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Yoga On & Off the Mat

Yoga, Sleep and Attachment: Part II

By Brooke Hewes, 2-21-08

	Ann Dyer below, courtesy of AnnDyerYoga.com

Last time I shared my sleep ritual—attachment, ear plugs and all. This week I consider sleep and yoga under the tutelage of Ann Dyer, a yoga teacher in Oakland, California, who Yoga Journal calls the “near-perfect sleep guru.” Ann hosts as many as 10 “snor-a-thons” a year, during which she uses asana, chanting, and meditation to help people fall asleep. She is a senior faculty member and teaching associate of Rodney Yee at The Piedmont Yoga Studio. Ann’s training is rooted in the Iyengar tradition, complemented by 10 years studying Nada Brahma, yoga of sound, with Mukesh Desai.

New West: How did you come to specialize in sleep yoga?

Ann Dyer: I had a student in my class, Robert deStefano, who owns Sleep Garden. He approached me about doing a DVD for insomnia. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about insomnia at the time. What I was thinking about was the level of exhaustion in my classes and among my peers, and I was trying to address this in my asana yoga classes. What I realized was that insomnia was a few exits down from not resting.

NW: How often do you hold workshops on sleep and yoga?

AD: Well we [Ann and Robert] are just getting rolling. We probably have 10 this year.

NW: So there is a huge demand for it?

AD: It is a huge problem. Sleep studies show that 60 percent of America has trouble sleeping. There has been a huge swell in the last year of sleeping aids, of drugs to help you sleep, followed by a backlash to these drugs. People went rushing to the drugs and then felt the side effects. Now people are desperate.

NW: There seems to be too much yang in our lives.

AD: Yes, and we don’t live in a culture that values or knows much about yin. The fact that any of us can sleep at all is a wonder with all those electronic devices — all that blinking, bleeping, ringing, and peeping constantly stimulating us and calling for our attention. One of the most basic things about sleep is our internal clock, and light guides that.

NW: To a certain degree, though, we have adapted to all this energy and noise.

AD: We clearly haven’t adapted very successfully if 60 percent of us can’t perform the basic human function of sleep. What people don’t realize is that what we are dealing with is so recent. Electric light and amplification are 20th century phenomenon.

Think about life in the 19th century, about the level of noise people lived with. There was no amplified noise. Even if you lived in town, there was just the noise of the printing press or a carriage passing by to deal with. In the 19th century, most days and night were filled with sounds of nature. Sleep has everything to do with the nervous system and all the noise we are dealing with stimulates the nervous system. If you go back to the 19th century, they went to bed because the light went out. Even kerosene is a very different experience. All of nature is telling you it’s time to go to bed. All the conveniences are great, but they have a price that we are not aware of. And I’m just talking about our eyes and ears! We could get into all the things we put in our mouths. The caffeine and sugar … Basically, we are insulating ourselves from the pull of nature.

NW: Tell me about zYoga, the Yoga Sleep Ritual.

AD: The yoga ritual DVD has a couple main points. I want to be clear that we are talking about stress-related insomnia, although people with insomnia because of medical problems or, for example, women during menopause will still benefits. But mostly, our products and techniques are for the average person who has trouble sleeping because of stress.

The bigger problem that people have is not going to sleep but staying asleep. They wake up in the middle of the night and their minds racing or they are staring at the ceiling. Why doesn’t the mind calm down? Well it’s because people aren’t falling asleep, they are passing out. They go, go, go all day long, get something to eat, sit in front of the T.V. and drag their bones to bed.

In yoga, we work from the gross to the subtle. The first thing we try to do is address the tension held in the body. In the DVD there is a simple routine that anyone can do. The sequence addresses tension that is usually held in the body after a long day. It is a sequence designed to quiet the nervous system. Yoga, in a broad sense, is divided into poses that stimulate or relax the nervous system. I have heard a lot of people say: ‘But I do a lot of yoga and I still can’t sleep.’ It is not just doing a lot of yoga, but doing a kind that will quiet your mind and turn your attention inward.

NW: I have quite an elaborate routine for turning my sense inward a night.

AD: People need elaborate ritual to calm their mind through the nervous system. Like if you were talking care of a baby, you would know instinctively what to do. They may get a bath or a bottle or a lullaby. Every sense is addressed—sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell. Usually things smell sweet in a baby’s room. Certainly you wouldn’t have the radio turned up or a lot of commotion.

We need to do something like that for ourselves. Pulling ourselves up by our boot straps doesn’t work. Instead of beating ourselves up for not sleeping, we need to baby ourselves to sleep. Maybe it is a foot massage or putting on soft music. We need to transition from working life to sleep time. I read a study recently that 70 percent of women do household chores right up until bed.

Insomnia is just a symptom of modern life. There is a barrage of sensory activity; there is a pace we have to keep up with. If we aren’t running around physically, we are mentally. In order to sleep, you need to be still.

NW: What’s also a factor is the stress about falling or not falling asleep.

AD: Forget about falling asleep. Sleep is on a continuum. First you need to rest and then sleep will come. Tell yourself ‘I am resting and I have done everything I can. It is now not up to me. I have to surrender. As long as I am lying here, I am healing.’ Ironically, that’s when sleep will come.

Everything about sleep is yin, the moon side. Falling in love is a very moon activity. Everything that applies to falling in love applies to falling asleep. You can’t will it to happen. You can’t say ‘it’s 10 pm and it’s time to fall in love.’ No, you have to woe sleep. You have to entice sleep.

NW: But what about my sleep routine in terms of attachment? Is it bad that I am too attached to my ritual [the ear plugs, the fan, the Sleepytime tea], and is that un-yogic?

AD: That is not something to worry about. You found something that works for you. In terms of props, you have to look at the down side. I will tell you, from a yoga standpoint, the fact that you are distracted—that sounds so easily pull you out of your internal awareness—can be worked on. You could practice a form of Nada Yoga. Some of the most powerful forms of nada [sound] yoga have to do with silence. There are two ways of relating to sound: allow sound to pull you out of yourself and allow sound to penetrate yourself. [In a seated position], soften your ears, and keep softening the ears and your entire self as a receptacle for sound. We actually hear with our whole bodies. Keep receiving and let the sounds touch you deeply. Eventually, noise doesn’t become something that distracts you, but a tool to draw you deeper into your core.

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By Brooke Hewes, 2-21-08 | comments (3) | email story | print story

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