How’s your sleep? Do you fall easily into the void at bedtime? Do you lay your head on the pillow and go out like a light? Can you enter into the Now so completely that nothing of this world remains? Or is it a little bit tougher for you?

My body hasn’t quite caught up to what I know deeply in my heart, soul and head. My emotions are even on board but ever since the months of constant shocks, often falling asleep isn’t possible, let alone easy.

It is quite a surprise to find myself resisting the body’s resistance, trying to change the result, to improve the storyline of a character on the widescreen. In actuality I am not the body. I am the awareness of the body, the I Am that is the mother of each and every I am —  I Am That I Am — whether identified with the separate being or the Totality it’s all the same. Even so it feels like sleep time doesn’t need to be so dysfunctional. I can see that the body is still reacting to the shocks, but rather than accepting that, there is a compelling urge to fix it.

Guessing you see the problem, the one I am creating with my not so innocuous resistance to the body’s resistance?  Is the urge primal, just old habit or something more?

Sleep, leaving this world behind, dropping the concept of Amaya and all that she supposedly knows, slipping into the wonder of creation, the dream state, is more than just necessary for a body. It is critical to return to the unmanifest, to drop into the timeless abyss of deep sleep where there is no author at all. It resets all systems, making it possible to be embodied. And yet, this most basic of requirements, as basic as food and water, perhaps even air, is not easily found.  

Anxiety is resistance to this moment. At night it looks like the thought, “Will I fall asleep tonight” appearing in sync with my head hitting the pillow. It is a well earned conundrum. My body has gone through so much for so long that it recoils at surrendering into what likely comes next, at least if history is any indicator. For me that is hours of body shocks when I fail to fall asleep quickly. If I drop off in short order there are no shocks. If I don’t, so far, they always start again.

So here’s the question – and yes it is rhetorical – how do I/we drop the history lesson and live in this breath with no shadow of the past at all? Lately, the one thing that is obvious is that a trace of yesterday usually pervades today. Sometimes it’s as simple as pushing this moment into the next instead of letting experience organically shift. It’s living life on the precipe of what’s coming rather than being drenched in what’s here now. It may be subtle; it may be wildly overt but unless I’ve fully entered into the entire space of my experience and exorcised it time and again – seems it’s never just once and done – there are still remnants impaled in observable patterns.

I am finding diving into the nearness of my experience, the body’s sensations, to be a superb empirical experiment. If I take anything with me, any concepts or belief, I only fool myself. To find out what is really going on, to get to the core of the experience, all bets must be off. I have to enter in as if I was just born, and experience the sensations from a vantage prior to ideas like body, pain and pleasure, health and illness, good and bad, pillow, bed, or world.

Why this experiment? It’s actually quite simple. Resistance takes me out of the now – resistance by its very nature is in opposition to what’s appearing now. Now is unconditional surrender to what is. Sleep requires my full surrender and I can’t get any closer to my experience as it actually is than by inquiring into my own being, into the densities of resistance within. Hence, the sleepy time experiment. I could continue to resist and try to improve my lot in life but I’m actually curious about this anomaly. If I fall asleep, that’s a bonus. The real reward is in the discovery.

“Progress appears to happen. You grow and evolve. It also happens that you struggle and slip back into well-worn patterns of behavior. When that happens, it appears that headway has run into headwinds and that fills you with anxiety and doubt. Both keep you frittering along the timeline of your life – past and future – anywhere but here.” Card #9 Headway – The Wild Child