I’ve been having problems with sleeping the past few months and started looking around for an effective guided meditation for sleep healing.
I came across this excellent guided meditation for sleep healing from Michael Sealey (watch it below) and have found it to work wonders.
My sleep problems ranged across the board and I know they’re fairly common: interrupted sleep, waking up feeling exhausted, tossing and turning, nightmares, aching bones and muscles.
I woke up irritable and in a sour mood, and it took me years before I realized it was my low quality of sleep that was the main reason for this.
I thought it was my diet, my self-limiting beliefs, my lack of physical exercise, relationship problems. To be fair, those were all relevant, and improvements I made in those areas also helped: but the hidden piece of the puzzle was escaping my grasp no matter where I seemed to look …
It was sort of like looking for your lost glasses when you’re wearing them.
I didn’t realize the very real and available power inside me and the fact that what was bothering me was the one thing I wasn’t conscious of but that also constituted such a core part of my daily life …
Quite the riddle, isn’t it?
Even on seemingly perfectly fine days, there was this exhaustion and depressive feeling gnawing at my mind and emotions that I couldn’t seem to shake.
Despite buying the best mattress I could find and taking melatonin, something just wasn’t clicking on the sleep front.
The melatonin helped me fall asleep in some cases, but I woke up feeling frazzled, irritated and downright sh*tty.
It was disappointing. Something big was missing and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I read all the scientific guides.
I worked on my diet.
I even went to a therapist.
It just wasn’t helping.
Then one day in my sleeplessness-addled brain I stumbled across guided meditation for sleep healing and began to find some of the solutions I’d been searching for.
I’ll admit that my first reaction was incredulous and a bit amused. I thought that this kind of thing was for wine moms and trendy suburbanites or those looking for a “quick fix.”
But I was wrong.
The guided meditation for sleep healing really made a difference for me.
My preconceptions about what it was and how effective it could be went out the window after several weeks when I saw real results in the quality, duration and restfulness of my sleep.
What is guided meditation for sleep healing?
Then I looked into guided meditation for sleep healing and after keeping it up for several weeks I noticed remarkable results. Restful sleep, no more nightmares, waking up rejuvenated and full of energy.
It didn’t happen “overnight” but the chances were cumulative and became increasingly noticeable just from me putting in half an hour a day before bedtime to go through the guided meditation for sleep healing.
The positive effects sunk into me on some deeper level and began to make a noticeable difference.
Guided meditation for sleep healing is basically where an instructor talks to you as you go through a series of attention shifts and stress relaxation practices until reaching a state of intense relaxation and inner calm.
Sealey takes you through each part of your body and lets you intentionally relax and de-stress them one by one, from your feet and fingers to unclenching your jaw muscles and relaxing the tension in other areas from the top of your scalp to your forehead muscles and core …
You go through a series of realizations and affirmations of protection where you gain a sense of security and restfulness that can often be lacking before sleep. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve drifted to sleep angry, depressed or extremely anxious.
The guided sleep healing meditation begins to soothe these inner states …
The effect is subtle but powerful as this guided sleep meditation begins to take effect … Sealey guides you through the points of tension and blocked energy to clear through them and consciously choose to relax those pains and tight areas one by one …
Through doing this guided meditation for sleep healing, I found what Sealey calls my “sanctuary of sleep relaxation,” and believe it or not, it started to improve almost every facet of my life from my relationships and career to my daily mental balance and feeling of wellbeing in the face of daily frustrations.
More and more studies show the huge impact of sleep …
More and more clinical studies show that sleep has a wide range of beneficial effects, from improving mental health and fighting depression, anxiety and stress, to lessening issues with ongoing pain, low-energy and scattered focus, and mental confusion.
Meditation has been found to be one of the most effective treatments for insomnia and sleep problems, addressing subconscious and physiological and psychological roadblocks to sleep and soothing them away.
Meditation has even been found effective in physically healing people when practiced for months. Some of these included incidents where the healing just was not supposed to be scientifically possible.
In one case a Tibetan monk suffering from gangrene says that several months of healing meditation helped heal his leg.
Those who have studied the case say that the Tibetan concept of prana or life breath may have played a part in somehow healing the circulatory process and oxygen saturation of the blood, undoing the damage to the leg.
What exactly really happened? I personally am not 100% sure. But what I can say is that if the monk thinks it was the healing meditations which made the difference in his healing process, then who am I to say definitively that it wasn’t?
Understanding the brain and meditation …
New discoveries are being made every day in the scientific community and I believe we’re just at the cusp of understanding the true extent of the mind’s reach and our human attention and power of concentration …
Many challenges that we experience on the mental level as human beings occur on the right side of our prefrontal cortex and in our amygdala. These regions of our brain are heavily burdened when we are going through stressful, angering, and confusing life situations.
