My Sleep Journey and Trusting Life

Medicine Writing Day 64/100

I have been on a journey with my sleep the last month.

I feel exhausted and depleted all day; but when I lay down during the day for a nap or at night to sleep, it feels like my eyelids have springs that rest open and my body have been plugged into an electric socket.

It feels like being over-caffeinated. Jittery and unable to focus or calm down; but underneath the surface you can feel the way all the jitteriness is consuming energy that you don’t even really have. My mind races and spins using its effect on my brain to keep my physical body awake even though it wants nothing more than to sleep deep and hard.

I have been tired and pushing myself beyond what my body was truly capable of for many, many years if I’m truly honest with myself, maybe even since childhood, but becoming a mother really ramped it up to an impossible level.

Before motherhood; I had undergone years of disordered eating; not feeding my body enough. I had a very unhealthy relationship with exercise; pushing my physical body through intense workouts every single day that left me feeling “high” for a bit, but came with a big crash later.

There were a couple years right before I got pregnant with Alma, where I was traveling for work almost every other week and between time zone changes and all the socializing that was part of the job; my body was screaming for more rest; but I just kept going, kept pushing, kept extracting from my body. Using energy that was on loan.

Everywhere; I was just building up more and more of an energy deficit.

I remember back then, when I got really honest with myself, wondering why it felt like all I really wanted to do was nothing. Like that was really what I most wanted to do; nothing.

Then, I got pregnant. The morning sickness was such a gift because it forced me to slow down and take really good care of myself. When you are pregnant and for months the only thing you can imagine eating is cheap pad thai, chicken fingers, root beer and Tombstone pizzas; you just eat those things, no matter how “unhealthy” they are. I slept a lot, ate a lot and rested even more. I did a lot of nothing.

But then, the baby inevitably came and even though I did my absolute best to rest during the postpartum period; I still ended up using more energy than I had. In Chinese medicine it is said that a woman gives up all her chi (life force) during childbirth. And that doesn’t include the years of sleep deprivation that come after the birth of the baby.

The idea that women should do anything other than take care of themselves and their baby for that first year is just insane to me. If you want to do something else, by all means, but there should absolutely zero expectations or pressure to. Building and birthing and feeding a baby from your body is quite enough.

Then I had another baby. And seven months after the second baby was born; here I am. In this place where my body has started to be unable to rest and go into a deep sleep. It’s like being woken up during the night so much in the last two years has taught my body to just stay awake.

They say you can’t teach a starving man about God; and that’s exactly how I feel as a sleep deprived mother. This past month when the insomnia has been the worst; I have been solely interested in survival. I have no capacity for anything else.

If you know anything about human design, I am a 1/3 profile. Human Design reader and channel, Rebecca Freeman calls this profile “the seeker of truth and wisdom.” I am most certainly that. When something like insomnia comes to visit me; I will seek until there is no more seeking to be done. I will get to the very bottom.

I used to do my seeking with a frantic and frenzied fixing energy. Like I need to know every single thing about this so that I can change myself and “fix” it.

There is some of that energy with this sleep journey for sure. I would like to be able to sleep again, yes. But, as I’ve softened I’ve started seeing how this relentless seeker in me can actually connect me to Source. I feel really alive and connected and turned on by the seeking if I do it without compulsion and with more embodied flow and trust. I don’t require it to make sense. I just start following threads and see where they take me.

So this sleep journey has been this delightful going down the rabbit hole of books, blogs, podcasts, and sleep experts. It’s been learning everything I can about sleep and how it works. It’s been a gratifying experience of starting to experiment with things to improve my sleep and my rest. The seeking on the sleep journey has actually given me energy and life again when I was feeling so entirely burnt out. Not that crazed energy; but an aliveness that only comes when you are on the path of least resistance.

Instead of worrying about how little sleep I’m getting (and don’t get me wrong, there has been plenty of that too) I just spend time really deepening into what this experience is trying to teach me and following the bread crumbs I’m given.

A new podcast comes on my radar about sleep; oh yes, that’s definitely for me. A friend mentions the name of a yoga nidra teacher that he likes and then I’m listening to her yoga nidras which leads me to the 10 day course she made about getting deeper sleep course.

In her course she mentions her mentor and teacher’s name, Dr. Niman, and then I find myself reading his book, Hush, about sleep as spiritual practice.

My sister tells me she has just listened to Micheal Pollen’s book called Caffeine, well that sounds like something I need to hear right now and so I listen to it.

I’ve really let myself be taken under into the mysterious river of life and the mysterious ways it works.

Each of these breadcrumbs has brought me a very important and much needed piece of information or reframes a thought pattern I’ve been having and I can feel myself being guided by that bigger thing. I can feel the swelling of some future wisdom being brewed within me as I allow and align with this experience of sleeplessness and exhaustion.

When we have experiences that our minds don’t like or think should be different, insomnia for example, we tend to get really fixated on fixing them. Our minds tell us, “I do not like this. XYZ would be a much better outcome! Let’s make that happen!” And then we’re off trying to control what is out of our control trying to get a certain outcome.

But, what I’m learning through this sleep journey is that I have no idea what the best outcome would be. Yes, I would like to have more sleep right now. Yes, I would love to feel rested and energetic. Yes, my mind really likes to tell me how important it is that I am not tired and I fix whatever is going on right now.

But, when I stay with the what is true, I can see how being in this state, with this ‘affliction’, is actually giving me so much of what I need right now. It’s teaching me how to do less. It’s teaching me how to be at peace in a different type of consciousness, a tired consciousness. It’s taught me to get off coffee and caffeine and experience the world without those stimulants long term for the first time in my adult life.

It’s teaching me about being satisfied with doing less each day. It’s teaching me to nap when I can. It’s teaching me to let go of lists and jacking my system up to “get shit done.” It’s teaching me to build a deep respect for sleep and the involuntary nature of it. How it’s something we simply cannot control no matter how hard we try. It’s teaching me to understand my body and it’s signals on a whole new level.

One of my deepest held beliefs is that Life is taking much better care of me than I ever could take care of myself. This is radical, and may be a really hard idea to swallow, especially when life is dealing you shit hand after shit hand, but it is Truth. The mystery will never not be a mystery and I choose to life a life that is in alignment with this fact, not in denial of it.

I’m letting this sleep journey shape me and teach me what it came to teach me.

There will be more on this sleep journey as it evolves. It is bringing up so much to process and contemplate.