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Meditation Tip to Help You Sleep When You Can’t

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Meditation Tip
to help you sleep when you can’t

What to do when jangled nerves keep you awake and you just can’t get to sleep? Sometimes this happens to me in the middle of the night which can mean staying awake for several hours no matter how tired I am.

What works for me is to meditate.  I’ve found that about 20 minutes of meditation while lying down in bed is the right amount; shorter doesn’t seem to work. I’m not trying to sleep but am meditating and, as usual, have a timer set to let me know when time is up.

After meditation my mind is always much calmer. This allows me to naturally fall asleep within 5-10 minutes without seriously trying. I was already tired and once the nervous jangle is gone sleep comes easily.

I’ve also tried meditating when sick in bed. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, probably because it is daytime and I’m not tired. If it doesn’t work I will meditate again later, typically 3-5 times/day when sick and have nothing better to do.

This may not work if you’ve never practiced meditation before … but it sure does for me.  That may be why you should learn to meditate too. 🙂

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Welcoming Prayer

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Welcoming Prayer
a tool for healing emotional wounds

Welcoming Prayer is a tool to help quickly reduce painful emotional overreactions.

It’s purpose is to help one “let go and let God” naturally heal old emotional wounds and to show you better paths to take in life.  People who know how to effectively use Welcoming Prayer can often quickly recover from an upsetting situation within just a few seconds.   For example, it can be used to help you sleep by clearing the mind of bad feelings that wake you up in the middle of the night.  Practitioners also eventually start seeing life more clearly which helps them avoid blind, unconscious, survival reactions

A variety of emotional & physical knee jerk reactions were stored during childhood deep within your body to help you “survive.”  For example, fight or flight reactions to unusual noises. Many of these automatic reactions are quite useful for dealing with simple physical threats; however, in a more complex world, blind reactions often make the situation worse.

Welcoming Prayer is designed to lead to better cooperation between your big-me, your higher self, and your little-me, the survival conditioning that has accumulated over time within your body. By welcoming blind emotional reactions for what they are — automatic survival mechanisms — one begins to see them from an observer’s viewpoint rather than from a victim’s viewpoint.

Welcoming Prayer starts by deeply experiencing feelings within your body and then welcoming your increased awareness of these feelings.  This awareness naturally leads to healing and to better solutions.  Letting go of your little-me‘s death grip on these feelings allows them to naturally pass by and disappear, like leaves floating by on a stream.

Welcoming Prayer Process    top

(1) Focus (2) Feel (3) Welcome (4) Let Go (5) Clear

You can try the Welcoming Prayer process and learn more about it by reading the resources below. Many have experienced almost magical relief by using it.  When you have an overly emotional experience in daily life, take a moment (5-10 seconds) to be still and to follow these steps:

1. Focus    top

Focus on the precise feelings, physical pains or other such sensations you are experiencing.  A simple definition of feelings is that they are physical sensations within your body.  We often ignore these sensations or they are so subtle we don’t notice them in daily life; but, if you start looking for them, you will notice specific feelings that are definitely come up in specific situations.  “Gently become aware of your body and your interior state.”

Try to precisely identify these feelings (i.e., physical sensations).  Even if a feeling is somewhat nonspecific, like anxiety about unknown concerns, you will still experience subtle physical sensations that you can notice if you look for them.

2. Feel    top

Allow the feeling to sink in and really feel it.  Don’t try to escape it or fight it.  Stay with this process until you connect to the feeling on a physical level.  Often fully experiencing a feeling causes it to just naturally dissipate on its own.   In order to let them go (discussed later), you have to fully own them.

Try to name the feeling if possible.   If you can’t name it then still get very clear on exactly where it is and how it physically feels within your body.    You are trying to enhance your abilities to precisely identify physical sensations (i.e., feelings) that affect you and putting a name tag on them can sometimes help you remember them from before.

The more I practice the more I notice that many of my feelings, i.e., physical sensations of bad or good, cannot be easily named.  So, I just focus on welcoming the physical sensation rather than any named feeling.  If I had to name them some might be called unpleasantness, anxiety, tropism, etc.  However, it is often easier just to mentally note a particular sensation exists in my neck, heart, stomach or mouth without trying to name it.

