Bedtime is Still My Spiritual Practice

The other night bedtime was hard. This happens way less than it used to, but it still happens. I don’t do formal meditation at this moment in my life, but I’m meditating more than I ever have. Every time I have a painful thought, a judgment of someone, anger come up, I feel it! I notice it! Which in and of itself is a miracle. Because it is so easy to get lost in it and not even know it is happening. That is one of the features of this season of my life — from some mysterious location, the vast wisdom of awareness that does not feel like “mine” yet I am not separate from — somehow it appears. And I feel it moving my mind, making it more flexible. So I really notice the arising of suffering thoughts right away, and the noticing them takes me on a track of oh! Where will this take me — not take me to trying to control someone outside of me, but take me to remembering that whatever my mind is telling me is between me and peace — usually it’s a person or situation doing or being some way I don’t want it to. What is to be changed is not the external. What is to be accepted is the emotions. And the situation as it is. And then what is available to be changed becomes more clear. What is in my territory to change reveals itself, the rest is acceptance. So when I say bedtime is my spiritual practice, it’s sincere. It is really a site of practice for me. Because it’s a good litmus test for how connected I am to the channel of awareness. My frustration and attempts to control when my kids go to sleep is so revealing in this way.

The other night bedtime was hard, and in this case that meant Chop (7) was really upset and yelling about something. I can’t remember what it was, because at this time of day it’s about anything / everything if it’s coming up at all. It’s his system, and our group system, being overloaded and I can see clearly how desperately all that is needed is sleep but it appears a maze is in front of us to get there. A maze through all the frustrations popping up in my child.

I’ve been noticing this thing in real time, which Eckhart Tolle describes, which is where the pain body, as he calls it, the emotional waves arise, and they kind of rise up from the solar plexus looking for thoughts to attach to, or they manipulate the thoughts, they completely altar the world view. (Another word for this is disregulation.) This description has really helped me, because sometimes I’m able to observe it happening in real time, in myself and my family members. The suffering is: unconsciously letting the pain body influence the story and make it miserable. When I’m aware enough I can separate the pain from the thoughts, and then it isn’t suffering. Then it’s just a wave of emotion rolling through, and awareness can contact it, feel it, know it’s there, and know it’s passing. When it’s unconsciously manipulating the thoughts, the world becomes a horrible, treacherous place. It’s easy to see this in children at bedtime. Like I can’t get another stuffy or get up again, my mom is making me lie down to go to sleep. My world is ending. It’s very unfair and terrible. It’s easy to see that there’s a benevolent force present — our parenting, taking care — seeing the bigger picture and enacting the wisdom that this kid needs to go to sleep so we are going to be the leader and reduce the options to get up so that sleep can come. But this is happening on the adult level all the time. Suddenly what my kids are doing or my partner is doing is a problem, because my pain body grabbed hold of my mind and changed my view of the world. In this way my children reflect all sorts of wisdom for me.

And! The other night as I was saying, my kid was yelling. And this has been a source of stress for us all since he was very small, and we adults have worked to manage it in a variety of imperfect ways over the years. He was crying and yelling: All I hear is no from you, I just need to hear a yes. What an incredible articulation! The pain of being a child, and I remember that feeling, like there’s so much restriction in my life coming from the adults. It’s wild to for example know that he is having some big transits in his life, and to witness myself be an agent of some of that growth for him, while I don’t feel conscious that I am being that agent. He’s experiencing limitation, and I am Somehow, this evening, he finally got into his top bunk. And in the midst of his pain, he paused, and honestly probably almost fell asleep. During that time, I had one of those incredible moments where in my mind what happened was a thought: I don’t know what to do right now. And even more amazing was the next one: that’s all I have to do right now, just not know what to do. And I relaxed, and I didn’t effort to fill the next moment with problem solving. I just rested in that thought. Then Chop spoke, he said: I realized when I pause, I see you differently. I need to pause.

?!?!

And he shifted it. He found it inside. And we finished our bedtime routine and he went to sleep.

I don’t need to hack bedtime. I don’t need to read about it. I don’t need to do anything except know that I don’t know what to do, when I don’t know what to do. I need to be available to the mess of it. Available to the wisdom that arises from who knows where. I can remember one of the biggest undoings from my (sacred) buddhist learnings: it looking peaceful is not true peace. The aesthetic preference I have for it to be quiet and conflict-free is not awakening to the vastness of love. It’s not true love, it’s not true peace. What is true peace is complete presence in the moment, without a story overlay. Meeting myself and my kids right now, in all the untamable waves of our aliveness.

And then again, over and over I forget and then remember: this is what I’m here for. This is why I had kids, among a million other reasons, some I know and some I don’t. I had kids to lie here at bedtime, to witness them, to lead them, to get so frustrated with them, to feel overwhelmed with them, to have them think I am their problem, to think they are my problem, and then to remember this is the reason I birthed them, for us to do all of this together. Every single part of this, every single moment of disconnection and reconnection is part of this blessing of their presence here. What a gift.

I’m here to witness this child from the moment he came out of me with his eyes open, to this moment when he finds the wisdom in himself to understand this pause and how it supports him, everything in between and everything beyond I can’t yet even imagine that he will discover. And everything I am already discovering because he came here to planet earth.