Sleeping Well In Winter
The three months of winter,
they denote securing and storing.
The water is frozen and the earth breaks open.
Do not disturb the yang.
Go to rest early and rise late.
You must wait for the sun to shine.
Let the mind enter a state as if hidden, {as if shut in}
as if you had secret intentions;
as if your intentions were already accomplished
— Comprehensive Discourse on Regulating the Spirit in Accordance with the Qi of the Four Seasons, Chapter 2, The Basic Questions
For the last two years, until about a month ago, I wasn’t getting more than 4-5 hours of sleep a night—sometimes as little as 1-3.
I want to share what I learned over these years, to help others.
Chronic insomnia is hard to remedy, because the longer it goes on, the worse a person’s mental, physical, emotional, and sleep health get.
However, with long nights still ahead, I think now is a great time to focus on sleep.
When I started writing this, I realized that sleep is so fundamental to life it would be better to break it up into a few parts.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting several more times about sleep.
What follows is an overview.
The future writings will be more practical, including minerals, flavors, and resources for sleeping longer and more restfully.
Resting well is about resilience
In examining the world and health, Hildegaard von Bingen coined two latin root terms: Viriditas and Ariditas. Meaning, respectively: green truth, and arid (or dry) truth.
These terms point at fundamental expressions—of ease and difficulty, dark and light, hot and cold—that make up life. But they also add a textural element that I find profound.
Life is complicated and unpredictable.
Therefore, being able to rest at night is partly about how resilient the homeostatic, or self balancing, processes of your body are. In other words, the balance between Yin (sleeping) and Yang (waking), or in Hildegaard’s terms, Dryness and Moisture.
How are you responding to your life?
Consider your body a landscape
The homeostatic balance within each person is, ideally, governed by ourselves.
There are many outside factors, though, that block, modify, and degrade homeostasis.
The broader climate on earth at the moment is a good example of a homeostatic process in a process of disruption. That’s why there are vast movements (catastrophic storms and drought). It’s the process attempting to regulate.
Inside of us, the hub our homeostatic processes cycle around is known as the circadian rhythm.
Rest and activity are inputs that drives the momentum of this cycle.
So that’s why the first question when addressing sleep or other chronic issues, is to look deeply at how you are responding to your own life.
This takes the blame off of external circumstances, and allows one to feel empowered.
After all, who is responsible for regulating us, apart from ourselves?
In the next few articles, I’ll offer ideas about how to better regulate our homeostatic systems.
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Thanks for reading.