Falling Asleep while Meditating: best Antidote*

If you are Falling Asleep while meditating, the best advice I have is: learn to sleep sitting up. This helps you stop fighting with the process of meditation and go along with it. You can also watch yourself fall asleep. This turns frustration into opportunity and irritation into insight.

You can try dream yoga, to use sleep as meditation. Or Sleep Yoga, for deep sleep. Also see: Meditating before sleep.

Falling Asleep while meditating

Learn to sleep sitting up. Why? After you learn proper technique, (How to meditate) a big part of meditation is studying the mind. What the mind is, what it does, how it operates, its fundamental nature. This is the key to Vipassana or insight meditation. So you want to see the various states of mind as well as possible.

Falling Asleep TO meditate: Dream Yoga and Sleep Yoga

There are even two different categories of sleeping meditation. One is called deep sleep yoga, when the mind does nothing. It becomes inactive. The other is called dream yoga, where we awaken in our dreams. We do various things in order to train our mind to see the luminous empty reality.

Watching the mind falling asleep while meditating is good training for this. These are powerful meditations. They’re very advanced. Falling asleep in meditation and watching your mind fall asleep and wake up is a precursor to that. It’s very useful and very helpful and will provide a lot of benefit if you decide to do sleep or dream yogas later.

Other methods: Falling Asleep while meditating

• A power nap can be very helpful.
• Conventional methods like tea or coffee,
• Splashing water on the face
• Stretching exercises.
• A number of visualizations (see below)

Why do we Falling Asleep while meditating?

Falling asleep in meditation is not because you’re bad at meditating. (At least I hope not because it happens to me all the time, especially in the afternoon.) It arises from the natural tendency of the mind to develop a momentum in a certain direction. When we’re moving and busy and going we engage in a lot of things. There’s a lot of stimulus going on.

When we sit down to meditate, that external stimulus stops. Or at least slows down dramatically. Therefore, the mind tends to slow down. When it slows down, sometimes it doesn’t slow down to a proper settled wakefulness. Generally, it’ll keep slowing right down thinking it’s time to go to sleep because nothing’s happening.

That’s because most of us keep our minds relatively busy with something. Watching TV, reading books, surfing the internet, talking to friends, cooking, cleaning, driving around, thinking about things. So when we stop all those activities, just the bare sustained attention or focus on an object of meditation makes the mind tend to fall asleep. It’s not exactly that you’re bored. It’s that the mind thinks it’s time to sleep. And so that’s what it does.

Visualized antidotes to falling asleep in meditation

Remember Falling Asleep while meditating is not necessarily bad. It can just become the object of meditation. This is completely valid and in fact a powerful technique. But if it gets too much, and you feel like you want to stay awake and not give into it for a time, there are some more potent meditative antidotes.

One teacher, (I am doubtful this is true), apparently tied his hair to the ceiling and even cut off his eyelids and threw them on the floor in disgust because he kept falling asleep. This is a great meditator, renowned. So you’re not in bad company from falling asleep. Don’t feel bad. But I advise against these methods. They’re too extreme for most of us.

Elation and Lethargy in Meditation

Another important point: don’t beat yourself up for falling asleep while meditating. It takes time to work with this. It takes time to adjust the mind to how it’s working. Part of meditation is called elation and lethargy (there are other terms for these- excitement and torpor). The lethargy is a sinking in the meditation.

We are meditating, but it tends to be more settled and verging toward a sleepy state. We’re really slow, somewhat dull, not really aware. We’re still present, so it’s valid meditation, but not wakeful. This has to be countered slowly and steadily with meditative energy.

One method: visualize a ball of light in the heart, center, and have it move up slowly to the crown of the head. Or expand it to fill the body. You can also expansively move the mind outwards on the breathing. Breathe out a bit forcefully and with it let the mind expand. It can expand in the form of light or just a sense of the mind moving out and mixing with the room around us.

Another technique is to raise the gaze. Obviously, if you meditate with eyes closed you would have to open the eyes.

If you’re really having trouble falling asleep this one is strongly suggested. Learn to meditate with the eyes open. I almost never meditate with eyes closed–only when I’m actually laying down and I wake up in the middle of the night.

Typically when we meditate with eyes open we focus a few feet, six feet or so in front of us on the floor in a soft gaze. This is recommended. If we are falling asleep while meditating, raise the gaze to eye level.

We can also raise it to just above eye level a few degrees. There is supposed to be a power bank of some kind there. This is not a real physical thing but it’s a means of the consciousness to come outward and bring power in or energy in through the eyes. This helps to wake the mind up to give it strength and engagement with the meditation.

Try not to give into frustration too much if you’re falling asleep while meditating. It’s easy to do. Falling asleep in meditation feels quite frustrating. It can have a painful counter effect on you to get that feeling in meditation. It might degrade and destabilize the meditative skills. It’s a form of fighting the mind.

As Milarepa said, “Instead of fighting my mind I rest in the innate state, not moving, undistracted. That’s the meditation of this beggar yogin.” Let me know how it goes in the comments. Let me know what works and what doesn’t. If you have your own ideas or suggestions drop them in there. Maybe they’ll help someone else.