Better Sleep for Better Meditation
We’ll start a new series tonight that I’m thinking of as something like a “Dharma Life Reset.” I want to look at the conditions—external and internal—that support a strong practice and satisfying life, particularly strong emotional regulation, everyday discipline, focus, and deeper meditation outside of retreat.
We’ll start this with a couple weeks of looking at the foundational conditions for focus and well-being, starting with one of the most important: sleep!
How long we sleep, how well, how we dream, and how we wake up are so important for well-being that we can almost draw a direct line between the quality of our sleep and the quality of our meditations, our focus through the day, our levels of inflammation, and the way our nervous system processes stress.
And we all know this is likely to be a stressful year. (Aren’t they all? #samsara)
So we’ll start the year off with an exploration of sleep as practice. Spoiler alert: less screens in the evening! Which contradicts online Satsang till 9pm, right? Well, come to practice, and we’ll see what middle way we can find together.
