Sleepiness

I wish someone would write a book about the role of sleepiness in a meditation practice. Sleepiness is usually explained as an extreme manifestation of the hindrance, "sloth and torpor". Commonly recommended strategies for dealing with sleepiness include "raising one's energy" (how the heck does one do that?), exercising before meditating, opening the eyes slightly for a while, standing for a while, redoubling efforts to observe the meditation object, abandoning the desire to sleep, and investigating the experience of sleepiness. Sometimes a nap is recommended, but usually the advice is that if one has had enough nighttime sleep, a nap is not called for.

I have tried all these strategies to little avail. Standing does help make it easier to stay awake, but it's usually pretty unpleasant and the meditation done in this state doesn't seem to be of good quality (though I could well be wrong about this). I use standing as a strategy for toughing out the remainder of the sitting period when I am meditating in a group. I have taken lots of naps, guiltily, because I usually have had enough nighttime sleep. I've found that a 20-30 minute nap will usually allow me to stay awake for another few hours, but waking myself up after that short a period can be painful. If I let myself nap as long as I wish, the nap will commonly last for 1.5 to 3.5 hours, and I've done that as well on many an occasion.

After my retreat at Forest Refuge, a fellow retreatant shared that the first time he entered the very deep first jhana taught by Pa Auk Sayadaw, it was during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. He posited (and I hope I'm recalling this correctly) that it was the relaxation of this state that allowed jhana.

Indeed, this reminded me of some experiences I'd had on that same retreat, when I chose not to fight sleepiness in the meditation hall, but just to allow myself to slip in and out of sleep while sitting. I found that sometimes, when I did this, I seemed to rotate among three mental states: sleep, jhana, and access concentration. In my case, what I called "jhana" was not the full absorption taught by the Sayadaw, but some lesser state of absorption.

Over the two months since I emerged from this retreat, my ability to use sleepiness, rather than fight it, has developed. I'm not sure whether this is a result of a conscious change of attitude, or whether it's some other change that's happened on its own. But over the past few weeks, sleepiness just has not been a problem for me in meditation. First, I have not gotten sleepy during my early morning meditations at all since I emerged from retreat, whereas during the last half of the retreat, I'd usually get sleepy if I did the 4:30 a.m. sitting. Second, when I do get sleepy during meditation, usually in the afternoon or evening, I actually welcome it, because somehow I don't feel the need to struggle with it anymore, and it does allow my analytic mind to settle down easily. I am then more able to observe the ever-changing nature of things, presumably because my conscious mind isn't constantly grasping at them.

One of my fellow retreatants used to spend most of the day in an easy chair in the library. She appeard to be dozing. I pitied her, figuring that she was not able to get anything out of the retreat and was just trying to pass the time. I considered writing a note to our teachers alerting them to her plight and urging them to talk to her about whether she might be better off going home. But I figured that possibly her home life was even worse and that she was staying on retreat to escape. Better not to interfere, I thought. One day during the last week I gave her a chocolate bar to help her feel less alone.

To my surprise, at retreat's end I learned that this woman was actually meditating very effectively in that easy chair, and that she had apparently made steady progress under Sayadaw's direction!

So much for the importance of sitting in an alert posture. Perhaps an alert posture is important for beginners, but perhaps once one has developed a certain level of concentration, it can be fine, or even better, to adopt a relaxed posture, and perhaps to allow in some sleepiness.