BODY RELAXATION BEFORE SLEEP🔗

When you lie down to sleep, it normally takes at least 15 minutes for your body to relax totally. All the stress built up during the day has to be gradually released before you can fall asleep. In this technique, you cooperate with your body by helping to release the stress. Just through awareness, you can relax your body and prepare it to sleep better. Falling asleep in awareness is meditation.

Lie down on your bed and close your eyes. Take your awareness to your feet. If you are feeling stress in your feet, start relaxing at that point. Do not move from that point until the tension disappears. Move to your hands. Your hands are the index of your state of mind. If your hands are clenched, it means your mind is tense. Relax every finger, relax the palm, the back of the hand, and don't forget your wrists. Slowly, move through your whole body, calming each part until you feel that total relaxation has come. Step 2: When the whole body is relaxed, when your whole body is at peace, move on to the mind. It will already be almost relaxed because the body is nothing but an extension of the mind. Watch your thoughts as they come and go. Don't chase any thought, don't reject any thought. Just keep watching them. Gradually, you will see that the stream of thoughts has slowed down. Your mind is slowly becoming empty. Continue to watch the mind till sleep overcomes you. Simply watch the mind till you fall asleep doing so. If you fall asleep in meditation, you will wake up in meditation.

ABOUT THE TECHNIQUE

Why do you carry your body like an armor? If you look closely, you will see that you are carrying your body like an armor, a defence against the world. We never release our body. We are so afraid to be vulnerable, to be open. If you observe children, they are so light, so comfortable inside their body. They don’t feel their body as a load. They don’t have an idea of ‘body’ in their mind! You feel the solidity, the load of your body because you are clinging to it. It is not clinging to you, you are clinging to it! Not only are you carrying your body as an armor, you are feeding and nourishing this idea continuously. When you become aware of this, you can simply drop the armor. I don’t mean that you should drop the body! Drop the idea you have of it in your mind. If you don’t carry it as an armor, your body will disappear from your mind.

INSTRUCTIONS

DURATION: Not applicable

In the night when you go to sleep, when you take off your clothes, imagine that you are shedding your armor too. At least at night, you don't need to wear an armor! Just imagine that you are not only shedding your clothes, you are shedding your armor too. Actually do it. Take it off. Take a few deep breaths. Feel the weight of the armor falling away. Don't imagine that you don't have a body. Just experience your body as soft and vulnerable, not as an armor. Feel your body as a flower, as delicate as the body of a newborn baby.

Let your body fall gently on the bed, like a flower dropping on the grass. Go to sleep in this way, unarmored and free.