They can become overloaded and go “on the fritz.”
Scans of those who practice regular meditation show that the right prefrontal cortex displays healthier brainwave patterns, increased dopamine (woohoo!), and begin to boost activity in the left prefrontal cortex where many positive emotions and proactive, capable feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment occur.
In fact, the left prefrontal cortex is even our serotonin factory: that elusive chemical that the medications for depression all seek to help improve distribution of.
Meditation has been demonstrated to have an overall beneficial effect on our sympathetic nervous system, which is the part of our physiological system that regulates our heart, blood pressure, breathing and overall balance.
When our sympathetic nervous system goes haywire we go haywire: reacting in a feedback loop of increasing worry, tension, panic and despair. This can eventually lead to life-threatening problems like cardiac problems.
Guided meditation …
I know that for me I always found it tricky to meditate just “on my own” without any instructions. I more or less understood the concept of different forms of meditation but I would find my mind wandering too much and too far astray.
Guided meditation and guided healing meditation was a big find for me. I could focus on the words being spoken and my breath and body and this was sufficient to calm the “monkey mind” and let the process unfold …
Following the simple vocal instructions let me release the need to control and achieve an outcome and just … do the simple exercises.
And they worked.
Healing yourself is possible …
In addition to the guided meditation for sleep healing which I found so helpful from Michael Sealey, my newfound openness to guided meditation has helped me discover other excellent options as well.
Going with the flow and letting my body and mind heal has often been a process of taking away all the clutter and demands that I was putting on myself and just learning how to be in the present moment where healing takes place.
I highly recommend an alternative, amazing guided self-healing meditation from the shaman Rudá Iandê. This practice uses shamanic breathwork to bring deep healing and I’ve found it’s made my energy levels soar and made me feel much more present and balanced in my daily life, both physically and in my mind.
Shamanic breathwork is amazing and it’s a practice that’s been understood and passed on for thousands of years.
Our breath goes through our body each moment and its powerful is hard to overstate. It connects our conscious with our subconscious and in a certain way it’s the “master key” to accessing those parts of us that are submerged and have deep power to transform and enhance us or trap and weaken us if it is ignored or becomes a sinkhole of blocked energy and subconscious sabotage.
Rudá’s YBYTU breathwork is incredible and it’s made a massive difference for me across the board.
Our body has enormous potential for healing that also can positively impact our charisma, mental acuity, confidence, goal-setting, and ability to put intentions into action.
It’s possible to live life with passion and a deep link to meaning and excitement.
Your body knows how to heal itself and has an instinctive intelligence that can realign you and your physical and mental self in a more proactive and effective way.
Rudá has a deep grasp of the natural wisdom of your body and its inner intelligence and his guided meditation takes you through this process in order to tap into the wisdom and healing that all of us can access inside ourselves.
There’s no need to look outside for a “miracle solution” or grand theory. You have the power within yourself.
My ‘wake up call’
Realizing the central importance of sleep in my life was a big “wake up call” for me and allowed me to improve in so many areas of life.
I spent a long time trying to find the “cool side of the pillow” in terms of sleep quality, length and refreshing-ness and it seemed to elude me.
Despite melatonin and the other strategies I mentioned, I was on a downward cycle of sleep issues and beginning to also develop other problems by focusing so much on the sleep problem and not seeing any real improvement.
By discovering and permitting the inner healing abilities of my mind, respiratory system and body to work their processes I was able to transform the blocked and erratic sleep experiences I was having and do much more with my days.
Now I approach the day with more energy and feeling fundamentally OK.
Not every day is a slam dunk, but I generally wake up feeling renewed and ready to take on new challenges and engage in my intuitive expertise to enter the flow state the right way instead of the wrong way.
Sleeping well has allowed me to improve the other areas of my life including my patience with others and my ability to focus on reclaiming my personal power and stop blaming (and praising or depending) on other people to make my life acceptable in my own eyes.
It makes sense if you think about it, considering that we sleep so much of our lives.
If you’re sleeping well and getting deep REM sleep then you wake up feeling good.
If you’re sleeping fitfully, snoring, and breathing like a broken lawnmower without getting enough oxygen then you wake up feeling sore, tired, anxious, and irritated.
Guided meditation for sleep healing can be a powerful solution and ameliorating practice to improve this and I know it’s helped me out a lot.
I really encourage everyone to check out the guided meditation for sleep healing that’s been helping me and the self-healing meditation from Rudá.
Sleep well, my friends.
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