Creative Guidance – Sleep and Disturbance – Inspirational Educative Articles

Sleep and Disturbance:

The objective of meditation is to relax the mind without falling asleep, and to relax the body without being disturbed. As long as both of these are happening in your meditation, you should be thrilled: If there is disturbance, then you have something to transcend – you have something to work on.

Initially, you should not be too concerned about relaxation. You should be more interested in understanding. Relaxation in meditation happens as a natural consequence of understanding your mind and body better.

Disturbance presents you with an opportunity to understand. If you want to go beyond the limitation of the mind and body, then you need to understand the nature of the mind and body. The nature of the mind is sleep, and the nature of the body is disturbance.

The mind simply doesn’t want to be here; it doesn’t like to be with the body. The mind knows that it can drift and spread itself across the entire universe, so it doesn’t want to be stuck in the body.

If you let the mind have its way, you’ll constantly be lost in thoughts. If you relax it too much, you’ll fall asleep.  Since the nature of the body is disturbance, if you sit for too long, your body wants to get up and walk. If you walk for too long, then it wants to sit down. Your body gets hungry and thirsty; it is constantly in need of something. This constant disturbance is what you are fighting in meditation.

As long as there is some disturbance, and as long as there is sleep, know that you have something to work on, and you need to keep working on it. If you are looking for something deeper, then relaxation should be the last thing on your mind. Relaxation is for those who are too tired to seek. As a seeker, you should not be looking for relaxation; you should be looking for the disturbance within, so that you can go beyond it once and for all.

“This article is a part of the creative endeavor of Nirvana Foundation and IASBABA.”