ROHAN GUNATILLAKE: Thank you for joining us for today’s meditation. If you’re looking for a classic Meditative Story, we invite you to explore the rest of our library.
You know, it’s always struck me how the pursuit of better sleep is so often the way people come to mindfulness and meditation. I’ve seen it time and time again over the years, and it makes total sense.
Given how much meditation and sleep are natural bedfellows, it’s also entirely natural that our show has its companion podcast feed, Sleep Song. If you’ve never tried it, you totally should. The way it works is, well, you know the amazing music that my annoyingly talented colleagues, Ryan Holladay and Eduardo Rivera, compose for each of our classic episodes? Well, they take that music from some of our favorite stories and make it the star. Modding it so that it’s super conducive to softening the edges of the day gone before and taking us closer to that threshold of sleep. The team talk about it as being your dream score, which I love.
So to celebrate how close mindfulness and sleep are, and to celebrate Sleep Song, I’m going to guide you through my favorite sleep meditation. I came up with the idea many years ago, and to this day it is probably the practice that people who know my work love the most.
You might be starting a new year at school, and there’s so much going on that you could do with a nice reliable way to settle in for sleep. Or you’re just dealing with normal life, and need that extra something to doze off, either at the start of the night or if you wake up unexpectedly.
The rest of the episode is designed for when you are going to sleep, so if you want to hit pause now and save it for later, please totally do that.
And the name I give to this meditation is “Fade.”
And what we’re learning to do is quiet our mind.
Since quiet minds and good night’s sleep are best friends.
Let’s start by just enjoying lying here.
Your body supported by the bed.
Knowing that you are totally held by the bed, with no effort from you at all.
Nice and supported.
Nice and cozy.
And for the start of this meditation, we’ll actually open our eyes.
Even though it’s dark, just keeping our eyes gently open.
Not looking at anything in particular.
This is the first sense we’ll fade out.
We’ve looked at so much today.
So many things have come into these tired eyes.
So they definitely deserve a break.
Just relaxing your eyes.
Relaxing the area around your eyes.
Thankful for all the work your eyes have done today.
And as slowly as you want, closing your eye lids.
Fading out the sense of sight into comfortable darkness.
Fading out our sense of sight.
Nothing else for it to do tonight.
Now to our ears and our hearing.
Noticing what you can hear.
Sounds near and sounds far.
Night time is normally much quieter than the day, but it still has sounds.
The sounds of the room, the sounds of the building, the sounds of outside, the sounds of your body as it breathes, the sounds of this episode.
Just paying gentle attention to the sounds around you.
Just receiving the sounds.
No need to do anything.
Sounds, whatever they are, just arriving, as you lie here in bed.
Relaxed. No sound more important than another.
And the way we’ll fade out sound, is to do something clever.
Instead of listening to the sounds, see if you can notice the silences between sounds.
Allowing the quiet of the outside to quiet the inside.
Tuning into the silence betweens sounds.
Tuning into the silence behind sounds.
Paying attention to Silence.
Gorgeous Silence.
Fading out our sense of sound by resting with silence.
Now to Touch.
Fading out your sense of Touch.
And doing that by paying attention to where in the body you can feel relaxation and warmth.
And just resting there.
Maybe noticing the warmth of the bed.
The soft rhythm of your breathing.
And just letting the body and the breath fade down.
Taking your time.
Letting the fading take as long as it needs to.
Being patient.
And just resting with what feels most restful, right now.
So with our senses turned down.
We’ll finish with thought.
Treating thoughts in exactly the same way we did sound.
Noticing any thoughts that arise.
Not going out to get them.
But just lying here and receiving them.
No one thought any more important than another.
Just thoughts, arising and being received.
No need to hold on to them.
No need to give them any energy.
Just receiving them.
And we can let them fade out in the same way we faded out sound.
Noticing the gaps between thoughts.
Giving more attention to the gaps than to the thoughts themselves.
Tuning into the silence.
Lovely silence.
Letting silence fade everything down.
The silence between thoughts.
The silence behind thoughts.
Fading down thinking.
Letting thinking go to sleep, as well.
Fading out.
Sight faded.
Hearing faded.
Touch faded.
Thinking faded.
Thank you and sleep well.
