Dishes done with love do not keep us awake. Tea without caffeine is not a cause. Cooking lovingly will soothe us ready for sleep and time spent working before bed on things poetic or artistic don not keep us awake. What we do with love makes us sleep deeper no matter the importance of it.

Sleep is sometimes disturbed by activity but only if it strains the body and stimulates the metabolism late in the day. Then, we wake up the body and then ask it to sleep.

Overfeeding the body with alcohol or food that takes long to digest will provide energy for the body when the body needs recovery fuel. This can make the imbalance between what we want in sleep and what we get in active thinking at night.

Obsessing with sleep can be a problem. The anxiety that comes from not sleeping can keep us awake. Nature gives us both sleep and the lack of it. When there is awake time while the rest of the world is asleep it is a time to write, to generate thoughts, to express the mind onto paper or computer so that those ramblings can be deciphered in the morning. A restless mind has unfinished business, some of which is worry but often inspirations arriving while all is still at night. Don’t be afraid of night work. It is often a joy for me to wake at 1am and write an amazing gift for my readers such as this one, and feel happy that I would rather be engaged in inspiring thoughts than sleeping to a military schedule. That is not my nature either.

But a restless night can be prevented on the greatest part by being at peace at night. This is not always a consideration when the appetites of the stomach, greed, sex and spirituality feel unfulfilled.

For that reason it is wise to resolve each appetite one by one.

The stomach will eat to its own death. expand daily to be fed more. Therefore we must learn satisfaction of the stomach by eating no more than the size of our own closed fist at any meal. This includes liquids. For this to nourish a sports person or labourer, there can be the need for 5 or 6 meals a day spaced hours apart. A glass of smoothy can often be more than this fistful we speak about here. Otherwise the stomach expands and never achieves satisfaction.

The greed appetite is severe and most damaging of sleep. Greed looks at the day gone by with disdain and worries that the abundance of the future will not be adequate. Like the stomach appetite the greed appetite can become an insatiable one when, the more we feed it, the more it needs to fill it. The solution to this angry greed view to satisfy its appetite is most often the argument with oneself, a quarrel as it were, between what didn’t happen that can ripen the appetite of dissatisfaction and what did happen that can satisfy it. The exact same goes for the view of tomorrow, in the argument within us between what might be unenjoyable and what might be enjoyable. When satisfaction is achieve is when the day just lived and days before it are seen as a balance of accomplishments and there is a thankfulness for it. Then there comes the notion of the future, and in this, it is not so easy to trust the unknown as it is to measure the past. Blind faith is the mind of the ignorant and foolish and therefore trust in the future is somewhat of an individual view, however, there are five things one can trust without blind faith, and they are Universal laws. Unchangeable and guaranteed to be the controlling force of every human who has existed and will exist. We cannot be separated from those, and in those laws there is a ruling, nothing bad can happen without something good. Nothing will ever be missing, it just may be in form your need to transform. With this wisdom, your mind can rest in a trust for the future based on certainty. In this it will come to peace and satisfy the greed appetite nightly.

The sexual appetite is far less subtle than the others. To a youth it is masturbation and this can bring about sleep at any age. Sexuality is physicalised in orgasm and satisfaction but to the mature individual there is a more subtle version of this appetite to experience its more purposeful essence, love and intimacy to label a few. One’s self seeks validation and in orgasm, alone or with other there is a satisfaction of this. But it is easily adapted to and soon can lose its deeper experience with one partner or ones own hand. We seek, in the sexual appetite the satisfaction of release, letting go of our ego and a moment of true validation, we want to feel, in the satisfaction of sexuality, alive. But the power of the source of this aliveness, placed in the heart or mind or body of a lover, soon wears down. After all, they are human and, attraction requires an element of fantasy about another person. A validator must be a champion of something in our eyes otherwise, the sexual appetite with them, be it simply connection or more physical sex, will die. It is therefore the bitter end to realise at night before sleep that the validation we seek, the feeling of being alive and worthy of it, must come from ourselves. This is ultimately to say “I want what I’ve got” and “I’m a lucky FKR.” the test of all this at night is the smile that will come to your face as you hold your pillow under your head and feel blessed just to be alive. This is the ultimate sexual appetite satisfaction. And it can, if one practices it, never be disrupted by the dependency on the approval of others.

The spiritual appetite is by far the most influential in the depth of sleep, even it, it has little to do with the length of it. Surrender is the sexual appetite’s only satisfaction. But we hold. We hold hopes and wishes, and material ambitions and worry and fears we might not be good enough, or earn enough and so, we block the spiritual appetite satisfaction and try to fill it with myths and Netflix and books. At night, in sleep, the physical ego closes and our spiritual nature wakes. During sleep we are actually awake, exploring the universe, recovering the body, reconnecting to soul. This nourishment is like a fuel pump into the deeper nature of subtle energies of the body. It heals. But we must surrender to the spiritual aspects of life and let go controls in order for this to be satisfied. We mustt therefore die each night to the physical world and be born into the spiritual. Our fears of death, of letting go, of powerlessness prevent it and therefore, for many, keep us awake while asleep. Our mind is active, we think, instead of die. Mostly this thinking takes the form of envy. Wishing we were somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else, instead of contentment that this bed, this pillow, this circumstance, this life is ours and we die happy with what we have, we want it this way and no other. Feeling surrender to the universal forces is the satisfaction of this appetite at night.

CONCLUSION

I am not there to see what disturbs your mind to disrupt your sleep nor witness if a stimulant stayed with your body past bedtime, But if I could make you feel warmed in your heart, a peace, thankful and safe, you would sleep deeply every day..

When the night wakes you, it calls you to get up and write. So don’t be angry that you lose sleep. If a child wakes you, be thankful that the child has a message in the silence of the night for you.

If you wake and have an early start in the morning, know that a loving sleep no matter how short, with the appetites satisfied truly, is far better than a long sleep done shallow due to the appetites seeking satisfaction in all the wrong places.

With Spirit

Chris