5 Ways to Improve Your Sleep By Joseph Emet

Like good health, a good night’s sleep is a gift, and lucky are those who have this gift! For the 75 percent of us who don’t, and look with envy at those who do, you now can do more than just wish for sleep. Mindfulness meditation has proven helpful in areas such as stress reduction and anxiety relief, and allows you to achieve better sleep. Mindfulness meditation, further detailed in Buddha’s Book of Sleep with tips and seven exercises to achieve it, helps to train your mind to replace old attitudes with new, sleep-friendly ones.

Consider that cats and dogs can sleep well. If they can do it, it should not be so difficult for us. We could do it well when we were small – in fact; we slept “like a baby!” Sleep is not something we have to learn. We only have to be aware of the things we do that prevent us from sleeping. That is why mindfulness practice, which is based on awareness, is a good remedy for sleep problems.

Here are some great ways to improve your sleep:

Joseph Emet trained with the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village, France and was made a Dharma teacher in Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition. He has a doctorate in music from Boston University and has published a Basket of Plums, a book with two CDS of songs. Emet, the founder of the Mindfulness Meditation Centre in Montreal, lives in Pointe-Claire, Canada. For more information on Joseph Emet.

Give the Mind Something Else To Do Other Than Think

The mind thinks like the heart beats and the stomach digests. It is in constant activity. The “Stop Thinking” command does not work with the mind like the “Sit!” command works with a trained dog! We can, however, redirect the activity of the mind. We can do a quick body scan to be aware of tension in any part of the body and relax. We can also give the mind the task of concentrating on the breath. You can even count breaths. It works better than counting sheep.

While the usual advice from self-help books deals with preparing the body, the practice of mindfulness helps us prepare the mind for sleep.