'Til Death Do Us Part

In this episode I share how getting in touch with your mortality may be the best way to practice balance & presence.

Could insomnia just be the ego's belief that going to sleep without fixing your problems could mean it has to deal with them for eternity? It just may be.

Join me in Episode 5 to learn more about the concept and feel for yourself!

If you would like to read the transcript of this episode, check it out here!

Transcript

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Speaker 1 0:05

Welcome to the art of falling asleep. I'm Derek Lacey and insomnia coach. I created this podcast. Insomniacs could have a space to come and feel guided. I feel like I know you could share some concepts that I wish people had shared with me , concepts that integrate sleep with every aspect of your life, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I believe sleep is not mean any other sleep exercise are the oddest artifact in the sleep is your canvas. And I want to help you express yourself using the insights from my sleep coaching practice and my own journey out of insomnia . And by sharing transmissions that help you bridge the way you experience life, better sleep. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another

Speaker 2 1:06

Episode, episode, number five of the article in the sleep podcast. I'm your host, Derek Lacey . And I want to talk to you today about permanence permanence. What do I mean by permanence? I'm not talking about the ability of your hair to be tightly curled, but the concept of forever things that lasts forever things that don't, what's immortal, what's mortal, and then how this all ties in to sleep. So, yeah, basically, I'm going to talk about death today. So I'm trying to lead you in gently, but you know, something funny happened as I was preparing this episode, I realized I wanted to do an episode on this, on the idea of, of death and , and really just mortality. And then I thought, Whoa , dude, this is a little too soon. This is a little too dark right now. It's episode five, not episode 15. And then I realized that, you know, that thinking explains my inspiration for this entirely because the concept of mortality to little untapped and what I believe happens as a result of this is that the concept of death goes a little forgotten. We avoid the thought of it for good reasons, right? Because like in the last couple of episodes, I talked about presence a lot. There's no, there's no such thing as a moment other than the moment that's right in front of us. So the idea of mortality can kind of contradict the idea of presence yet. Ironically, getting in touch with mortality can be a wonderful way to get back in the present moment. So I thought it was kind of fitting that I felt compelled to, to talk about this after talking about presence so much, you know, it's , it's also more mortality. I think there's a correlation. The more intense the situation is, the more that being mortal can allow you to surrender. When we encounter intense problems, we tend to face them with this sense of ignored mortality. What I mean by this is that I think a lot of us acknowledge that we will die one day, but when circumstances are heightened, we subconsciously lose our sense of mortality, which gives the problem a feeling of permanence. Like if I don't make this right, right now, I'll have to deal with this for eternity. There's a very good reason, a very good explanation. I think for why this happens because a part of us is eternal. Just not the part that deals with 3d problems, like the problems that a lot of people are dealing with right now, you know , with righteousness and , uh , problems that we struggled to find linear solutions to . But we feel like we need those linear. This creates this type of solution for all of that stuff needs to be figured out by the ego. But the part of us that has eternal access the soul, it's all forgiving, all loving and it occupies the same body that the ego does. So it makes sense. When you think about it, this way, how the body who is partially occupied by the souls state of permanence may confuse a temporary state of being for permanence. Now, if you're not a spiritual person, if you believe for instance that when you die, that's it, you just, you die. This doesn't mean that the concept, this concept can't help you. What's important to remember is that when you forget about your mortality, regardless of your spiritual belief, your challenges will tend to feel like permanent ones. When in reality, most problems, even the ones that seem to prevent us sleeping on a subconscious level will go away in some form or fashion throughout a lifetime. Maybe not entirely, but in some form or fashion. And yeah, if you don't believe that your soul moves on forever and that when you perish in human form, that that's, it, the idea of permanence could feel relative. And therefore a problem now is a problem forever. You might be facing a situation that could realistically be a forever problem, but maybe for you and for anybody, when you factor in your mortality, you may look at the part of the problem causing the