How you think about sleep is so important.
Today I’m sharing a broader perspective on sleep from Ruby Bedi, my spiritual mentor, who helped me years ago to recover from a severe illness. She did it by reminding me to think from beyond the body’s physical needs.
Meaning, what is the deeper purpose of sleep?
This is an excerpt and photo from a conversation we had in 2015. It’s inspiring me lately, and I hope it can do the same for you.
CC (Chris): Ruby, help us to understand the importance of sleep.
RB (Ruby): Well, we have not incarnated to sleep. The purpose of our incarnation is creativity. We all want to create a legacy through our children, our wisdom, and our unique contribution to the world. That is the purpose of every human being. So, being the creative species that we are, we always want to be creating. And we need energy to create. Sleep is where we replenish our energy so that we can enjoy our lives and contribute to others.
Let’s look at sleep as our inner workout. We are working out while in a whole different state; working our ideas, our memory, our intuitive muscles, so that when we wake up, we are now ready to create the things that we have envisioned in our sleep state. It‘s going to be so easy, because we are simply replicating what we have already done. Imagine that, you can be resting, sleeping, and achieving your goals. You can’t get it any easier. And this is the brilliance of the human species.
We cannot NOT sleep. There is some intelligence within that says, this is going to happen to you, every 24 hours. You can fight it, or try to override it, but it’s going to happen. It’s a protective mechanism, from a wiser place. It’s just like any other cycle of nature. Sleep is a way to reset our mind into a greater consciousness.
CC: What role does sleep play in healing?
RB: It’s not what sleep does, but what doesn’t it do?
We have this beautiful body and physiology and psychology and all aspects of consciousness. Within us, there is a home, there is a source, and that home of consciousness is the sacred space. Call it god space or universal space, but that is our personal space where we imagined a story of what we wanted to be, and we put together the energy and consciousness and the skills and all the beliefs we needed and all the situations we needed.
Sleep is a process or a tool to rest in that home of consciousness. It’s not just sleeping for so many hours a day because your body needs it. That is a narrow and fragmented thought process.
CC: I feel that it is our daytime awareness that allows us into that deep rest at night.
RB: People want health, they want better energy, but tell me, what is your plan for that good energy? What are you going to do with that good energy?
You have to think big. Think into your capacity. How will you maneuver? How will you manifest? How will you create with that energy? Without that vision, we are lost.
I suggest three things – that whatever you do in life, that whatever you accomplish, it has to serve you personally, it has to serve your community, and it has to serve our planet.
So when people have a personal awareness of what their energy is for, and have these three things aligned, their mission and goals have a deeper meaning, and they rest naturally at night. Their sleep is a different quality. Their personal vision and mission has to come first. For life, for growth, for contribution, not for sleep.
CC: Thank you for reminding us to take that bigger perspective. We need sleep for recovery, for replenishment, and for energy to take into the next day. But let’s consider WHY we need that energy.
RB: You could actually call sleep “plugging in” to the source. We plug in to that source of our deeper knowledge, our gifts, our intuition. In the daytime, we are not really thinking inclusive of the planet or the world. We likely are just thinking of ourselves. But when you are in this beautiful sleep plug-in, you can access information and energy from a bigger source, from the universal field. You are connecting to everything else that is happening, everywhere. You gain knowledge, you gain wisdom, you gain the big picture. And, you also gain the intuition of how you should act within that bigger picture. And when you wake up, you feel inspired and rejuvenated.
CC: Why do so many struggle with sleep?
RB: The key reason, in spiritual terms, is that you don’t know who you are. Now the human body and the human species are brilliant. We are brilliant in all ways. But we haven’t actualized our brilliance. We often are fooling ourselves, telling ourselves a lot of lies that create so much stress on the body.
You may be somewhat lost. Maybe you are pretending to be somebody you are not, so you are not using the unique skills you were born to share with others, but you are mimicking other people’s lifestyle and skills, to be somebody that you think is different or greater than you. When you think somebody is greater than you, that’s a good sign that you haven’t reached your greater mind.
CC: How can this way of thinking help us with sleep when we are distressed, anxious, in pain, or ill?
RB: All day we are focused outside ourselves, our senses overloaded, projecting our energy. So we have to basically come back and we have to reset, and we have to have the plug in, because we need energy to consciously explore and create.
Now you have more charge, so that you are not feeling this annoying aspect which is stress. Stress is simply a fluctuating default energy in you. But when you are in your sleep, you have a good current flow, and you are not experiencing these default vibrations.
Human beings are such an interesting species. We look everywhere else but within. We say, “ I need a good bed, I need a good blanket,” and those things are important, but at the same time, you need to know where to go in your body as you rest. That is where the deep comfort is.
It’s comical to me that corporations and people first create the stress (longer hours, more demands), and then they need to teach and learn meditation to remain stress free. Why create this stress in the first place? Then you have to solve it. Why not just remain healthy?
There are so many reasons for people being distressed or anxious. You can also have anxiety from physical pain. But no matter what the reason for your stress is, there is a space where there is no pain. You have a place, like a room in your body, that you can connect to that energy source, where you are beyond thought, and pain free. That is pure consciousness.
So part of you is in pain, anxious or stressed, but then there is also another part of you that is not running those symptoms. Imagine that space. It’s like different channels on a radio station. You have the ability to control what you want to play. There is a pain free station in your own body that you can connect to.
In the continuum of energy and consciousness, when you come back to your source space, your sacred space, it just removes the anxiety. And the plugin gives you access to wisdom, so that you consciously make different choices during the day. You begin to choose something else that doesn’t create anxiety or stress within you.
So let the universe work on you while you sleep. We have our awakenings through the sleep process. It’s fascinating.
