1. Have an Early Dinner.
If you plan to have a heavy dinner or things like meat in the evening, eat at least three to four hours before you go to bed to allow the process of digestion to be over. This practice will take care of many things.
Do you often wake up feeling tired or grumpy for no apparent reason? You could be incubating “bad eggs” during the night. Sadhguru explains how to sleep right, and things to do so that every morning is full of light, energy, and new possibilities for you.
Sadhguru: During sleep, you can unconsciously incubate negative or positive things. If you have a tendency to wake up in the morning feeling nasty for no reason, that means you are incubating “bad eggs” in the night.
This can cause major physiological problems over a period of time. It is important that you eliminate these things from your life. So before you go to bed in the night, there are certain things that you need to take care of.
If you plan to have a heavy dinner or things like meat in the evening, eat at least three to four hours before you go to bed to allow the process of digestion to be over. This practice will take care of many things.
Drinking a certain amount of water and taking a shower before you go to sleep will make a lot of difference. If the weather is such that taking cold showers is difficult, you can go for lukewarm showers. Do not take hot showers in the night. You will sleep better if you take a shower because it is not just the dirt on the skin that you are washing away.
Have you noticed that if you are very tense and anxious, taking a shower makes it feel like the burden has been lifted to some extent? A lot of things happen when water flows over your body. A shower is a very rudimentary form of Bhuta Shuddhi because over 60 percent of your body is actually water. If you run water over it, a certain purification happens that goes beyond cleaning the skin.
One more thing you can do is to light an organic oil lamp with a cotton wick in the room where you sleep. Regular cooking oil, lint seed oil, rice bran oil, sesame oil, or olive oil will do. You will see that the negative things will completely disappear. You can also do a chant or some Yogic practices before you sleep. If you want to do Isha Kriya, it is available on the internet.
Keep in mind that you are a mortal and could drop dead right now, no matter if you are young or old. Before you sleep, sit on your bed and imagine this is your deathbed – you have just one more minute to live. Look back and see, whatever you have done on that day, was it worthwhile? Do this simple exercise because you do not know when you will be on your deathbed or lying in a hospital with all kinds of tubes sticking in you. But you can enjoy doing this every day: Sit on your bed, look back and see whether the way you handled the last 24 hours made them worthwhile. If you do this, you will live a worthwhile life.
Every night, you should set aside everything that you have gathered – the body, the content of the mind, and any other things. Do not ignore the “small” things because they are actually big. I have seen people carrying their own pillow because to them, it is very important. Before going to sleep, keep aside your pillow, your footwear, your relationships, and everything that you have gathered. Then you will wake up with much more light, energy, and possibilities than you have imagined possible. Just sleep as life – not as a man, woman, this or that. Keep everything aside.
Generally, in India, we have been told that you should not point your head to the north while sleeping. If you sleep in a horizontal position with your head towards the north, then slowly, blood will get pulled towards your brain by the north magnetic pole. When there is too much blood circulation in the brain, you cannot sleep peacefully.
If you have any kind of inherently weak aspects in your brain, or if you are of old age, you could die in your sleep. One can suffer a hemorrhage because extra blood is trying to enter the brain through capillaries. This is true only in the Northern Hemisphere. If you go to Australia, you should not put your head towards the south. In India, you should not put your head to the north. You can put it in any other direction.
Waking up to an alarm bell is not the best way to live your life. The kinds of sounds you wake up to will determine the context of the day and the future of your life in many ways.
The kind of food you consume, the kind of thoughts and emotions that you process, and the level of vibrancy you have will determine how much sleep you need. If you need eight to twelve hours of sleep, you should go to bed early so that you can wake up naturally. If after waking up, you doubt whether you will stay awake or not, then, you could use a chant if you have identified one of the Vairagya chants [1].
[1] An album with chants offered by Sounds of Isha.
Traditionally, a whole science of living has been built into our lives. They told you that in the morning before you wake up, you must rub your palms together and place them upon your eyes. The reason for this is there is a heavy concentration of nerve endings in your hands. Rubbing the palms together and then placing them upon your eyes ensures that your senses awaken instantly.
Even when you are feeling sleepy, you can rub your palms together and see how everything comes awake. Every morning, before you move your body, your body and your brain should be active. The idea is that you should not get up dumb. So you do the palming and then roll over to your right and get up.
An important physiological aspect is that your heart, which is located on the left, pumps your blood across the body. In India, we have been told that when you wake up, you must roll to your right side and get up. When the body is in a certain state of relaxation, the metabolic activity is low. When you get up, there is a surge of activity, which you do not want to obstruct by getting up from your left side.
Every day, nearly a quarter of a million people in the world will not wake up anymore because of natural deaths. Though there is no guarantee, suppose you do wake up tomorrow, it needs at least a little celebration. You do not have to get up and dance, but at least you can smile! Then remind yourself of all those people who matter to you and are also alive today. That must cause another big smile. This is a simple first step to your spiritual process.
