Is Sleep The Key to Monk-Like Wisdom?
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Pedram Shojai is the founder of Well.org and host of The Urban Monk podcast, as well as an herbalist, qigong master, and doctor of oriental medicine. If anyone’s figured out how to stay peaceful while living a hectic, modern life, it’s him. In an excerpt from his new book The Urban Monk, out February 2, Shojai explains why sleep is one of the most important — and overlooked — keys to living a wise and happy life.
Urban Monk Wisdom
Our world is overly yang and masculine. We force things in time. We tear through the earth and mine it for resources. We push our bodies to keep marching when tired, and we try to force sleep to come quickly after racing all day. We go too hard and wonder why slamming on the brakes doesn’t work so well.
Sleep is yin. It is a passive process of allowing and being, totally different from the “masculine” go-go-go way of our world and daytime craziness. It is the opposite of “doing.” We fall asleep. We let go. We release and get out of the driver’s seat, and boy is that hard for lots of people. After all, our entire culture is shifted toward accomplishment, doing more things, and keeping score.
To the busy person, sleep can seem like such a waste of time.
In Chinese medicine, sleep is when our Hun, or ethereal soul, travels and connects with the life around us. It is when we dock our conscious minds and allow the subconscious to communicate with the Superconscious Mind. This is where we download wisdom, heal the body, and do our soul work. Sleep time is as important as our waking hours. We do a lot of heavy lifting on the soul and spirit planes in our sleep, which is why we feel so hollow when we’ve lost it.
The body needs to be in balance and the blood needs to be pure for deep, meaningful soul work to happen. When we’re toxic, manic, time compressed, and wound up, we can’t drop into the unconscious mind. The self-conscious aspect of us fights to keep pushing.
The ego feels like it is dying when we need it to disengage.
This is where the real work comes in, and this is where we can use sleep as a wonderful spiritual accelerator in our lives. When the self-conscious mind doesn’t want to let go, that’s a good indicator that we’re trying to run our lives and are not allowing our higher self, Divinity, the Great Tao (whatever you want to call it) to drive. The ego is trying to dominate. All the great spiritual disciplines out there teach us to get out of the way and let Spirit guide us. In fact, the great spiritual delusion is that our personal will even exists. All the great mystical traditions lead to the same conclusion: Namely, that the Universal Will to Good is running the show, and the delusion of separation is what keeps us suffering.
Fearing the Noise
Most people are terrified to hear the noise right under the radar. That’s why people fear meditation. “Holy shit, it’s so loud up there!”
We live in a culture where the norm has become aversion to pain. We don’t like feeling uncomfortable, and our whole culture is oriented toward helping us move away from pain. Medicine throws pills at our discomfort. A nightcap helps ease the stress. Meaningless sex helps distract us from the lonely nights.
This is also why most people are afraid of the dark. The yucky undercurrents of our shadows come out in the dark, quiet nights. The mind starts to race, and we can’t deal with what’s coming up.
We toss.
We turn.
We move to distract.
Maybe it is just temporary financial stress. Maybe it’s the person you lie next to. Should you file for that divorce? Maybe it’s all the missed opportunities in your life or perhaps the trouble your kids are in. Maybe it’s a deeper, darker secret you have never dealt with. What to do? How are you going to make it? So many worries… Don’t trip; we’ve all got this s**t going on. It is right under the surface but gets way louder when everything else starts to calm down.
As the silence begins to take hold, our inner noise magnifies.
Take all the stuff you’ve been processing over all these years, don’t get to it, and then lie down and try to sleep. That’s the problem. That’s a big reason why we don’t sleep. Thoughts and emotions start popping up and stimulating us when we’re trying to go down. We can run all day, but in the quiet stillness of the night, it’s all there in front of us.
The Urban Monk takes on his weaknesses. He deals with the unturned stones and looks under the rug. This is the way of the warrior, and the fact is that there’s no other game in town.
We must reconcile our lives and come clean with ourselves.
