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.
When we sit on the cushion and all the circumstances are good, plus the environment is cooperating, then we have some experience of meditation. But when we get off the cushion and move into everyday life, then sometimes — even though we know that, theoretically, we can practice daily meditation anywhere, anytime — we forget what that really means.
“To cope with destructive thoughts, we need to understand that what is really happening is a failure to recognize our mind’s true nature. We get muddled when we confuse our conceptual mind — the way we perceive external objects, the way we feel and think — for reality. And, in doing so, we end up exaggerating our problems.”
“Trying harder and putting in that extra bit of exertion was so counterproductive!”
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