Sleep-Suffering

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I'm 2.5 years into my Buddhist practices and I reasonably have a good proportion of my day spent in mindfulness. This is one of those really unconscious skills where you never quite feel it improving, until you feel it in action.

For example, suppose you're learning how to ride the bike. You kinda get a sense of how much you're improving by measuring the distance you go before falling or how far you go with each bike pedal stride. When you're training jiujitsu you can feel your body moving more smoothly as your mobility improves with time.

But when it comes to mindfulness, how the heck do you measure progress (also, measuring progress already implies that you're engaging practice from a transactional angle) ? You don't look at the time during meditation so you can't really measure how long you stay in focus, nor is that a reliable indicator of progress in mindfulness.

You can sorta measure progress by the amount of time you can sit in one meditation. Unfortunately after a certain amount of time (40 minutes-ish), it devolves into an insistence on time and becomes less about the practice.

Then you have one of those days where you JUST notice out of the blue, "hey, I'm somewhat disturbed right now". Even if it wasn't full-blown rage, even if it was just a minor turbulence from the calmness you feel from meditation, you just feel it. With this great new ability, you get to choose: do I continue to let myself be this way, or do I shift my focus?

At first it was a lot harder than I thought to shift my focus. But after years of practice it became quite trivial. When I'm awake, I can do so many different things when my karma arises.

My wife reacts in a way that invokes my karma? I can go take a walk. My dog barks disrupting my Zoom call? I can close the door. I can let things just be and continue to be in peace.

Then I encountered a fresh humbling experience that prompted me to write about this today: what about when I'm asleep?

There is a Korean monk, Ven. Hyekuk, who is one of the most elder figures in Korean Seon Buddhism in modern times. He talks about an interesting state of mind called "O-Mae-Il-Yeo", which is the state of being mindful while asleep.

This monk is, like many Korean Seon monks, super hardcore. He found himself unsatisfied with his practice and cut off three of his fingers as a vow to attain Buddhahood. He practiced in the mountains without lying down, eating only raw food for years. And even he says he did not arrive at o-mae-il-yeo.

In his dharma talks he frequently talks about his frustrations with sleep. I'm not telling you this so you'll be discouraged, the point is that sleep is a tough topic even for seasoned monks.

Now back to me, I'm having some life circumstances where I find myself experiencing some stress. One of the reasons I can't quite talk about yet, but another reason is I'm competing in jiujitsu next month in a pretty intense competition.

One of the reasons why I'm competing this time is because I didn't like how I ended my competition last time. I passed out AFTER my match due to stress and I don't think that's how I want my competition history to be over.

All of that was before I practiced mindfulness. So now I catch myself unconsciously slipping into worrying about competition performance every once in a while, but I can always redirect my focus on the training I can do today instead of worrying about opponents I know nothing about, making them more and more formidable inside my imaginations.

But what about at night, when I wake up because of stress that surfaces up unconsciously? These worries combined with my other stressor just keeps me going in a cycle. Ok, so I try meditating mid-sleep, focusing on my breath. This works as long as I'm semi-conscious, but when I fall asleep... The unconscious wakes me up again.

I know once I wake up I'm going to be fine, which makes things a bit more annoying. It's this 3-4 hour window that I have to continue navigating in a semi-conscious state. Once it's 5AM and I start my practice, I'll be able to focus on the practice and have a go at another day.

Then I remembered something: I actually went through this entire process once. Early in my practice days I had a problem waking up at 5AM and I kept on lingering on my bed, just browsing through my phone or hitting the snooze button.

I decided to put an end to this by making a pact with myself: For every minute I stay in bed, I do 1 more bow. So 30 minutes of lingering means 138 bows for that morning. I was pretty earnest with this, and one day I overslept for 2 hours.

120 more bows later I never even considered oversleeping ever again. My unconscious had learned its lesson because I followed through on myself.

Remembering this, I thought to myself: The next time I wake up from stress, I'm going to go to my room and start bowing. That's the last thing I remember before waking up from a good stretch of sleep at 5AM.

Start practicing Buddhism with my Practice App, it has a built-in bow counter along with a meditation timer. Next time you wake up with a stressed mind, this is the perfect tool for you to wake up from the nightmare of suffering; way better than coffee.

Billy Seol

July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com