The Spiritual Lessons of My Insomnia Recovery Journey
- restedandfree
- May 11
- 10 min read
Author’s Note:
This article appears to be about insomnia and recovering from it. It is. But as you read, you will find that insomnia recovery is just an excuse to talk about your mind and its relationship with whatever arises. This relationship - the gap between stimulus and response - is where the choice for suffering or peace is made.
I believe this article will help you understand this truth and become more aware of this gap. After you read it, the next time something arises that you’ve been making into your enemy, you might find that you pause, reconsider, and shift your response.
Every time you do this, you are deepening your peace, liberating it from dependence on outcomes.
Come and enjoy a journey into the deep wisdom within you.
May this article and its accompanying video benefit you greatly 🙏
Can insomnia be a gate to liberation?
When the student is ready, insomnia arrives.
Well, at least in my case.
Insomnia was something I’d struggled with for over 3 decades. For those 3 decades, sleep was either never refreshing or simply scarce, especially whenever there was any change in my sleep conditions.
In the 3rd decade, the situation became more severe. Eventually, I became reliant on edibles for years.
Then, they stopped working.
How was I going to sleep now?
The doc prescribed meds. One by one, I tried them all. My fear grew into terror as every medication and every combination failed. Hopelessness and helplessness began taking over: I can’t sleep, nothing I do helps, living like this is excruciating, and the only possibility I can see is that, as this becomes more and more intolerable, I will slowly and painfully wither away; insomnia will eventually kill me.
I was surprised by the fact that I was surviving as well as I was - and even somewhat functioning - on so little sleep. But not only was the physical struggle intense with all the fatigue and pain, but the mental struggle too. The fear. The isolation. Not a single person around who understands what you’re going through. Being conscious for nearly 24 hours every single day, and specifically conscious of struggle, fear, and deep discomfort. Everything feeling wrong and out of place. Being treated every day like everything is normal when you are in the midst of the greatest battle of your life.
All that I’d learned from spirituality through the years had helped me place insomnia in perspective: it was just a passing experience, like all experiences are; the underlying Being that I am wasn’t dying, not even suffering.
But even this didn’t help improve the situation!
No amount of seeing that I am not the body or that this is just an experience my soul is having, ultimately inconsequential in the soul’s bigger picture, moved the needle.
The master, insomnia, had a different plan in mind, and that plan did not include any form of withdrawal, detachment, or escape.
Insomnia teaches embodiment.
If you attempt to minimize the fear, you’re just delaying. The only way out is through the fear. But to journey through it, one must be equipped with a very important piece of information, and one that is difficult to find in a world so grossly misinformed about sleep: Fear was the nervous system’s response to the perceived threat of wakefulness (not sleeping).
Despite what you learned from the medical field, wakefulness is not inherently dangerous. I’m aware this goes against the collective consensus, and that’s what it takes to overcome insomnia. A big part of the recovery is reeducation, and I was fortunate enough to come across a former sleep-physician-turned-sleep-coach, Daniel Erichsen, to learn that I wasn’t in real danger. What was happening in my body was almost entirely a reflection of what was happening in my mind.
My suffering was not purely a result of sleeplessness, but my response to it.
This is why you often hear me say that most of our diseases, particularly chronic ones, originate in the mind, not the body, and are maintained by vicious loops of resistance to what’s arising, which perpetuate anxiety, fear, and mental and emotional pressure.
Once something is perceived as a threat when it isn’t one, and there is an attempt to avoid it, that avoidance actually sustains it. (This is why exposure therapies have great value.) For example, chronic fatigue is largely sustained by the very desire to avoid the fatigue rather than allow it. If you’ve had CFS, this is understandable: the fatigue is disproportionate to the expenditure of effort and utterly debilitating. Nevertheless, it remains true that the resistance to welcoming the fatigue, due to the understandable fear of it, keeps it looping.
The loop is interrupted when we introduce a different response.
