Sleeping it off

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms 2022

Lately, I have found myself reacting in outsized ways to small trigger-points. Slight discomforts remind me of bigger things in the past, leading to mood swings that feel more like rapid, aggressive, destabilizing spikes than the big but more comfortable waves of ups and downs I am used to.

I know, because I am over half a century old, that it’s ok, even necessary, to have feelings, to express them, and to feel into the information they provide. And yet I am exhausted.

On some days, I just long for bed. Not so much because I am tired, but because sleeping has always been an effective buffer for me. When my first husband went incommunicado for 24 hours during the 1997 Sierra Leone coup, I went to bed and slept through some of the worst hours of worry. When I waited for the results of essential health checks, I slept on-and-off for days. In short: sleeping has always been a good way for me to avoid conscious thought.

This week, as I returned to my daily meditation practice after a month’s hiatus, it felt surprisingly comfortable to be in the calm of my body while allowing conscious thoughts to just pass through. I breathed more deeply than I had for weeks. I felt clearheaded and almost resolved.

This body, I thought, which I have not always treated with gratitude and gracefulness, which I have sometimes derided and even deeply disliked, which I have mistreated and ignored. This body has a 100% success rate of getting me through challenging times. Whether through sleeping or breathing deeply or just carrying me, literally, from one thing to another while everything changes, again, constantly, always. This body, I can trust.

And so I sit.