Why You Can't Sleep During a Spiritual Awakening (5 Reasons)

A lot of people have trouble sleeping during an awakening process. Trouble falling asleep, and trouble with sleep in general. There are several reasons for it, and once you see them, most of them are workable.

1. The nervous system is adjusting

Your nervous system is getting used to this awakening state, and that goes progressively deeper over time. Every time you let something go, every time there is a shift or a big realization, the whole system has to adjust to it. For some people that is harder than for others.

2. The process takes whatever space you leave it

This is the one most people miss, and in my experience it is the biggest factor.

Look at how much you are pushing yourself during the day. If you are constantly bombarding yourself with to-dos and shoulds and musts, and with input, podcasts on the train, audiobooks on the way to work, no silence, no meditation, just work, then one of two things happens.

Either you cannot really function at work, because the awakening process takes the space available there. Or, if your schedule is genuinely full, the nervous system work that needs to happen takes the space you do have. And that space is the night.

This process is a physical transformation, and it physically demands that you look at it and be with it. If you do not take time to process the insights, the energies, and the emotions that come up, then the night is the first place where you wind down enough for all of it to surface. That is a very common reason for lying awake.

3. A lot of processing happens in dreams

Much of the work happens in the dream state. Dreams have different meanings, not always, but often during awakening you notice certain themes returning again and again. Those are usually themes for you to process and look at. Clues left for you.

4. Restlessness with nowhere to go

We carry an enormous amount of restlessness, almost a cultural restlessness. And when you numb it, with television or with your phone, it cannot live out its full course.

This is sharper if you are not moving much. The body wants to move. And when you become more sensitive through the awakening process while sitting still most of the day, the body will display that restlessness, often exactly when you are trying to sleep.

5. Lack of grounding

Your nervous system does not feel safe. If you want it to feel safe, grounding is, in my opinion, the number one thing to do. The second is to look at why you do not feel safe, which matters just as much but takes longer.

And then there is the analyzing

One more reason people cannot sleep is that they are trying to analyze all of it. The mind is looking for a way to understand what is happening, and that is where a great deal of the searching comes from: the videos, the books, and the endless turning it over in your head.

Part of that is useful. But you cannot fully understand this, because awakening is about freeing yourself from the mind. The mind, with its concepts, is limiting reality at all points. You can still use it as a tool, as long as you understand that it cannot hold reality. It is something arising within reality, which means it is always smaller than what reality actually is.

Trying to analyze yourself, your patterns, your awakening, someone else, or a situation is very tiring. It keeps the mind busy, which keeps your energy busy, which makes it very hard to relax.

What actually helps

Add real restfulness. Not television or your phone, but grounding exercises, meditation, and walks, ideally in nature.

Add movement. I exercise four times a week, and for me that has been significant. Honestly, daily makes sense, because the body is simply not built for sitting on a chair.

And stop trying to analyze it so much. What surrender actually is, is letting go of the mind. That is what lets you step into this freedom: surrendering your thoughts, surrendering your movement.

In the twelve step programs there is a stage where you acknowledge a higher power, whatever you want to call it. It is about trusting something bigger that you are part of. Which is exactly what you discover in this process anyway: that you are part of this, and always have been. That you are the big self, not the small self.

If you are looking for the grounding practices, I made a list of ten that I find genuinely effective. They are in the free stabilizing awakening guide: fromdoingtobeing.org/stabilizingawakening