Restful Sleep Archives

I can’t sleep, I just toss and turn for hours” is such a common complaint in my office these days. Thirty five years ago, when I began my private practice, I was working in New York City, and seeing a lot of people in high stress jobs. But curiously, people slept OK. Now I work in a peaceful rural setting in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and insomnia or other sleep disturbances are disturbingly common. What’s happening?

STRESS! That’s what’s happening. We live with a level of chronic, unremitting stress that our bodies were never designed for, and we are paying the price with stressed adrenals and elevated cortisol levels that keep us wakeful when we should be sleepy. Stress hormones were supposed to be released when the proverbial tiger was jumping out of the tree to eat us, not when we sit in traffic, worry about the economy or stress about our work, relationships or the state of the environment. Now, so many of us have constantly elevated stress hormones, and that is a real problem (for many reasons!) but especially when it’s time to wind down and relax for sleep.

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Guided meditation is a process by which a guide or teacher leads you into meditation. An effective teacher can teach you a simple pathway to a meditative state, as well as help you experience being in that state. Once you have experienced what it feels like to be in the natural state of meditation, and learned the path to it, it is easy for you to take yourself there.Meditation shouldn’t be hard, it’s a natural state for humans. But a lot of people become frustrated and discouraged trying to learn meditation on their own. It may be because they are using techniques that just aren’t right for them, and/or have inadequate guidance. Being guided into the experience of a meditative state, with a guided meditation CD or mp3 is an easy way to eliminate those problems.

Meditation is, most simply, the process of re-connecting our mind, emotions, and body with our spirit. The basic purpose of meditation is to bring us back to our center, where we are in communication with our higher/deeper/inner self, and with spirit. There are many ways to meditate, and cultures all over the world have used meditation in many different forms- sitting, walking, movement. There is no single right way to meditate; we each need to find the form that works best for us.

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Tossing and turning…

what is guided meditation?