Sound sleep has long eluded me. I've had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. Many nights, my sleep is edgy. Good sleep continues to be a work in progress.
Despite the limitations in my sleep pattern, what feels hopeful is that I'm sleeping better now than I have in years. My sleep still falls short of the ideal. But it's much more workable than it historically has been.
I'm not sure I can put my finger on all the interacting ingredients in my improved sleep. But I can point to two practices that have been helpful.
One is the practice of Yoga Nidra. The other is a metaphoric experience of self-parenting.
Yoga Nidra
Yoga Nidra is commonly referred to as the Yoga of Sleep. This characterization is slightly misleading because the intent of this practice is to foster a deep state of relaxation, somewhere between waking consciousness and sleep, not sleep per se. But Yoga Nidra has helped me prepare my body and mind for sleep.
As with meditation and asana practice (asana is the yoga of embodied movement and poses), you generally start in Yoga Nidra with centering and intention setting. Centering is about settling comfortably into your body, letting the rhythm of your breath offer its natural harmony, and sitting or lying down on your back, the posture for Yoga Nidra, in a balanced way.
Centering is also about calmly noticing without judgment your outer and inner landscapes. You may notice sounds around you, for example, and places within your body that seem tense or loose, heavy or light. Settling in and noticing can help you rest your awareness on your experience of the here and now.
Setting an intention is about making a commitment to bring a particular quality of heart or mind to your experience. With Yoga Nidra, I often set an intention to bring a sense of trust, a quiet confidence that my body will receive the rest it needs.
What makes Yoga Nidra distinctive is that, while lying down in relative stillness, you let your attention travel from one part of the body to the next in a planned sequence. While I suppose you could do Yoga Nidra completely on your own, I have always found it helpful to listen to a guide with a soft and soothing voice walk me through the rotation of my consciousness across and throughout my body. (I currently listen to a guided Yoga Nidra practice in a recording I found on Apple Music.)
A guide might instruct you to first bring attention to your right hand, for example, and then to the front and back of your hand, your thumb, and to each individual finger. With the guide's gentle prompting, you might then turn your attention to your wrist and to your forearm and so forth across the full terrain of your body. I find that this body-scanning attention traveling, guided by a nurturing voice, can lull me into a deep, full-body relaxation.
Yoga Nidra is sometimes considered a form of guided meditation. This makes sense, since in both guided meditation and Yoga Nidra there is a guide who escorts your consciousness and imagination to different places that help you connect with your inner self. But in my experience, meditation involves a keener alertness than Yoga Nidra. I've meditated many hundreds of times, but I've never fallen asleep in the process. In contrast, when I first started doing Yoga Nidra, in a group session guided by a friend who was steeped in the practice, within 20 minutes from the start of a session, I invariably fell asleep. The point of our sessions was not to fall asleep. But sleep always came to me. The kind of relaxation fostered through Yoga Nidra may bring you closer to a sleep state than guided meditation does.
Symbolic Self-Parenting
When getting ready for bed at night, Yoga Nidra has helped bring rest to my body and stillness to my mind. But it has not been enough to move me into sleep. The near-hypnotic sleep effect I experienced at the group sessions with my friend did not transfer over to my efforts to sleep at night.
What has helped me in my quest for nighttime restful sleep is to imagine myself nurturing my child self, a practice I think of as symbolic self-parenting. In this practice, I symbolically give the infant and small boy in me the nourishment he needs to feel whole and secure, especially in the dead of the night, when the child part of me may feel lonely and vulnerable.
I came to an awareness of the potential of self-parenting in fostering sleep by first taking a close look at a habit I developed years ago. My habit was to get up in the middle of the night to snack on comfort food. Sometimes the snacks were more like meals. For example, a favorite treat consisted of yogurt, blueberries, and granola. Eating became so necessary to my falling back to sleep that it felt like an addiction.
After a few years of dependence on this eating-for-sleep ritual, which, incidentally, didn't always help me to fall back to sleep, I began to balk at its hold on me. I knew I was "eating my feelings," and I didn't want to continue.
I wasn't exactly sure what feelings I was eating. But it didn't require a heavy psychoanalytic pondering to speculate that I was trying to use food to meet an emotional hunger. In the wee hours of the morning, I could tell when I woke up that I felt alone and frightened, not unlike the dread of abandonment an infant might feel.
As I touched into my food craving one night, the image of a mother’s milk came to me. Intuitively, I interpreted this as a symbol of the immediately bonding and satisfying experience of having my essential needs as a child fully met. (My own mother did take good care of me as an infant, so mine is not a story of parental neglect in the earliest years coming home to roost in adulthood. Why I felt a strong longing for such primordial nurturing is perhaps another issue.)
I also felt a tinge of shame. Here I was, a father of three grown children and a grandfather, and I was still beholden to my own childhood longings, fears, and soothing fantasies, as if I had not fully grown up. I had to work with myself to interrupt the shame and let it begin to fade. I reminded myself that I was doing fine as an adult and had been blessed with a good life.
What I did next was to conduct a kind of experiment to test my hypothesis that there was a link between my sleep issues and a yearning for a child-like security. The experiment consisted of buying an infant’s milk bottle, filling it part way with milk, and placing it on my nightstand one night. When I awoke at 2 am, before heading downstairs to our kitchen for my food fix, I looked at the milk bottle. It held my gaze. It seemed to be saying that yes, the kind of safety and satisfaction that came from a mother's loving nourishment is what a part of me really would like.
And then I laughed to myself. The whole idea of using this bottle, or food of any kind, to meet my desire for deep emotional security struck me as a silly substitute for the kind of love and support I was yearning for.
I can’t say that I immediately gave up the desire to grab some tasty treats. But that first night with the milk bottle facing me with its unmistakable literalness, I paused before acting on my food-comforting impulse. I allowed the warmth of my breath to fill my belly and the palms of my hand to hold my heart. And I resisted the craving.
What I did next was dig around in a box of old photos for a pic of me as a little boy. I found one, the one shown above. I was strangely touched at seeing my big and happy eyes. And I was moved to smile back at that little boy and blend into his comfort the kind of fatherly love that I had given my own boys.
I kept the milk bottle on my nightstand for a couple of weeks. It served as a clear and concrete reminder of what I no longer seemed to depend on. I became freer and less habit-driven in deciding what to do when my sleep was disrupted. I was more tender toward myself when sleep did not hold.
Since my milk bottle experiment, I've successfully stopped eating in the middle of the night, and I’m more likely to fall back to sleep after being up in the wee hours.
I still at times struggle with sleep. I continue to be a light sleeper who often sleeps in fragments. But my sleep is more easeful than it has been for a long time. And I'm grateful to Yoga Nidra and my symbolic self-parenting for the sleep gains I've been able to make.
I admire you as an explorer of your inner and outer lives. I love your willingness to go beyond the veil of the mundane.
I admire your courage and strength to share your journey with a wider audience.
I am pleased, but not surprised that this experiment is bringing you the pleasure of improved sleep.
Best wishes,
Ray
Well said! Thanks for sharing this path to better sleep. I loved the personal reference to early childhood and mothers milk at your bed side.