3. Welcome    top

Saying “welcome, welcome, welcome” three times is one way to welcome the Holy Spirit in the feeling.   I will sometimes repeat the welcome word many more than the minimum three times recommended.
• Welcome your increasing awareness of your emotional and physical knee jerk reactions and their triggers.  Becoming aware of the specifics of a negative feeling is a positive thing well worth welcoming.
• Welcome that increased awareness enhances the ways you will begin to deal with realities. You will become more mature and in harmony with life.
• Welcome that “this too shall pass.” It is possible let go of painful feelings (i.e., let God handle it) and allow them pass by naturally on their own. Let them go in a way similar to the way you would let go of your attention to a leaf floating by on a stream. Another helpful tip is to realize that past memories & future worries do not exist in the present; so, be here now!
• Welcome the opportunity to practice,  during your daily activities, going along with God’s will rather than your own.  Thy will be done … for my own good.

One way of thinking that seems to work for me is to “welcome” the detailed awareness of the feeling since awareness seems to lead automatically to its dissipation. I’ve read that it is unconscious feelings which do the emotional damage, not the conscious ones.  That’s an excellent reason to welcome your increasing conscious awareness of them.

Another way to welcome the feeling is to name it and say to yourself something like “welcome fear,” “welcome anger,” or “welcome” whatever other feeling you may have. By welcoming your physical and emotional reactions to events and situations in daily life you are surrendering to God’s presence and God’s action within your life. Of course this is directly opposite to the natural resistance your ego has to such situations.

Thomas Keating, one of the founders of the Contemplative Meditation movement says, in Open Mind, Open Heart  (p.99), that “If you can embrace the painful feeling, whatever it is, as if it were God, you are uniting yourself with God, because anything that has reality has God as its foundation.”   He says ” I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing.”   If you believe God is good then verbally welcoming the emotion God is giving you helps you recognize that it is there for your own good.

You are only welcoming your actual physical feeling in each moment and not passively accepting situations that are intolerable. Once you open to your inner experience, without indulging or feeding your reactive ego, your response to the outer world will be much clearer and more decisive.  You can begin responding from a state of awareness instead of automatically reacting.

4. Let Go    top

“Let go and let” God handle life including this particular situation.   Another statement some people prefer is “I cast my burden on the Christ within.”   Another is “relax and release.”

You can let go by repeating one or more of the following sentences which will apply to most situations:
• “I let go of the desire to change this feeling.”
• “I let go of my desire for security, affection or control.”
• “I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.”.

These are phrases describing your intention to totally surrender to God’s will in the situation.  Turn the feeling or emotion over to God and let it go.  Many find to their surprise that, after going through the Welcoming Prayer process, the feeling has completely dissipated.  For others sometimes that will happen and sometimes not.  If you experience resistance from your reactive ego at any stage or the feeling has not completely dissipated then try going through the process again starting at the top.

Practicing Contemplative Meditation, also known as Centering Prayer Meditation, enhances your ability to become more aware of bodily sensations and then to let go of thoughts and feelings as they float by.  Thus more meditation practice can make the Welcoming Prayer process more effective.

5.  Clear    top

Clear your mind just like you do during Contemplative Meditation.  Practice getting into the here and now and letting thoughts and feelings pass by without getting attached to them.

If the negative feelings you were “welcoming” persist then rinse and repeat the entire welcoming prayer process, especially the parts where your tend to get stuck.  Often repetition will at least help if not completely accomplish the trick of completely removing a burden from your mind.  Practice makes perfect. 🙂

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Note: The commentary above relies heavily on and includes quotations from these resources. Look them over yourself.

Open Mind Open Heart Book Review

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Open Mind Open Heart Book Review

Open Mind, Open Heart is a book about a spiritually-oriented type of meditation called Centering Prayer. Here are some descriptions the book provides:

  • “Centering Prayer as a discipline is designed to withdraw our attention from the ordinary flow of our thoughts.” (p.34).
  • “It concentrates the essence of monastic practice into two periods of prayer each day.” (p.34)
  • It is a “specific method of preparing for the gift of contemplation” (p.4), i.e., the gift of directly experiencing or “resting in God” (p.20) which “is beyond thinking, images, and emotions.” (p.114)
  • “… it centers one’s attention on God’s presence within” (p.109)

This book was written by Thomas Keating, a retired Cistercian priest, monk, and abbot, who is a founder of the Centering Prayer Movement. He’s obviously a good writer who is intellectually talented and well qualified on the subject. After you skim the first three chapters of background materials, the book focuses on answering a long list of questions Keating has received during seminars about exactly how to do Centering Prayer and what to expect from it.