Easy to say, not to say easy to do when you feel the way you do. The truth is, in intense conditions such as debilitating fatigue or persistent sleeplessness, it is unfathomable that the situation could be accepted without resistance. That’s why it’s chronic — not because there is really a chronic disease in the body, but because it’s constantly pushed against. We all have what I call a threshold of acceptability. Recovering from CFS and insomnia requires stretching that threshold by countless miles. We must accept this, too. That becomes the mantra.
The brain can’t tell the difference between a real and perceived threat. It reacts the same to both. Therefore, the experience of perceiving threat can be identical to being under real threat. Prolonged perception of threat feels awful not because the threat is real, but because the system is trying to function while believing it is fighting for its life. Overactivated, vigilance is high, sensitivity at a peak, and more and more things begin to register as potentially dangerous: The benign sunset becomes scary as the night approaches, sounds seem hostile as they may prevent sleep, the bed appears as a battle arena and not a place of rest.
The way the battle shows up is different for different people. But try tp sleep when you are terrified that you won’t, and when you want nothing more than to avoid feeling tomorrow as awful as you did today. It’s exactly when the pressure to sleep is so intense that it eludes us.
Recovery is a process of re-teaching the nervous system that we are safe, thus reducing hyperarousal and anxiety, and finally enabling sleep to simply happen. The starting point is accepting that your situation is not dangerous, despite how it feels (i.e. despite all evidence to the contrary). There isn’t anyone standing over you at night with a knife, it’s just that your amygdala is reacting as if there is. The only way to convince it that there is no danger is to befriend the very thing you’ve been trying to avoid: not sleeping.
The attitude of befriending wakefulness, rather than trying to force sleep and fretting about it not happening, signals safety to the system. It’s not being awake that is the problem, it’s being awake and making it a problem that is the problem. That’s the response that needs to shift. And everyone has their own way of doing it — some will watch Netflix, others will read, and others yet will just rest... A relatively OK experience at night (“enjoyable” might be pushing it) can show the brain that wakefulness is not so bad.
That already signals safety. But what matters even more when it comes to wakefulness is maintaining awareness of the belief that it is a real threat. When we understand that the brain is simply trying to protect us from what it perceives as a threat but that we’re truly safe, that reframe alone shifts our response.
The complete shift doesn’t occur in one night, however, far from it. It’s a retraining of the mind, or of the nervous system, however you wish to look at it (in my view, they’re utterly inseparable).
In addition to shifting our relationship with wakefulness and our fear of it, it’s also important to shift our relationship with the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise the following day. If we can allow and welcome the discomfort and anxiety that arise, we are further showing the brain that the unpleasantness of not having slept does not equal danger. In fact, it may not even present as a problem, unless we insist it is one.
This single lesson is more valuable than most people recognize: Unpleasantness - even if intense - does not equal danger or a problem. Your nervous system reacts to it as if it is because you keep avoiding it rather than allowing it. Everything I say about making peace with not sleeping applies to any pain or discomfort that arises in your life. If you stop making them your enemies, you teach your nervous system that pain and discomfort are not problems to be solved. They are then experienced quite differently. Specifically, without suffering.
The distinction between discomfort and danger / a problem is incredibly significant because it greatly decreases the attempt to avoid it. And it is this very attempt to avoid the unavoidable that is the source of most of our suffering.
When it comes to insomnia, the paradox holds: No longer trying to avoid not sleeping is what enables sleep. But as long as we try to avoid it, insomnia continues. If you understand this deeply, you will begin to see, perhaps the next time pain arrives, how you maintain it longer than necessary, how your resistance intensifies it needlessly, and how issues that could simply pass become “chronic.”
What we’re doing in the process of recovery from insomnia is training ourselves out of battle mode. We’re not fighting to secure the outcome, we’re accepting whatever may come. The insistence that sleep must occur places pressure on it. Whatever we make overly important is what we become anxious about. And when that anxiety exists around sleep, it prevents it.
