Like wild geese, we make many trips in our lives: from birth to death, from health to illness, and from illness through healing and recovery. The integration of the three elements of our selves include the body’s bottom-line physicality; the mind’s undeniable presence within our body; and the evanescent spirit, embodied and expressed in waves of pure awareness, difficult to pin down but impossible for most of us to deny.
In your journey from stress or anxiety into insomnia and other disturbances of your wake/sleep cycle, you will have physical symptoms that sometimes command your attention; repetitive, ruminative, or unwelcome thoughts and conclusions that will dominate instead, depending on the day and the state of your physical body; and other times when your spirit, soul, or “self” will move forward and become the focus.
All of these elements play a part in healing. The majority of the time, we will be staying with the body and its behaviors; the next most frequent focus will be your thoughts, at the level of the conscious mind, occasionally dipping into the unconscious mind as it sometimes reveals itself, and lastly, into that state of pure being, where healing may be already present.
Like geese, we will look down from heights occasionally, and then other times we will be on the earth, feeling the water and ground beneath our feet. The ultimate goal is for you to re-learn something you once did effortlessly: sleep. I can help with this goal, and along the way I’ve picked up a number of other foci in my training — namely, helping you to deal with stress and the stress response, and with anxiety and other distressing states. In this blog, I’ll be sharing some of the ideas and observations about human sleep that I’ve collected over the years.