most painful emotions and be like , um , I'm going to die one day. And I haven't got time for this. And remember too, that this is a sleep concept. And with sleep concepts, we're not looking to poor hand sanitizer on our emotions and act as if those emotions that block us from sleep are bad. All emotions deserve love and attention. We just look to collaborate with these emotions so that we can sleep. That's all that has to happen. The belief that we are standing for is okay, even with everything that's happening right now, even with everything that I've ever been through, I am still entitled to sleep. And to do this from this concept what's happening is that we are just making the emotion underneath the block to sleep relative. We don't want an emotion to actually weigh more than the sum of its parts. Here's how this all came together. For me the other day, I was driving down the road, running an errand, and I was way up in my head. I'm in the process of making some really big decisions right now. And you know what? That's like the bigger, the decision, the more you focus on, what if it doesn't work out. So that's what I was doing. I was just thinking about what I didn't want to happen. And then suddenly right, as I was making a turn awards out of nowhere, and I just thought to myself, you're going to die one day. And then in an instant, my body went from a stress state to being completely relaxed. And I actually stopped thinking about what could go wrong and then started thinking about what could go, right? And then how much control I actually had over making things, right? I felt so much relief and then laughed at how thinking of my own death felt so good. And it, it kind of sounds funny to think about going up to somebody who's really stressed out and to make them feel better, instead of saying, Hey, things are gonna work out just fine. You say, you know, you're going to die one day, right? And not like , uh , you're gonna die one day, but like, Hey, you know, you're gonna die one day. I don't know how to say it correctly. But I do know that for me, when I felt relieved by this, what I was doing was realistically getting in touch with my mortality. I closed the gap that my situation was creating between my true reality. And then the perception of eternal reality that was being experienced by the temporary part of me by my ego. And if you really think about it, this is probably the best way to, to define insomnia. After you get all of the sleep hygiene pieces, correct? If you still aren't sleeping, if there's something mysterious, that's blocking you. All that's happening is your ego is thinking that before it goes to sleep, it needs to fix whatever problem it might be facing. Because if it doesn't, it's going to have to deal with this for infinity. Cause if you think about the ego and sleep, we sign a silent contract with our mortality. Every time we sleep, go ask 10 people how they prefer to die. And at least 9.9 of them will say that they want to go peacefully in their sleep. So you see how there's this double edged sword with sleep and death. And then there's the subconscious, just in the balance in the middle of it, all of the two edges having it's wild adventure, like which way am I going tonight? And if it's this way, damn, I'm not ready. We need to fix these things. And this is ironic. It's super ironic that the setting that we need in crave in order to regenerate our body and feel good is the exact same setting that we choose to perish in sleep has a fucked up sense of humor. Trust me, I know it. Well, I know it really well. And I respect it. I have to , I respect a good joke. I respect it when it's done well. And you kind of have to, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of power and peace when you figure it out. So it only makes sense to me that the natural balancing agent for reconciling this irony is getting comfortable with the concept of mortality. Recognizing your mortality will keep your subconscious from having to frantically avoid being on the wrong side of the sword every night, when it's falling asleep. Now that this idea, this concept comes up for me, I realize that this is exactly what it must be like when you die peacefully in your sleep, that it's not going to sleep thinking you're going to do something the next day. You must be. I'm assuming that you have to be in full cooperation. It's just gotta be something that happens when your soul and your ego and your body all come together. They have a drink. They look at each other, they thank each other for their time and they decide and accept that this is the last time they will sleep in the form of human body. There would be no fear in that none . And that would be amazing. And so you can think about this concept in a few different ways, but from this perspective, just the fact that you might be emotionally blocked, falling asleep. And if the possibility of accidentally death in your sleep is what's keeping you awake. Just the sign of fear alone is enough to know that this is not the night that it happens. So there really is nothing to fear. Fear is a sign that there is nothing to fear. The