If you were to look deep inside yourself, beyond your thinking mind, where did the above words land after you took them in? Invoking all your senses, can you perceive how those words manifested in your physical form? Perhaps you were transported to a place where stress languidly dripped from your brow. Your muscles melted off the bone, released by the marrow of your being, unfurling into gentle slumber.

You are invited to explore this somatic refuge, this sanctuary within all of us where our body longs to find itself at day’s end. It releases itself into unencumbered, velvety stillness, punctuating its arrival with a toned “ahhhhhh,” dropping deeper into relaxation…

Romancing Sleep approaches the idea of sleep by looking at the unified whole of a person. Just as a cake can’t rise without the proper leavening ingredients, so sleep becomes an elusive endeavor without acknowledging all the inner aspects of a person necessary to achieve this. These ingredients are not found on the pharmacy shelf. They reside within you, yours for the taking: all that is needed is to know how to access them.

Let’s start with an overview map of one’s inner world that will be explained in detail in the coming chapters. The subconscious/unconscious plays an important role in providing you with an on/off switch into the world of sleep and dream. Most of us live in a society where we spend the entire day in our logical, analytical minds. We spend so much time in this mode, that when it comes time for that mysteriously magical time each night to ‘turn off’, we assume that brute forcing our way into slumber is the only way to get there. The analytical mind still wants to take charge. If this is the way you approach sleep, how has that been working for you?

The inner workings of our bodies don’t understand the daytime, brute force language directed at going to sleep. This requires a softer, subtler language, coming from deeper realms not readily apparent to our conscious, waking mind. The subtle language introduced in this book is not one of words, but of paying attention to what the body is telling us. If one ‘listens’ with all one’s sensory abilities, the body is already conveying what is and more importantly, what is not working in order for it to fall asleep.