Challenge Number Four: Sleepiness!

Oh my gosh, do I need to sleep!

Why am I so sleepy?

Was I meditating or sleeping?

I don’t know how many times I’ve said any or all of these things to myself while trying to meditate. I’ve started my session doing everything that I needed to; gotten myself a glass of water, made sure that the phone was out of reach, opened up some space in my calendar. Perfect! I sit down to start practicing, and the next thing I know, instead of realizing some great depth of my mind, I’m nodding off…or even dreaming!?

When we feel sleepy during meditation, there are many possibilities of what may be going on. First off, we may just be exhausted from our endless number of things that we’re attempting to do…all at once. Or, the sleepiness that we experience may be our mind and our habits rebelling against our sudden interest in working to change them.

In a very real sense, the experience of sleepiness can be our ingrained resistance to looking at what’s really going on in our mind, to “waking up.” We’ve discussed in previous posts how thoughts, sensations, or emotions can catch our attention when we’re trying to meditate. In fact, as we often find out, our thoughts may become even more pronounced, appearing to be more numerous than before, once we turn our attention towards them.

When we encounter sleepiness during our meditation practice, we may attempt to resist it. But when we do, we find that the sleepiness that once arose as a wave now becomes a flood. Sensing our impending doom, we succumb to the natural impulse to sleep, and promptly nod out, sitting up, with our head “bobbing for apples,” giving us minor whiplash each time our chin heads towards the floor.

Solution:

While this may sound strange, the sleepiness that we encounter during our meditation is no more real or substantial than our thoughts are. With thoughts, if we allow them to simply rise without grasping onto them, they’ll simply fade away, back into our mind. In the same way, assuming that we aren’t sleep deprived and sometimes even if we are, when sleepiness occurs during meditation, if we simply allow it to “be,” without fighting it, returning our attention to our breath or an object of focus, the sleepiness can fade away as quickly as it came.

What we do is to simply notice that there’s sleepiness and return our attention to the object of our meditation, perhaps the breath or an image. (please see the post, Anchoring the Awareness of Emotions in the Breath, for more discussion on how to use the breath as the object of meditation. Also, please refer to the Related Posts at the bottom of this page for additional information.) Giving no more weight to our sleepiness than to a passing cloud in the sky, we resist the temptation to focus on it, and allow it to pass as a mere arising of the mind.

I know that this works! I’ve tested it many times because I’ve fallen asleep while meditating, even while receiving teachings on meditation and the mind, and I know how hard I’ve worked to not fall asleep at these times. What I’ve found repeatedly is that if I’m not just genuinely over-the-top exhausted, I can regain my meditative awareness – sometimes very quickly – if I don’t resist the feeling of sleepiness.

Just like working with our thoughts, sensations and emotions, working with sleepiness may take time. Try it. Practice it. See what works. See what doesn’t work.

As always, feel free to leave a comment on this site, or contact me directly if you have any questions or would like to see other topics presented.