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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.

Built to Last

Written by Ann Zimmerman on . Posted in Spirituality, Stress and Fatigue, Zimmerman Articles.

by Clark Zimmerman, LAc.

One of my best friends from college used to have a Volkswagen bus.  He would spend hours tinkering with his engine in the driveway of the house we rented with some friends.  He wasn’t an expert mechanic, but he found great joy in figuring things out.  It was a sort of puzzle that led to a lot of satisfaction when he got his van working just right.  There were a lot of amateur mechanics in the neighborhood who liked to tinker on weekends.  Most of the cars were older, simpler rides.  They were quite different from the complex, computer centered vehicles of today.  They were made to be worked on by regular folks, who had a little training and a willingness to fumble through the process. As technology has advanced, it has become more difficult to work on cars.  Gone are the days when most vehicles were serviceable without a lot of expensive diagnostic machines and specialized parts. While the vehicles of today can offer more comfort and bells and whistles, I feel that we have lost something as we have made the move away from the automotive simplicity of the past.  

In a way, it is similar to the idea of planned obsolescence.  This is the idea that things are purposely built to break or age quickly out of their usefulness.  Companies use planned obsolescence as a way to ensure that customers are required to purchase new items sooner.  If a product wears out more quickly, customers need to replace items more often, generating more business and profits.  The corporations and their shareholders benefit, while the consumers and the environment pay the cost.  It can feel so frustrating when you want to fix something that has broken, only to find that no one makes replacement parts.  I experienced this last month when I tried to replace a lightbulb in an outdoor light at my office.  I was looking for a way to open the fixture, but was confused to find that there was no way in.  It turns out, the fixture itself is disposable.  When the LED light inside burns out, you must replace the entire plastic fixture. 

This approach seems to be spilling into our collective beliefs about many things.  While we used to value consistency and serviceability, we now increasingly have become a society that builds things to be disposable.  We use things for a while and then replace them with the newest model.  This is true with cars and appliances, as well as with relationships and work.  It used to be more common to stay in the same community for much of life, to maintain lasting friendships, to stay with a job for many years, and to nurture lasting marriages or partnerships.  All of these have become less common over time.  Just as it is increasingly common for people to throw away things when they no longer work the way that they would like, we have grown more accustomed to casting off relationships when things become challenging.  When we place less value on the longevity of things, we tend to also see less value in working the process to maintain and improve our connections with other people.  The truth is, many parts of this human experience take a lot of work.  We want things to feel easy and remarkable; to be in a perpetual honeymoon stage.  One thing that is certain in life is that things need tending to.  They go awry and need mending.  The more we believe otherwise, the more likely we are to toss things out, or turn away when we are met with resistance or challenge.  

My friend eventually got rid of his old VW. He grew tired of spending his days off searching for parts that were increasingly harder to find.  He replaced it with a used truck that he kept for a few hundred thousand more miles.  To this day, he continues to value things that are built to last.  I suppose that is why we are still friends after all of these years.