Sleeping Well and Acting Effortlessly from a Place of Deep Rest

An Edited Excerpt from Oral Teachings by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Summer 2019

I want to emphasize here at the start of this retreat the importance of sleep. Personally, I have promised myself seven to eight hours of sleep a night, which I feel is very important. If you are not getting a full night's sleep, I encourage you to allow yourself a longer sleep at night.

I've heard people say, “I regularly wake up at two or three in the morning and have difficulty going back to sleep.” This seems like a very common problem for many people these days. One of the things that affects this is your relationship to sleep—what sleep means to you. Pay close attention to what sleep means to you and come to feel: Sleep is sacred. Sleep is an opportunity to connect, an opportunity to heal, an opportunity to grow. It's true even for children and teenagers: the time that they are growing the most is when they are sleeping, not when they are running around. In the Tibetan culture, when I was growing up, it was not like that. We were yelled at if we slept too late in the morning. Now I feel very different. Lately, whenever my son Senghe goes to sleep, I feel very happy and say, “Sleep, sleep as long as you want to.” He used to have a hard time sleeping at night, but now he is sleeping until 11 a.m., which is good.

When we do happen to wake up in the night, the only thing we need to know is not to interfere. Do not interfere by turning on your screen, or the TV, or the light, or interfere with a cup of coffee or a book. Nothing. Our only commitment is to go back to sleep.  A simple commitment, with no other interference, okay? And the important point here is not to struggle, not to put in a lot of effort or turn toward your thoughts.

Here is a simple meditation that we all could do in returning to sleep. Bring your attention to the body; bring it to a location like the heart. Simply keeping your open attention in the heart, breathe from there. It's as simple as that. You can bring your attention to any place in the body, but the heart is a good place. And breathe from there, with each exhalation resting deeper. But be careful not to lose the connection for the period of time that you need for entering back into sacred sleep; that's the commitment. It's different for different people, but let's say that we'll commit to staying connected to the meditation for five to ten minutes. For some people it might take closer to ten minutes. For me it usually takes five minutes, but those five minutes are important. There is always interference around minute two or three. Thoughts or wakefulness arise in minute two or minute three. So I need the full five minutes. That is my commitment then: I will stay connected to my heart, breathing from the heart, for five minutes to enter into sacred sleep. I don't have to repeat that commitment to myself verbally, because deep inside I know it's about five minutes, and so for that time I simply don't lose the connection.

I would like each of you to commit yourself to doing this for this retreat—just a very simple kind of commitment to make to yourself. Then, whatever other practices you are doing, like dream yoga or sleep yoga, are fine. But if you're not doing any other practices, that's fine, too. You are preparing the base by improving the duration and quality of your sleep. That is a very important first step!

Nowadays, science is finding more and more evidence pointing to how important the duration and quality of one's sleep is. It turns out that an important risk factor for many diseases is not sleeping well enough. It can just arise out of habit. Of course, there are many reasons. People might say, “I cannot sleep because I need to study.” But in order to study, you need a clear mind, a fresh mind, not a dull mind. For learning you need a clear mind. And for a clear mind, you need to sleep.

Generally, too, you need good sleep in order to make better decisions throughout all of your life. In many, many of the important moments in life you have the opportunity to decide either to move forward, to stop, to go left, to go right, or to not go at all. And each of these different directions will have a different impact on your life in terms of the goals you are trying to achieve. To make clear decisions, then, you need to have a clear mind. A clear mind definitely needs deep rest or good sleep. Actually, not only decision making, but whatever you are doing, you need to have a clear mind. How many accidents happen due to a lack of alertness? Sometimes we feel it as a lack of energy. How do we get good energy? We might take what is called a power nap. Every time you feel you need it, it's important to be able to take a rest.

