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Sleep Walking

Written by Ann Zimmerman on . Posted in Chinese Medicine, Mental and Emotional Health, Spirituality.

by Clark Zimmerman, LAc.

I have a ritual of sneaking into my daughter’s room before I settle into bed for the night.  I make sure the covers are just right, give her a kiss on the cheek and say a little prayer for sweet dreams. For a long time, she would coo and roll over, continuing on her dream time journeys. The past few months though, she has roused from slumber when I kiss her, and she begins speaking a sort of incoherent drivel, or shares a little snippet of a dream. Often times she sits up in a state of confusion and starts moving around, looking for something to pull her back into the gentle spell of sleep.  On the most amusing nights, she walks out into the family room before the good-night kiss and starts telling mom and I jumbled stories of far-away lands. When this phase began, we didn’t realize she was still sleeping, so we tried to follow her logic. We soon figured out that she was walking and talking in her sleep.  This is the nature of being asleep: Sometimes it is deep and restful; other moments it is fitful and unsettled.  

Dreams can seem so realistic. We can believe that we are awake and conscious, but oftentimes this is a trick of the mind. We can notice this when we are in the middle of a powerful, convincing dream, such as a dream where we are falling. The experience can seem so real that we feel it in the pit of our stomach, like we are riding a roller coaster. Even though it is not happening, the mind and body can believe that the dream is real.  When we sleepwalk, we are acting out a dream. In Chinese medicine, we say that when we sleepwalk, the soul becomes unrooted in the body, and the body moves on its own without the oversight of conscious awareness.  

When we are asleep and dreaming, we often don’t realize that we are asleep until we awaken.  We all have likely experienced the relief when we wake up from a nightmare, with our heart racing, and realize that we were asleep.  In many spiritual traditions, they describe an unaware person as being asleep.  We may think that we are awake and in control, but so many parts of us may not be conscious. We mistakenly believe that we are our thoughts and emotions, our desires and our pain.  We may even believe things that may be absolutely untrue. We fall into a world of illusion that seems so real that it affects every part of our experience.

The world’s problems are, by and large, human problems-the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well.

Adyashanti

Like my daughter speaking nonsense, or looking around in confusion when she is half asleep, we all can fall into a place where we are not present. We can become so caught up in the illusions of the mind that we react to situations, rather than living in the moment with clear perception and intention. This is usually when we get into trouble. We say things or make decisions we later regret. This is why it is so important to practice waking up. Like a fish that doesn’t realize it is swimming until it is out of the water, we often don’t notice that we are unconscious until we begin to wake up. The practice of meditation and contemplation are transformative tools that show us where we may be unconscious and reacting to life. Just as we exercise our bodies and sharpen our memory, we must hone our ability to become more aware.

Lately, I have taken to blowing my sleeping daughter a kiss goodnight from her bedroom door so as not to wake her up. I let her move through her dreams uninterrupted. Then in the daytime, we work on becoming more fully awake. For the nighttime is for sleeping and the waking hours are for waking up and living a present life.

Room to Grow

Written by Ann Zimmerman on . Posted in Acupuncture, Chinese Medicine, General Health, Mental and Emotional Health, Spirituality.

By Clark Zimmerman, LAc. 

I have a lot of dirt under my fingernails these days. This happens every spring, once the winter darkness gives way to the longer days, and the garden begins to awaken. My wife and I spend lot of time in the spring getting the garden beds ready. We weed, trim, spread compost, mulch, and make sure the irrigation is ready for the coming heat.  Once things begin to be a little more orderly, it is time to sow the seeds. Anytime someone tells me that they don’t believe in magic, I tell them to go and plant a garden. There is something about the alchemy of watching the sun, soil and water turn seeds into food, flowers and medicine. 

This weekend I thinned the radishes and lettuces that we seeded a few weeks ago. It feels a bit strange to pull perfectly healthy plants before they have grown, but it is an essential part of gardening. In the Taoist theory of the five elements, springtime is the season of the wood element.  Wood exemplifies the energy of visions and planning.  Like the information contained in a seed, the wood element has a blueprint inside: A vision of how an idea can grow and develop.  While the fall and winter are the seasons to prune the dead wood, the clutter in the closets, springtime reminds us of the importance of thinning the things that are still full of life and possibility. It is hard to thin things that feel relevant and alive.  We tend to have an easier time expanding than we do downsizing.  Culturally we seem value a wealth of experiences, more than space.  This is why so many of us tend to be overcommitted.  However, when we commit to too many things, no matter how wonderful the things may seem, we restrict the space for things to grow and thrive.  My lettuces seedlings all looked so eager to grow; so full of life, yet if they are all left to grow, they begin to crowd each other out. They compete for the water, the sun and nutrients.  This overcrowding guarantees that none of them will truly thrive.

