Your body never lies

I haven't slept through the night since last Friday night. Which means I've gone without a week of shut-eye.

The doctor had prescribed me medicine for sleep. Which I had been taking pretty successfully. (I don't believe you can do much healing if you don't 1. sleep, 2. drink water, and 2. eat). Then the meds didn't help me sleep anymore, but they did leave me groggy all morning. After a few days of that, I decided I needed a new strategy. Onto plan B, which involved a variety of "hey, I'll try everything I've ever heard is a good idea when you can't sleep." I am now certain, this is not the kind of sleeplessness a glass of wine will cure. Nor will warm milk.... And before I knew it, a week had passed. Time moves in a strange blur once you reach a certain level of exhaustion.

I think of disrupted sleep as my body's first big warning sign that something is really off.

On the one hand, it's not a particularly useful signal sometimes. "Yes body, I know, I know my brother died. I am aware. Thank you for the memo." or "Yes body, I know my apartment has bed bugs and I'm sleeping at a friend's house and have nowhere to move to next week, while I'm taking a prelim. That IS really stressful, isn't it?"

On the other hand: your body never lies.

And the truth is that no matter how devastated I am or how anxious I am or how tragic something is, there are usually things in my life I've stopped doing to take care of myself sometime before the sleeplessness begins.

A labyrinth for meditation in Madison that I visited three years ago. 

So, here I am, an energy medicine practitioner, who has been doing yoga for more than FIVE YEARS, and meditating for just as long... who has not been doing any of those things on a daily basis.

No really. I have been doing none of them. Partially because I just felt so cocooned and overwhelmed that going to a yoga class almost felt like a violation of my personal space. Meditating was so painful because my emotions were so raw. I haven't even biked to work once since I got back, since showing up at all seemed like an achievement. I just kept driving. I had even pretty much stopped walking my dog, just letting him outside to wander. (He was almost hit by a car in the pitch black last night as he insisted on grazing on our gravel road as if he were a herd of cattle out west, simply disinterested in moving... thankfully, my neighbor saw him and slowed to a crawl. Not that Bandit ever moved. But at least he didn't die).

Watching your dog (the one that you're completely co-dependent with and couldn't stand to lose) nearly get hit by a car because you don't want to go on a walk? If that's not a clue that you have to do something differently, I don't know what is.

This is unsustainable.

In fact, I feel relieved just telling you about how unsustainable it is.

Because I haven't slept through the night in nearly a week. How much louder does my body have to get before I listen to it?

This morning I sat on my meditation cushion again for the first time since I got back.

It felt strange and uncomfortable, and after ten minutes I'm pretty sure all I had accomplished was ruminating on a cushion with a candle.

Then I did fifteen minutes of gentle yoga, at home, by myself, in my living room stretching out whatever called to be stretched. I walked Bandit three times today. And I did my daily energy routine in under five minutes while I got ready for work. The yoga, the meditation, the energy work: they were all bare minimums. I did not linger on my cushion. I did not push myself to go a full hour at anything. And all three dog walks were almost certainly under a mile total in length.

But, we all have to start somewhere. And for me, that much felt like a lot. It felt like a lot compared to what I had been doing. So, I'm going to take a moment to feel grateful that I finally took some time to honor my body.

I'm probably not alone in wondering why it feels so hard to do something as simple as sit on a cushion each morning.

But I do know that my body has lodged a formal complaint. The kind that can no longer be ignored.

Tonight before bed, I'm going to use a technique to sedate my stomach and kidney meridians which are completely over-energized. I lay in bed this morning clearing my stomach chakra of toxic energy and just felt sick with how much crap I was pulling out of it. (Hmm, how much of that comes from the chemicals I've been putting in my body to sedate me into sleep when my body was trying to tell me something was unbalanced?) Then I'm going to sedate my fight or flight response: that meridian keeps many of us awake during stressful times.

And I'm going to try again to sleep.

Because how can anyone heal without sleep?

And, in times of crisis, how can we sleep without healing?

I wanted to share this with you, because I talk a lot about doing things to take care of myself. And I also want you to know that I fall off the wagon too. I struggle to sit on my cushion. Sometimes I feel like ten minutes is excruciating, when I used to sit through thirty minutes of meditation like it was a drop in a bucket.

This last week? Unsustainable. This next week? I have an intention of honoring and supporting wholeness and healing and light. In the process, I welcome your prayers for peaceful sleep and healing.


Namaste-