Resting or sleeping does not mean that your bodymind is inactive, or unproductive. Not at all. In contrast, it can be very active. Actually, some parts of the brain are more active when you are asleep than when you are awake. Studies show that there are some waste removal processes that occur more throughout the body and brain while you are sleeping than while you are awake. Imagine that you are having big parties and big meals at your home, and as a result you are accumulating more and more garbage in the kitchen, but you are not cleaning it out. What's going to happen? The kitchen is going to become filled with garbage. That's probably what happens in our brains from not sleeping well. We are creating more waste byproducts but not giving ourselves enough time in the sleep state to clear it out.

I also believe it is the case that during the day, the effortless manifestation of one's qualities and one's meaningful and helpful action all arise from the place of deep rest, of connection, rather than from the place of disconnection and effortfulness. For instance, effort is not involved for one to feel joy. If you look, when you feel a true sense of joy inside, it doesn't come when you are trying to feel happy, or when you are trying to force yourself to be happy, or when you are obliged to be happy. It doesn't come then. It comes anytime the space is open, the connection is there. The experience of joy simply happens by itself.

Look at the nature of the practices that we are doing, such as the five tsa lung exercises. These involve physical movements related directly to the five locations of the energy centers in the body. The tsa lung exercises act to open grosser blockages of the body, and through opening they give rise to the pure energy of the wind, which allows the spontaneous experiences of the mind. That's all we're attempting to do with the tsa lung exercises. It's like clearing away the traffic. If you want to arrive at your destination faster, without obstacles, then you want to go when there is no traffic, when the movement is not blocked. That's what tsa lung practice is doing: by physically opening the five locations, the flow is not blocked and the arising of experience is not blocked.

When we do the practice of the nine breathings of purification, we are simply opening the three channels. And the five tsa lung exercises open the five energy centers. So in both practices we are only attempting to open the space—not trying to manifest directly a particular quality or create an experience. Rather, we are simply opening up the space, clearing the blocks. There's a difference. Many times we try to create experiences with effort. However, it may be difficult as in the case of sleep. You only go to sleep when you stop trying to go to sleep. Have you noticed that? When you really try hard to go to sleep, does it make it better or worse? Worse. In the same way, when you are really trying hard to be happy, does that make it easier or harder to be happy?

In the same way, you can't effortfully give birth to some awakening. Rather, you can open to having the experience of awakening. So it's more like the effort is what we need to watch out for. It is the effort that creates the blockages.

One thing I have been emphasizing quite a bit lately is the sense of exhaustion. How many people feel exhausted? I know a lot of people feel this way. When you feel exhaustion, it does not necessarily imply that you have been productive or that you have done a lot. Very often the sense of exhaustion arises when you are not actually getting much done, yet you're trying to do a lot. That's where you get exhausted. When there's a flow in the doing, then it won't exhaust you.

So when I'm talking about deep rest in the midst of activity and sleeping more during the night, I'm not saying to become lazy. Just be careful not to put in too much effort. Sometimes the reason we put in too much effort is not because the work we are doing requires it but because our personality gets involved, the pain identity gets involved. It's not the actual work that leads to our expending so much effort, it's that the I, the ego, gets involved in that work.

Maybe it's a little different if you are younger, in your 20s or 30s—it might even be that a little bit of ego is helpful then, when you are new and starting up. I don't know if it's ever helpful, but for most of us who are older, I don't think it's useful anymore. We are too old to play those kinds of games with the pain identity, you know? We're too old already, and we certainly don't want to get older any faster. [laughter] Whatever we do, we want to have joy and to make connections. And if what we are doing works, then great. If it doesn't work, fine. If there is a place for you to engage, then engage. And if the situation doesn't have a place for you to participate, then be happy and let it go. You want to feel equally free in your engaging and in your letting go. Then there is only fun there. And from that space you can do a better job in whatever way you become involved.

So you see, the sense of effort is directly involved with the identity, the self. These teachings and practices are ultimately about self-transformation involving aspects of body, and also acknowledging sleep, and acknowledging resting, and acknowledging connecting, and acknowledging the opening of these energy centers and bringing awareness into your body, awareness into your effort, awareness into your pain identity. Simply bringing awareness there.

We will have the opportunity to engage with these practices a lot over the course of this retreat. And the very basis for doing that is sleep and rest. Okay?