I have been thinking about sleep and how the amount and type of sleep we get impacts and affects our level of wellness and what role sleep plays in intuition. To state what is obvious to many of you, most Americans are sleep deprived or do not sleep well. Good, sound sleep that allows for dreaming is one of the key taproots to building and living a healthier life. Good sleep gives us more “space” for our lives. Let me explain.
Of course sleep allows our bodies to physically recover. Dreaming which is apparently on average of two hours a night is also important. While there are many functional theories regarding dreaming, what is perhaps most important for wellness is how dreaming allows our minds to make deeper sense of the events of the day and fit them in a larger realm. I noticed when I was not sleeping enough a few years ago, I did not dream or I had no easily recalled memory of the content of my dreams. And more importantly I did not feel as well. Sleep and dreaming help immensely to balance our lives by integrating our emotions with our physiological processes thus jettisoning the junk and help us to connect to our deeper selves and therefore more fully into that place where the good, the true, and the beautiful infinitely lives. Think of this balancing like what is necessary and what happens when we are carrying a dish of water and we are trying to not spill it. The individual ripples are the emotions, thoughts and behaviors that affect the whole dish which is the infinite world of sleep and dreaming and the energy and movement of this whole amount of water effects the structure and size of the ripples and “absorbs” their information and energy.
What does this have to do with intuition? Well, the ability to notice, listen to and honor our intuitions play a very important role in making sense of our lives and being able to consistently make healthy choices. If we have not slept well, we are more easily agitated and cannot think clearly the next day. We have to spend more of our precious daily allotment of energy managing yesterdays events. We are less likely to see and experience the abundance in the here and now and are more easily swayed to choose unhealthy foods or forgo our exercise for the day. In fact my intuition is telling me I need to get a bit more sleep this morning or those cookies from the kids party yesterday will look like breakfast!