So, recovery is about becoming free of attachment to the outcome (sleep). We stay open to whatever happens. But because the insomnia recovery journey teaches us to identify the very mechanisms of suffering, the wisdom of non-attachment eventually spills over into all other areas of our lives. The fact is, an outcome may be pleasurable, or it may be rather neutral, or it may be in the domain of pain — but the only sensible thing to do given that it cannot be guaranteed is to be open to whatever comes. That is not so hard to do when you know that discomfort will come, and that you can simply accept it when it does. If you don’t make it a problem, it won’t be one.
If you are familiar with Buddhism, Taosim, Zen, Christian Mysticism, or other traditions, it might be clear to you that insomnia (like other challenging conditions) is truly an incarnation of the wisdom portrayed by such traditions, manifested not in a body but as a life circumstance that demands transformation. The Teacher comes when the student is ready, and its name might be insomnia.
That said, being humbled by and learning the lessons of the Master doesn’t mean you now walk around as Mr. Untouchable, like many people imagine. Rather, it means you are free to be totally honest about your thoughts and emotions. That’s very different than “playing saint.” It makes you more authentic, but not necessarily more palatable to others, nor others more palatable to you. This isn’t about liking everyone or everything, or being agreeable; it’s about allowing all things to be as they are.
It’s about a peace that is not dependent on people reacting to you a certain way, or on feeling a certain way, or on being able to sustain some kind of ideal behavior. The peace that depends on outcomes really depends on the presence of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That’s what it comes down to. Seeking peace in this way ensures suffering.
The peace that my master taught me is not dependent on outcomes, but is present both in pleasure and in pain, in joy and in sorrow. It does not attach to the former, nor reject the latter. It is peace because it sees nothing that arises as an enemy, and accepts all humbly, even non-acceptance.
Despite how many picture him, the Buddha wasn’t stoic, he was a feeling human. As long as you think of liberation or non-reactivity as static in that way, you continue to cover up the Buddha within you, as you attempt to separate liberation from being human.
The Buddha in you simply knows that everything you come in contact with is an arising (in the vast field of being) conditioned by other arisings, and lives in the gap between what arises (inwardly and outwardly) and the response to it. As I always say, you cannot control the flow of life (what arises), only your response to it.
So how does the Buddha in you respond? He befriends what is, without clinging to it nor avoiding it.
That doesn’t make him inhuman, it just makes him a dude that doesn’t suffer ;) And his whole point was that the same is available for us dudes and dudettes. The concern regarding what causes suffering and how to end it is not something reserved for the Buddha alone. If it is, it’s because the Buddha is you; you just may not have yet found out that —
both the cause and the end of suffering lie in you.
We can all let our suffering be our teacher rather than our enemy. This is why you will often hear the following from people who recovered from insomnia:
“It was the worst thing that could have ever happened to me; there is no suffering like it. Also, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.”
~
If this article was of interest to you, join me in this special video (below) as I break down the 4 big spiritual lessons on the path to embodied peace that I learned from my insomnia recovery journey. Continue your journey into this wisdom. In addition to what you read about here, you’ll hear about the importance of self-kindness (aka self-compassion) and about the mind-body unity.
As you listen, think of your biggest struggle in life, whatever it may be, and you might come to see how it can become your gate to liberation. Maybe it is trying to teach you the same lessons insomnia taught me.
I know “my master” had me go through these lessons so that I would tell the tale and share the wisdom. Perhaps it also gives some credibility to my teaching: I didn’t arrive at it by sitting on a bed of roses; my bed (specifically…) was made of thorns and nails.
But only as long as my mind was untrained.
Whether we learn the end of suffering by going through something scary, intense, and overwhelmingly challenging like insomnia, or through another of life’s myriad challenges — we will learn it, sooner or later. As ACIM says, the curriculum is not optional, only when we elect to learn it is.
May this benefit you 🙏
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