In a way, losing sleep is a good thing because it highlights all the shit we drag around all day. Just because the perpetual motion, noise, TV, and other life activities drown these undercurrents out when the sun is up, it doesn’t mean that they’re not there. The need for sleep helps us see them. Sleep is when we become aware of our personal spiritual work and see what it is we need to do to heal.
Face your demons and you’ll sleep better. I’ve seen people come back from the darkest of places and shine in their lives. I’ve seen people with gut-wrenching histories work through their trauma, accept, forgive, heal, and move on. I certainly am a fan of working with a good therapist if your demons are pretty hard-core; that’s fine. The amount of power and liberation on the other side of that is immense, and I cannot overemphasize how valuable that work is.
Small Death
We have important start and stop cycles in our lives, and there’s a reason why the ancients called sleep the small death. We allow ourselves to fall and die to the day. We prepare to be reborn to the next day, which is filled with our dreams, plans, and aspirations. Shutting down helps us learn to get out of gear so the innate wisdom of our bodies (and souls) can take over. The better we get at this, the better we heal. The more we learn to let go, the deeper we sleep and more rested we are.
We can also practice this in mini-cycles during the day. A power nap goes a long way. A 5-minute meditation break can tap into the same energy. The goal is to learn to unplug and drop down into a deep, relaxed place for a designated amount of time. Maybe you can sneak a 10-minute nap at work; set your alarm and go for it. At night, you should have a whole shutdown ritual that prepares you for slumber. Taking sleep seriously is the first step to making it a priority. We grew up around rituals. Our brains understand rituals. Set one up for your sleep shutdown process and make it a nightly habit. It’ll help direct your psyche to go there, and it’ll cue your physiology to follow suit.
This shouldn’t be mistaken with the other “small death” that happens with sleep apnea, however. This is when your airway is obstructed by your tongue or throat, and you struggle for air at night. The brain freaks out when oxygen levels drop and cues us to wake up so we don’t die. There’s also a nervous system version of this which is rarer, but sleep apnea is serious business. If you or your bedmate snores like a busted chainsaw and complains of fatigue all the time, go see your doctor. People die from this stuff.
Sleep for Enlightenment
The ancient sages placed the third eye right in the center of our forehead where we have our pineal gland, and they knew the importance of this tiny part of the brain. In fact, this is really where much of the magic happens. The chemistry of the pineal gland is particularly interesting for an Urban Monk. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that helps us stay happy and powers the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows for higher moral reasoning, complex thought, and the negation of impulses. It’s the part of the brain that has been shown to grow in functional MRI studies performed on meditators. A healthy diet rich in tryptophan (an amino acid we get through various foods) helps keep our serotonin levels high. Serotonin converts into melatonin in the pineal gland.
Melatonin, as we’ve discussed, helps us sleep. It’s also a potent immune modulator that helps our bodies boost our natural defenses and fight off disease. This is important because sleep is when we shut down and scavenge for cancer cells, move out toxins, flush the brain, and restore healthy tissue. Melatonin helps us sleep and heal.
There’s something interesting that also happens in the pineal gland. Our melatonin is converted into dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which has been described as the “Spirit Molecule.” DMT is released in bursts in people who’ve had near-death experiences and is an active ingredient in ayahuasca, which is a psychotropic plant medicine used by Amazonian shamans to communicate with Great Spirit. Rick Strassman, MD, has done some groundbreaking research on this subject, and I encourage you to check it out. For our purposes here, a really important axis for personal growth seems to happen in the pineal gland, and that subtle neurochemistry gets all messy if we’re not sleeping. People who don’t sleep well seem to have a critical roadblock to personal growth and happiness, and this is likely a reason.
Later in this book, we’ll learn to cultivate this area and wake up our “spiritual eye.” For now, the take-home message is that you’ve got to sleep if you want to break free and live a fulfilled spiritual life.
Reprinted from The Urban Monk by Pedram Shojai, OMD. Copyright © 2016 by Pedram Shojai, OMD. By permission of Rodale Books. Available wherever books are sold.
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