The Threshold Between Sleep and Avoidance
El Umbral Entre el Sueño y la Evitación
A question about falling asleep during meditation, and whether sleepiness can be a form of resistance to what is uncomfortable.
The Threshold Between Sleep and Avoidance
A question about falling asleep during meditation, and whether sleepiness can be a form of resistance to what is uncomfortable.
I was wondering about something. For most of the meditation, I was partly struggling and partly letting it be that I was falling asleep. This happens often because it's right after lunch for me and I get a bit tired. Sometimes I manage to get a twenty-minute nap before meditating and I'm much more alert. But I was wondering: can you learn to not get pulled away by the tiredness and just remain alert no matter how sleepy you are? Can it be treated like a strong emotion that you simply look at?
Yes, I think so, but only to some degree. Sometimes that pull toward sleep is a resistance. It's a different kind of avoidance mechanism. One form of avoidance is daydreaming, being taken into thought. But when what we're facing is more intense, or carries more of a sense of being too much for us, then sleepiness might be another mechanism.
In my case, when I was younger, I was having blackouts. I wasn't actually falling asleep, but I would be sitting and I would have (it's hard to describe) something like a blackout. I would start dreaming, but I wasn't falling asleep. It was a different mechanism to avoid. And as I was able to be more present to what was coming up, that stopped.
Two sides of every practice
But at the same time, this is useful for what the meditation was about today: there are two sides to everything and to every practice. So don't assume that staying awake is all that matters. It's important in one sense, and not that important in another, because at some point, if you're too sleepy, you're just going to fall asleep when your body needs it.
Extreme practices of forcing wakefulness are useful for exploration, but they're only useful for one half of what I was pointing to in the first part of the meditation. It's not the full story, because it needs the complement: it's totally fine to fall asleep, and there's nothing to gain by not falling asleep. Otherwise, the mind can turn it into another thing to seek, another problem to solve. "Once I figure out how to stop falling asleep while meditating, then I will arrive."
Development and realization
We can't really arrive anywhere. We can develop the body-mind. We can develop the integration of all levels and depths of realization. But there are two pillars that hold the arch, or two sides of a coin, and both need to be cultivated in a sense. Yet only one side can truly be developed. The other side is realized, because it's already given.
So I would say: be open to the possibility that the sleepiness is a resistance. And also, it's late where you are. You're in the evening after eating, and if you woke up early or didn't have a nap, you're going to be more prone to falling asleep. But I would be open to exploring what that temptation is, that pull. Is there anything that's being avoided by falling asleep?
The edge between wakefulness and sleep
One last thing: when we become really, really present, we get very close to something that is very similar to what happens when we go to sleep, because there's a stopping of mind. Certain aspects of the mind quiet down, and actually, the footprint of that has been seen in fMRI. The transition into sleep is very similar in many ways to what happens when we get really present.
So to have the experience of falling asleep while meditating could actually be a valuable exploration. You could stay in that middle point between wakefulness and sleep, explore that transition, and really pay attention to the movement in and out, from wakefulness to sleep and from sleep to wakefulness. I'd actually recommend exploring that more than forcing yourself to stay fully awake, because that's going to bring a lot of stress and control.
I could also see that the sleepiness was relevant to today's meditation. Was there a part of you that felt something wasn't right, that falling asleep shouldn't be happening?
Yes. I could see that. When I was falling asleep, there was a thought saying, "This shouldn't be happening now."
And were you falling asleep more in the first part of the meditation than the second, or the other way around?
More in the first.
Resistance as a signal
That makes sense. In the first part, the direction was toward what is uncomfortable. That's when you were falling asleep, so it's a sign that it's a resistance mechanism.
And at first I was thinking, "Oh, again, he's going to take us through suffering, but I'm not suffering right now." My mind was saying that kind of thing. Maybe I wasn't suffering, or maybe it was more like, "Not this again. I don't want this."
Even more so, because of what you just said. If you weren't suffering, you would have no problem going to whatever part of your experience was present. But if the thought is, "Oh, this again. I'm not suffering. Why are we going toward suffering again?" and then you can't go there willingly, that tells you something. If you can go to suffering intentionally without resistance, you're not suffering. But if you can't, then you are.
Right. One thing is that I'm not suffering, but if I think about it, suffering arises. There's suffering there.
The test of freedom
If you go into that space, that energy, that contemplation, and something you don't want appears, that's exactly where we need to go. Otherwise, it remains in the shadow, in what we're avoiding.
In the situation where it's genuinely true that you're not suffering, you would be able to contemplate whatever is difficult. You could experience pain, but there would be freedom in the contemplation of something painful. There wouldn't necessarily be resistance to it or a sense of suffering. You might feel, "I don't want to contemplate this because it's painful," and you're free to not do that. But that's different from, "Oh, don't make me contemplate or explore what is present." I'm not asking you to contemplate a specific thing. I'm not asking you to think about all the dying children in the world. I'm asking you to come into present experience and explore anything where there is discomfort, contraction, a sense of "this shouldn't be there."
If that invitation brings up, "I don't want to go there, I was happy where I was, and now you're asking me to go to something unpleasant where there's suffering," then you are suffering. Because you can find the experience of "I don't want this to be happening" precisely when you think you're not experiencing suffering, but actually you're not experiencing it because you're suppressing it or getting distracted. And it's really significant that the sleepiness arose exactly at that point.
Yeah.
So I would recommend practicing that first half. And then when you're falling asleep, explore. What happens in that movement in and out of sleep?
Yeah. Thanks.