Forum: Practical Dharma

My S.O. winked at me maliciously after my meditation session last night. "Sitting indeed. You were snoring in there! A fine meditator you are!" - "Was not" - "Too!" and so on

Anyway, I usually notice when I start to doze off, and yes, sometimes only after the fact... and I duly note the event, trying to catch as many sensations of it as I can. It still is a tricky object for meditation

So, what are your recipes for dealing with drowsiness?

Apart from visualizing brightness and taking deep, invigorating breaths, and getting up for a walk?

Cheers,
Florian

Hi Florian,
funny story you are telling here. One that everyone knows well I guess.
What I do when I get tired during meditation is to increase the speed and volume of the notings and I keep my eyes open. This is important because one time, when I was practicing on my bed facing the wall, I doze off and fell down the bed
After this I did not doze off anymore.
Best wishes,
Martin

My daily routine involves hitting the cushion early, ten minutes after waking up each morning, so I've had long battles against sleep. None of the traditional advice has helped much, and 'going for a walk' (i.e. not meditating) is not a solution, in my opinion. For weeks on end I battled against falling asleep, and it remains my main obstacle to practice.

Noting the sensations of sleepiness is helpful - as Florian suggests. But engaging in activity to counteract the sleepiness is not generally helpful, in my opinion, because you are then engaged in doing something - i.e. trying not to fall asleep - and this is not meditation, almost as much as actually falling asleep is not meditation.

I've found it helpful simply to let sensations arise and note them, and if sometimes I fall asleep then so be it - that was my state of mind, and that's what happened. My attention was eroded by sleep. Big deal! I'm a human being! Occasionally, it's possible to sit through a sleepy spell, noting as much as possible, and then discover that the mind becomes alert again after a time. (Presumably because it has simply taken the sleep it needed, and now is more able to continue.) In these cases, techniques to counteract sleepiness might have actually prolonged it.

Refraining from aversion to sleepiness, I've found, letting it take its course (within reason) naturally builds an ability to cope with it over time. I find now that I'm able to remain alert in states of consciousness very close to sleep, sometimes to the point of even having dreams begin to arise without being dragged into them.

Having said that, though, I've recently been practising samatha more frequently, and have found Alan Wallace's advice useful on switching to more subtle objects or sensations when laxity sits in - as counterintuitive as this may seem!

Duncan.

Many of my most interesting meditations have been while "surfing" the boundary of sleep while in bed. I'm more interested in how I can get closer to that state while doing sitting meditation---though with sharper focus and/or less interference from dreams.

That sounds a lot like I'm just goofing around with hypnagogia, but I'm sure that this has been a different animal: periods of lucidity coming and going over a period of hours, not just a short nightmare. Rather scary to be quite lucid and realize I have no sensation of breathing nor any sensation of not being able to breathe. I've experienced sleep paralysis a number of times, but this was different in that I couldn't even locate the sense of a body which couldn't move/breathe. (I'd say pratyahara, but it feels like cheating if it isn't during a regular sitting mediation.) Somewhere in there (just prior to the above, I think) was the sense of my perspective/existence dissolving into absolutely nothing, which I got pretty scared of ("wait, that's Death; don't want to go there, can't come back") and "backed away" from. Tempting for me to chalk it up to the "who am I?" I've been doing throughout much of the last few days and when I go to bed, but if I were a betting man, I'd say it probably was just the unusual amounts of coffee I'd consumed during the day. Other experiences involved getting some practice at tuning into vibrations and the value of total relaxation while focusing on the breath. That all begs a large measure of skepticism, but thanks for reading anyhow.

For what it's worth, I've struggled with this and my own answer -- for now -- is to meditate earlier in the day.

I spent a lot of time struggling with drowsiness while meditating before sleep and it didn't seem productive. I could focus on the sensations and note, but the quality of awareness was so... weak that I just had the intuitive sense that I any observation I might make really wasn't going to be very insightful. It just felt like going through the motions.

So now I meditate earlier in the evening and the quality of practice feels much better.

p.s. I also like to note as I go to sleep. Many times my wife will wake me up because of some neighborhood noise or I'm snoring and I'll respond as if I never went asleep -- perfect lucidity, unaware that I have transitioned into sleep. Kinda cool.

Author: AlanChapman

I'd have to agree with betawave. I don't meditate first thing in the morning because I'm still tired, and it makes for a crap session. Same in the evening - if it's too close to the end of the day I'm too exhausted to put in a good performance. I think it should be remebered that meditation is the cultivation of a skill, and not an exercise in endurance. Sloppy practice leads to sloppy chops.

Thanks everyone for the advice.

Cheers,
Florian