Sleep and Insomnia

A Special Application of Focusing

Courses and Coaching for groups and individuals

Sleep problems can cause a great deal of stress and suffering. In a busy professional life, they may undermine our natural abilities and lower our performance. In our personal lives, we can find our backlog of tiredness and fatigue leaves us less able to respond as we wish to our loved-ones, affecting our relationships with others around us. It can diminish our natural optimism and resourcefulness, and as our bodily energies flag, our emotional energy is often sapped too, curbing the pleasure and meaning we want in our lives.

By combining experience and expertise in three different areas, we offer a means to improving sleep, and of building your resources as you do so:

1. Sleep-Focusing: A special adaptation of Focusing for sleep.
2. Meditation: drawing on over 25 years’ of meditation experience, we can help you work with your thoughts, your mind and emotions to settle and deepen your relationship to sleep.
3. Compassionate Communication for inner awareness (aka Nonviolent Communication™): This approach helps us regain our connection with abundant life energy, and enables us to discover more of the unconscious impulses that keep us awake.
4. Lifestyle, diet and health: supporting you to atune to your natural body clock and ‘organic time’.

Benefits

As this approach is practiced, typically reported benefits are:

• Sleep comes almost instantly most nights;
• If sleep comes more slowly, we still feell refreshed in the morning;
• Lucid dreaming;
• Feeling of vitality and refreshment in the morning.

Following are extract from ‘Sleep-Focusing: A Pathway to Sleep’

I wake up, sensing deep night all around, with just a hint of dawn. I float deliciously for a few moments in a dream-filled, sleep-soaked, semi-conscious state; then roll over. I’m intending to snuggle down again into that sleepy warmth but the sad fact is, I’m still awake.

Sleep is still close by, and I can feel it in and around me. But now there’s something else too –an anxiety, a dread even, about what this night will bring. Groggily-tired, I begin to search for sleep: it grows elusive. I start to grow restless, with a touch of creeping despair, as I wonder how I’ll cope next day. I’m even wider awake now, and feeling helpless too, because my mind has dispatched itself to some buzzy hinterland, and I know that I might as well give up on sleep, although I’m too tired to do anything else...

Steps Towards Sleep

1. Interrupting sleep;
2. Searching for ‘Awake’;
3. Finding what lies between me and sleep;
4. Exploring ‘Awake’;
5. Knowing ‘Awake’ may be hard to find to find;
6. Allowing ‘Awake’ to enter in;
7. Checking my intentions;
8. Not wanting to sleep.

The effects of Sleep and Insomnia

The extraordinary thing about finding that sense of ‘Awake’ is, that as soon as I touch it, my body immediately responds. It feels deeply and healthily tired, just as it does before one slides easily into sleep. The tiredness is delicious and very real. When I feel this, I know I can roll over onto my side, and sleep will nestle into me, often within seconds. Sometimes it takes a little longer, but by keeping the sense of ‘Awake’ with me, sleep arrives.

Rousseau – the Dream