other day I was, I was flying just a couple of days ago. I was flying and I'm not a big fan of flying. I travel a lot more. If I could drive everywhere, I would rather drive from the bottom tip of Texas to the bottom tip of Florida. However long that would take then fly for like two hours across the ocean. That's just the way it is. And so I was on the plane and it was doing that whole thing. It does when it bounces around and makes me feel uncomfortable. And then the thought came to me again, you're going to die one day and then like magic. I immediately felt better. And what was cool was that what it made me understand was not necessarily that I was going to die one day, but that I was going to die one day. And that day is most likely not today. So instead of me thinking about how much of a bummer it would be for me to die as an IE mortal, right before thinking about my mortality, I'm an immortal on a plane thinking like this would really suck if I died right now, cause I'm not ready. But instead as thinking about it, as somebody who was mortal, I was able to take the pressure off of this single moment. There was no pressure because I was never permanent to begin with. There would be a lot of pressure if surviving that moment was the difference between the earth falling out of the sky or not. But that's not that that wasn't what reality was. So I couldn't help it feel better. This is all very much like getting a new pair of tennis shoes. It sucks when you buy a new pair of shoes and then you get your first stain on them in the first day or the first week. In fact, nothing in the history of the world sucks more than that. That's the worst thing that could ever happen to a new pair of shoes. Anyhow. But when that happens is that the last pair of tennies that you'll ever own, probably not. And at most it's only a problem until you get your next pair. No one right now is still mad. Over a premature stain from two pairs of tennis shoes, go in this concept the best way to deal with the next time. Somebody steps on your new pair of tennies. You just have to remember that those shoes will die one day too. When I'm remembering that someday I will die too. Unlike I feared at the beginning of recording this podcast, I'm not being morbid. I'm just being mortal. And by being mortal, I'm reducing that erroneous gap that's been created between my reality and what my emotions and my nervous system are experiencing. As reality, getting in touch with your mortality is not intended for you to be morbid or feel anxious about death. Please don't leave here with that feeling. It's so that you can get your nervous system to just keep it real. When your nervous system is keeping it real, it can surrender to the things that are real, like the fact that your body is tired and that your brain is sleepy, that the Denison receptors in your hypothalamus are absorbing all the sleep you created that day. You get to succumb to the melatonin in your bloodstream and deal with the stuff that you have to deal with emotionally in the morning. This doesn't mean that you stitch a meme into your pillow that says you're going to die one day. No, that's not how it works. I did try this out. I didn't stitch anything into my pillow, but I have played with this concept the last couple of nights, I've just said that to myself, you're going to die one day just to see what happened. And sure enough, I felt myself going deeper and deeper, as I said it. And look, the, the thought of acknowledging your mortality in order to fall asleep is not the plan here. But I do want to say that being in touch with your mortality is one of the most helpful things that anybody can do. It is the key to understanding life and accepting life and being able to move through life no matter what, but the sleep concept that I want to share with you here is that you are not here on this planet, in this lifetime to get anything right or wrong. You are just here to experience emotions as a human being because you can't take them with you. Your emotions are not permanent. And because this is the case, this is just more proof that the obstacles that are preventing your subconscious mind from falling asleep are only designed to be felt when you are supposed to be awake. When you, the human we're biologically designed to think and problem solve. And that sleep is only here to give you an escape from that job. This is what happens when you are in touch with your mortality, you get to do all the things that you, the human being we're supposed to do. That's it may you always

Speaker 1 22:12

Upgrade , sleep falling asleep podcast has been brought to you like normies glasses, better sleep starts with blocking blue light and nothing better than the unnatural lights coming from your electronic devices tells your brain that it's daytime and the pineal gland doesn't release the melatonin. You need to sleep . In some cases, this is the only thing preventing people from falling asleep to learn more and start blocking blue light immediately go to Dawn . this.io . Use the discount code for more information on how to sleep better. Please visit Derek Lacey coaching.com.