Thursday, August 25, 2011

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep...

And then I tighten my head on my neck to pull it back and down into the pillow...
Draw my shoulders in...
Take a firm grip on my hips and knees...

And then I'm all ready to have a good refreshing sleep.

Sounds strange, but it's a reality that sleep isn't as refreshing and relaxing as we imagine it is. It has the potential to be, yes, but a lot of the time we take our deeply held tensions right over into sleep. Which is probably why we often wake in the morning feeling bleary and heavy headed.
This is a really tough one - what can you do about tensions which surface after you've gone to sleep?
I've found that spending some time directing for release in the neck, the shoulders, and other joints helps to quieten everything down so there's presumably less of a tendency to seize up after I've slept off. Certainly I wake up feeling fresher and more rested than if I'd just gone off, unreleased, to sleep.
A lot of the time, however, it seems just strange to compose myself to sleep in that way. I didn't realise that in the beginning; I'd direct and release one particular time, and then forget all about it for the next week. This, because I'd got used to lying in bed going over and over the day's happenings and slipping into sleep from there. So that seemed the proper way to go to sleep. The other was okay for a change, but it just didn't seem right to be doing it every day.
Strange - it would seem that we all desire ease and restfulness, and we'd grab every opportunity to have it - and then it turns that what we want is not so much ease and restfulness as the comfort of familiarity. Even if it's ultimately damaging and unsatisfying.

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