To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Continuing with sleep and how important it is for overall well-being as well as focus and better meditation, we'll look tonight at sleep planning, intention setting, and probably a bit about practice while dreaming, including setting up the conditions for lucid dreaming.
These first few weeks of our new "Dharma Life Reset" series are all about balancing our energy through the day, beginning with the fundamental physical conditions for our energy levels: sleep, food, exercise, and positive social contact. I think of these as "requisites": the necessary elements of feeling better than awful all the time.
The classical "Four Requisites" (for Buddhist monastics) are food, shelter, clothing, and medicine, and with the exception of clothing in our era of vast over production, these are still the true base level of survival needs for humans. Adding sleep, exercise, and positive social contact brings in three things that may have been simply assumed in the ancient, communal Buddhist system but that can be severely impacted by our postmodern ecosystem.
So let's call these the "seven requisites" for well-being. Of course there's lots more good stuff that fills out the upper reaches of Maslow's pyramid—art, eros, agency, etc—and we'll get to those, but let's get the foundation set.
Our meditations through this basic series will emphasize grounding, orienting, and getting our energy stabilized and brightened.
