Falling Asleep Under the Milky Way by the Bonfire — A Deep Sleep Meditation for Anxiety, Stress and Depression

The seventh episode in the Falling Asleep By series.

You are in a mountain clearing at night. The air is cool and clean and thin at altitude. A small bonfire crackles beside you, warm and intimate, casting its amber light across the clearing.

And above you, the Milky Way. 🌌

That river of ancient light stretching from one horizon to the other. Millions of stars. Billions of years. The whole vast story of everything, visible from this one small clearing, on this one quiet mountain, on this one perfect night.

You are lying on a cashmere blanket, warm by the fire, under the infinite sky.

And at the moment sleep arrives, something extraordinary happens. A shooting star blazes across the Milky Way. And the fire breathes its last breath and goes dark. Both at exactly the same moment, as though the universe and the fire conspired together to give you one perfect, unrepeatable moment to let go. 💫

This meditation is for anyone who needs the perspective of infinite space to finally release the weight of the day.

Please let me know if you enjoyed this session: sylvia@sylviaingle.com

And if today's meditation has stirred something in you, a curiosity, a longing, a quiet sense that you are ready for more, I would love to support you further.

Visit www.sylviaingle.co.uk to find out how we can work together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Take one slow breath in and let it go. Take another deep breath in all the way down and let it go. And we can begin. You are on a mountain, high up. The air is cool and clean, where the world falls away below, and the sky above feels closer, closer than it does anywhere else. Here you can feel the difference in every breath, each one a little clearer, a little more pure. Pure is the air below. It's night, safe deep mountain night. You are lying on a Kashmir blanket in a small clearing amongst the rocks. The ground beneath the blanket is firm, the mountain itself holding you from below. Beside you there is a small bonfire. It's simply warm and present the way a good fire always is. Amber and gold, deep as orange, crackling softly, sending the occasional spark drifting upward into the darkness above. That spark vanishes into something so much vaster than itself. The warmth of it reaches you on the side. That cozy warmth of a fire you are close by. Open your awareness to the sky above. Even with your eyes closed, allow yourself to feel its scale, the sheer extraordinary vastness of what's above you, what's above you tonight on this clear mountain, the Milky Way, that river of ancient light stretching from one horizon to the other, crossing the whole sky above you in a great arc of silver and pale gold. A river of stars, a gathering of so many million of millions of points of light that they blare together into something continuous, something that seems less like stars, and more like the sky itself. Luminous sky. Longer than the earth itself, longer than anything you could hold in your mind without it simply opening. Every star that ancient people navigated by, every star that's been watched from below by every human, every human that's ever lied on their back on earth and looked up and felt in the face of all that light felt both very small and very health. You are both of those things tonight. The fire is warm beside you, the universe is vast above you, and you're here in the middle of bow, breathing the clean mountain air, exactly the right size for this moment. Feel the warmth of the fire on your face, that umber crackling warm, the fire is alive, constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly being created, never the same from one moment to the next, and yet always recognizable itself. Listen to it the soft crackling, the occasional shift of a log settling, the quiet breathing of a fire that's been burning for a while now and has found its own easy rhythm, and above the stars, ancient, so far beyond anything the fire's warmth can reach, and yet somehow in conversation with it tonight, the small and the infinite, the warm and the vast existing together in this clearing just for you. Perhaps everything belongs to everything else in ways we cannot see on a clear night lying on a Kashmir blanket with a fire beside you and a Milky Way above you, giving up trying to figure out any of it, breathing in the cool mountain air, and feel both the warmth and the vastness, the warmth next to you and the vastness above you, both completely in their own way, yours, your body's warm and heavy on this solid mountain ground, the breath is slow and easy in this clean thin air, the fire's crackling softly, the stars above the knowledge that you are part of something infinite, that the thoughts that felt so urgent tonight, the worries, the plans, the things undone, and the things that went wrong exist within a universe that's been expanding for 13 billion years and contains more stars than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth. And that somehow within all of it, here you are on this mountain, breathing this air, next to this fire, warm and alive, and looking up at the same stars that every human who's ever lived has looked at. Every atom in your body forged in the heart of a star that lived and burned and gave itself completely so that you could be here tonight. Grieve that in you are as ancient as the stars above you, and tonight you are exactly where you're supposed to be, your breath slow, your body heavy and warm, the fire beside you, breathing with you, the Milky Way above, patient and vast and completely indifferent to anything except the fact of your existence, which it regards in its ancient way as nothing less than a miracle. Fire is lower now, it's been burning beautifully for a long time now, it's finding its end. The way of good things slowly and warmly, gently the flames have quietened, what was dancing is now simply glowing, amber and deep orange and the occasional blue at the heart where the heat is now the light is softer now, the crackling has settled and stilled, the warmth of the fire is gentler now, still here, but softer, and the sky above seems brighter for it as the fire dims, the stars intensify, the Milky Way growing more vivid, present. You are lying between a fire and an infinite sky, warm and bust, ending an eternal, and you are perfectly, completely at peace in the space between us. Your eyes too heavy now to hold even the thought of opening your breath so slow and deep and barely move the Kashmir over your chest. The mountain is ancient beneath you, the stars above you burning with the light of billions of years and the fires glowing, the last of its umbers pulsing very gently, coming to rest, and then in the same instant the universe and the fire conspire, shooting star, blazing across the Milky Way from one edge of the sky to another, a streak of pure white light there and gone in a single perfect, unrepeatable moment, and the fire in that exact same moment breathes its last moment and goes dark, the um ember fades, the light is gone, and the sky above you is nothing but stars now, infinite, ancient, silver stars in a millions, the Milky Way stretching across the whole of everything above you, and the mountain is dark and still beneath you, complete silence, the most complete silence you've ever known, and in that silence, in that perfect, conspired, unrepeatable moment, something in you that's been waiting for exactly this to let go completely, warmly into the most beautiful deep sleep.