Based on my own limited Centering Prayer experience of less than a year, Open Mind, Open Heart is a good thorough explanation of Centering Prayer.  However,  for rank beginners I would suggest starting by watching an brief YouTube video by Thomas Keating. In this video Keating says only your intent to be open to the personal experience of God is important; don’t worry about the “how to” details. Just keep practicing Centering Prayer as he very simply describes it in this video and you will progress. After some actual practice Open Mind, Open Heart is a good next step to help answer some of the questions your intellectual mind may have about this experiential practice.

For those who already have a little Centering Prayer experience, Keating is exceptionally good at getting into the “how to” specifics of this simple but mystical subject (which is ultimately indescribable, i.e., directly experiencing God). He doesn’t skip by the hard parts and clearly admits such facts as “Christian life and growth are founded on faith …” (p.13).

Keating also talks in detail about some changes to look for. For example:

  •  “The only way to judge this prayer is by its long range fruits: whether in daily life you enjoy greater peace, humility and charity.” (p.114)   I.e.,  Don’t look for specific results while doing Centering Prayer itself.  Different people will have different experiences while practicing Centering Prayer ( from each other and, indeed, from themselves over time).
  • Look for how “you begin to relate to others beyond the superficial aspects” (p.114) and how you begin to have “greater compassion.” (p.97).

Other comments Keating makes about potential benefits include:

  • “Emotionally charged thoughts [that sometimes result from Centering Prayer] are the chief way that the unconscious has of expelling chunks of emotional junk. In this way, without your perceiving it, a great many emotional conflicts that are hidden in your unconscious and affecting your decisions more than you realize are being resolved. As a consequence, over a period of time you will feel a greater sense of well-being and inner freedom.” (p.96)
  • It can also happen that external difficulties may arise in your life that have a direct connection with your spiritual growth.” (p.97)

All in all this book is an excellent aid for practitioners of Centering Prayer to intellectually understand in more depth its purpose and details. However, don’t forget that ultimately the practice and benefits of Centering Prayer are experiential and not something the human mind can actually understand.

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Six Individual “Types” of Happy

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Six individual “types” of happy

Happy is a somewhat vague term.  So, here are some more specific definitions of happy which will help you clarify what it takes to be happy. One could say being happy is having one or more of the following types of good feelings:

  • pleasure/pleasured … pleasure-pain, pleased, comfortable, pleasant, secure, beautiful, life of enjoyment
  • interest/interested … flow, entertained, involved, engaged, stimulated (variety), fun, life of engagement
  • success/successful … satisfaction, proud, accomplishment, curiosity-satisfaction, completed, finished
  • connection/connected … relationships, friends, sharing, love, caring, rapport, more info, more power, companionship, affiliation, life of affiliation
  • meaning/meaningful … important, respected, self esteem
  • growth/growing/learning … actualized, being all you can be, fulfilled

notes

* Each cluster of words (types) is grouped together into related general feelings.
* These are fairly orthogonal components which cover most of the important ways to feel good.
* Breaking happiness into one of more of these clusters makes it easier to recognize why and when you are happy (your destination). Knowing the exact destination/type then makes it easier to determine how to get there.
* The ranking of these types is different for different people. E.g., someone who is more driven by success may be willing to sacrifice family time.
* At different times different types come to the forefront. E.g., during an athletic contest success may be most important, while later on when eating enjoyment may be most important.

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Your Thoughts Control Your Destiny

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Your Thoughts Control Your Destiny
So, what is my true destiny?

Thought-Management.com is all about how small seeds of thought eventually grow into your destiny (see thought tree).  Here are some possible destinies to start thinking about.  Why … because what you think about comes about in magical ways.

Desireable Destinies?

  • Happy – The ultimate destination? See this breakdown of some key aspects of happiness.
  • Healthy – This destiny may not be completely under our conscious control. However, it’s still a good one to focus on since health and energy enhance our ability to reach and enjoy other destinations.
  • Successful – Success and accomplishment are the dream of many.
  • Wealthy – Abundance provides the freedom and tools to accomplish other goals.
  • Wise – Without wisdom or guidance we are doomed to make mistakes.
  • Loved – Cared for, respected by yourself and others.
  • Actualized – Making the most of yourself is one of the biggest, most important challenges in life.
  • Peace – Without peace within we always feel unsatisfied.
  • Joy – Joie de vivre, an exuberant cheerful enjoyment of life is a worthy destination.
  • Health – Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health.
  • Harmony – In harmony with God and man.
  • Learn – Humans are innately curious.
  • Grow – We always want more of the good stuff. By our nature we are goal oriented and want to grow.

These roughly defined “destinations” are a good place to start as you define your own unique destiny.  Create more and more detailed mental equivalents as you think through your particular mission, purpose and destiny in life.

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