Guided Sleep Meditation
By Tergar Meditation Community • 2 min read
Here is a guided sleep meditation that anyone can use. It will allow you to sleep better and wake up feeling well-rested.
We tend to assume that there’s nothing to be gained from feeling exhausted, bored, out of it, or dull, right? But actually, you can make friends with sensations like those, and they can be quite beneficial for meditation.
In fact, for guided sleep meditation, you need to feel somewhat tired to begin with. Incorporating sleep meditation into your practice might even change your relationship with the sort of experience you would otherwise dismiss as an obstacle to be overcome, or a temptation to be resisted.
First, allow yourself to let go of any tension that might be in your body and mind. If you are relying on a little bit of tension to keep you awake, let that go too. When you totally relax, sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get sleepy. Close your eyes. Let everything drop, and just be.
Be aware of any experiences, whether of fatigue, boredom, restfulness, mental fuzziness, whatever arises. Continue to maintain your awareness of these sensations. Eventually your awareness will begin to fade in and out: you’ll become a bit more alert, then a little sleepy, then you’ll snap back into alertness, then the sleepiness will return. In the end, you’ll doze off, with an awareness that you are doing so.
Practicing guided sleep meditation will imbue your sleep with awareness. In that way, sleep itself becomes a meditation. If you sleep for an hour, you’ve meditated for an hour. Lovely to think about it that way, isn’t it? By the way, it’s not unusual to become distracted as you fall asleep: “Uh-oh, did I set the alarm? I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow,” and so forth. However, it’s important to note that if your mind is distracted at the moment of dozing off, rather than in a state of awareness, then what you’ll have instead is ordinary sleep, not sleep meditation. Though there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!
If you want to start your day with awareness, try this guided morning meditation.
“The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
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In this video, Mingyur Rinpoche instructs us on how to meditate while sleeping. He describes the process of having awareness as you are falling asleep and how this awareness continues in the sleeping state.
Listen to guided sleep meditation by Mingyur Rinpoche
Learn meditation under the skillful guidance of world-renowned teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at your own pace.
Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
“Ordinarily, when we talk about “the mind,” we’re referring to memory, perception, thoughts, feelings, and so on. But in the meditative tradition, these describe mere mental events. Clouds move in the sky, but clouds are not the sky. Awareness is the sky, in which the clouds of mental events come and go. Awareness is simply knowing.”
If you’re reading this, you’ve certainly received at least a few teachings that inspired you to meditate. But for some of us, there’s just one catch: we somehow can’t get around to actually doing it. “Oh my, the day went by so fast! Well, tomorrow, I’ll definitely make time to meditate.” Tomorrow comes and goes, and meditation gets put off until the next day . . . and the next.
When we have committed to the path of meditation, we tend to impose this desire for consistency on that, too, so should we experience any sort of dip in our meditation practice, we feel uncomfortable, dissatisfied, insecure — all those bugaboos start vying for our attention.
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