Spring is the time to consider what ideas we want to nourish and what visions we want to tend to; what commitments we can entertain.  It is also the time to decide which plans we should thin out.  When we get overextended, even with wonderful and interesting things, we typically can’t give things the attention and resources that they need to really grow.  Like the seedlings in my garden, the longer we hold onto things, the tougher they become to thin.  The same is true of spring for humans.  It is important to consider what things we want to “plant” for our busy season, and then to thin the things that make our days feel overcrowded.  Thinning our lives involves some honest reflection.   We need to consider how much care we can truly give a thing.  

“Too much of a good thing is not a good thing.”

This is the challenge with opportunity and abundance.  It is tempting to say yes to every good thing that crosses our path, but doing this typically leads to overwhelm and exhaustion.  Before spring turns to summer, it is a great time to honestly consider what visions and plans you truly have time for, and to thin the rest.  When we consider the lesson of the garden, that things do best when we allow for some room to grow.

Cracks in the Earth

Written by Ann Zimmerman on . Posted in Chinese Medicine, Spirituality, Stress and Fatigue, Uncategorized.

by Clark Zimmerman, LAc.

Years ago while traveling in Tibet, I was amazed by the dryness of the climate.  Though the mountains were covered with snow, and the rivers were raging torrents, the ground was largely a dusty wasteland.  There were sporadic fields, where the people grew barley, but much of the land reminded me of stories I had heard about the great dustbowl from the 1930’s. Growing up in the Midwest, I was a stranger to dry air.  The humidity  was so dense that it seems to saturate the skin and soak the spaces inside your bones.  There was a general heaviness in the summer air that felt oppressive at times.  

When life dries out, things begin to harden.  Leaves and stems become brittle; the ground mimics concrete.  In my 17 years in southern Oregon, I have begun to grow accustomed to the cyclical drying out of the land in summer.  What winter and spring have given, summer takes away.  Things grow in the summer, but there is a sense that everything is living on borrowed time.  As the season progresses, the ground loses its give and hardens into a protective shell.  This has a way of locking in the moisture that the ground still holds, but it comes at a cost.  Not only does the hardness in the soil keep some of the water in, it also prevents water from soaking into the ground when a big rain comes.  If you look at the ground when the first big storm comes in the late summer or early fall, you are likely to see a lot of the water running off into the creeks and rivers, instead of down into the earth.  It usually takes a bit of consistent precipitation to loosen up the ground so it can receive the water. 

With the ongoing drought in the west, I have noticed that the ground doesn’t just harden in the summer anymore, it has increasingly begun to crack.  It more closely resembles a desert than the forest floor that I am used to in western Oregon.  There is a sadness that I notice when I think of how much things are drying out, but I am also reminded of one of life’s truths:  When things are pushed to a breaking point, new opportunities arise.  The cracks in the soil allow the healing waters to more easily enter the soil, so not as much runs to the streams.  I witnessed this during the rain we had last week.  The soil had become so dry that it had broken open….it was ready to receive.  

It reminds me of how the past couple of years have broken most of us open.  We keep bending, withstanding, until we tend to harden up to minimize any further pain.  Yet, life has continued to push us even farther.  Most of us feel that we have been pushed beyond our limits.  The hardness of our shells has begun to crack, just as the dry ground beneath our feet has opened.  This splitting apart has created more space to receive life’s grace.

“The wound is where the light enters you.”

–Rumi

The poet Rumi knew this truth.  That often we must completely crack open to heal.  We must truly fall apart to know authentic wholeness.  As I continue to do my healing work in the community, I am struck by the immensity of the suffering that have all endured the past couple of years.  I am also in awe of how that suffering can lead to profound change and acceptance.  People are still struggling, but new shoots of growth and understanding are sprouting.  We are coming back to find what is really important, what truly matters.  All we have to do is be willing to let life continue to crack us open and to have the faith that it is leading us somewhere better than we can imagine.  Then the light will enter our lives and illuminate our souls; the rain will nourish and soften our weary bodies.

Be well.