Imbolc Valentine Moon
Going to sleep. Staying asleep. The first is easier than the second for me. Kate, a survivor of medical school residency, has some ideas that she’s shared with me. Paying attention to my breathing was one. This meshes, of course, with meditation and a gestalt psychology approach, experiencing all the sensations of your body. I’d never applied it trying to sleep and it does help.
The monkey mind is strong though. After a while my mind grabs onto the words I’m using to pay attention to my breathing, begins to run somewhere with them. Look. A banana! Even so, breathing helps even if not all the time.
A second idea involves counting. You know, sheep. Backwards from a thousand. That sort of thing. My own take on this is to repeat 1,2,3,4 and 5,6,7,8 over and over. Now, by the time I get to 4, I get a yawn. But the monkey is still active, still hunting for the banana that sneaks around this dulling.
So, the third idea. Go to your happy place. Oddly, this was harder than I imagined it would be. Where was my happy place? As I’ve written before, happiness is not my goal, rather flourishing (eudaimonia). So that idyllic spot where trees and sunlight and grass come together to create a place of rest and contentment? Doesn’t work for me.
Took a while but eventually I hit on the Minneapolis Institute of Art (not Mia). At the MIA there was a sweet spot of intellectual and emotional and social stimulation. I felt good there. Stimulated and stimulating. Giving and receiving. So during my counting I now go on regular journeys to the MIA. I was there so long as a volunteer, 12 years, that I remember the building and its contents, as they were four years ago anyhow, very well.
It’s taken me a while to get the monkey to let go of art history-lots of bananas!-and allow me to just be in the presence of the art qua art. That’s not to say that art history doesn’t inform me even in this attempt to go to sleep; it does, but I don’t follow those thoughts anymore, at least not while trying to sleep. Next post: a tour from these trips.
