The spiritual element of sleep

[Anthony66]

This question pertains to a personal problem. My son has a sleeping condition where he isn't restored through sleep. We have been to various specialists who have prescribed all manner of drugs, but things haven't improved significantly over the last 9 years or so. I was looking at his sleep biometrics this afternoon and he has very minimal deep sleep, often only 10 minutes or so over a night. He is often in bed for 15 hours or more as a result.

I know Steiner speaks of the astral and etheric bodies departing the physical during sleep and this has made we wonder whether my son's condition is spiritual in nature. I guess in using the language of spiritual, I'm importing a duality that is not there. But I'm thinking more about how a holistic understanding of reality pertains to my son, particularly in light of the limited efficacy obtained through treating the condition with pharmaceutical means.

[Federica]

Anthony,

I am too much of a beginner to take the risk of saying anything here. Maybe just one thing: the etheric (life) body does not depart the physical body during sleep, otherwise we would lie dead. Only the astral body and the True Self, or Higher Self do.

But I thought these Steiner lectures could maybe interest you, either retrospectively, or prospectively:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA302a/E ... 21p01.html

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA206/En ... 07p01.html

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA318/En ... 16p01.html


I hope that by inquiring about your son's condition from a spiritual perspective, you'll discover some useful insights!

[AshvinP]

This question pertains to a personal problem. My son has a sleeping condition where he isn't restored through sleep. We have been to various specialists who have prescribed all manner of drugs, but things haven't improved significantly over the last 9 years or so. I was looking at his sleep biometrics this afternoon and he has very minimal deep sleep, often only 10 minutes or so over a night. He is often in bed for 15 hours or more as a result.

I know Steiner speaks of the astral and etheric bodies departing the physical during sleep and this has made we wonder whether my son's condition is spiritual in nature. I guess in using the language of spiritual, I'm importing a duality that is not there. But I'm thinking more about how a holistic understanding of reality pertains to my son, particularly in light of the limited efficacy obtained through treating the condition with pharmaceutical means.

Anthony,

I went through a sleep study some time ago, because I was also having difficulty both getting to asleep and staying asleep. The former had to do with racing intellectual thoughts and associated anxieties. Of course the first inclination of the doctors was to prescribe anti-anxiety medication, but they really stupefied me and fortunately I decided to discontinue. The sleep study revealed that I had a 'moderate' form of sleep apnea and they gave me a CPAP machine, but I found that it was simply too cumbersome and basically made it more difficult to sleep.

I can't offer any specific advice for your son, since I don't know any details about his situation and, even if I did, I wouldn't be qualified to offer either standard or occult medical advice, but I would definitely say he should proceed with caution with respect to the plethora of sleep medications which are dispensed in these situations. I think the biggest problem is over-reliance on them, which then weakens the will, and strength of will is exactly what we need to quiet the intellectual voice and deal with other soul-issues. As you can imagine, focused thinking practice should certainly help with sleep to the extent the issue is connected with racing thoughts.

As for the sleep apnea, the spiritual path has also helped me with that. Part of my problem was overeating, eating unhealthy, and eating too late at night, as well as too much screen time right before sleep. We also need strength of will and motivation by high ideals to avoid such things. Generally, we grossly underestimate how much our intentional thought-life influences our soul-body organism, positively and negatively, and relatedly how much thought-control we can exercise over our organism with imaginative development, wholesome spiritual habits, and persistent effort. This path is not for everyone, but perhaps he would be interested in trying the memory review exercise right before sleep. Unlike the standard medical treatments, it certainly couldn't hurt.

Each day one should review one’s daily experiences. You can do this by picturing to yourself the most important things you experienced during the day and the way you behaved in relation to them. All this is done in a frame of mind that wishes to learn from life. How can I improve on something I did today? This is the kind of question one asks oneself, and it does not dull one’s sense of either joy or suffering. On the contrary, you will become more sensitive. But you will not harbour anxiety and regret about what you did, instead transforming such feelings into the intention to do things better in future. Thus you work on yourself like a builder. Just as a builder does not sit down disconsolately in front of a house he has built, complaining sadly about it, but instead, when he comes to build again, uses the experiences he has gained to do it better, so a person can do the same in regard to himself. Sorrow and regret can drag us down whereas learning builds us up. Sorrow and regret are of no use. The time we waste in entertaining these feelings should be used instead for our own improvement. All this requires no more than three or four minutes and then you will fall asleep with a manas³ that has received the capacity to progress. If one can add to this an important precept for life or also a good thought for others, this is especially good. This gradually as it were transforms us, since we have endowed the manas liberated in sleep from all personal limitations with a worthy content that nurtures our development.

[...] Then you can take four or five minutes to undertake a review of your experiences during the day. I would ask you to let these daily experiences pass briefly before your soul and to be clear how you relate to them. Observe yourself and ask to what extent you are satisfied, how you could have experienced things differently, what you could have done better. Thus you become your own observer. The point of this is to observe yourself from a higher perspective so that gradually the ‘higher self’ comes to hold sway over your everyday self. At the same time, all worry, sorrow or suchlike about what you experienced should fall away. We should simply learn from our own lives, read them like a book. We should not think back regretfully to the past—we can do that the rest of the day if necessary—but courageously use this past for the future. Then we will learn something that benefits our current, personal existence, and that will, above all, bear fruit in the period after our death.

...

In the evening before falling asleep each pupil should cast his gaze back to how he lived during the day. This is not about allowing the maximum number of events to pass before your soul but about doing this with the most important events. We can ask ourselves what we can learn from what we experienced or did that day. In this way life becomes a lesson for us. Our stance towards ourselves is that of learning from each day to benefit every new day. By doing this we take our past with us into the future and prepare our immortality. Then perhaps we can end the day by thinking of other, beloved people who might need our good thoughts.

If you fall asleep during this exercise it really doesn’t matter. If you do, then you take a tendency to progressive development with you into sleep—and that’s good too. Only the morning meditation must take place from beginning to end in an alert and wakeful state. I would just ask you to accomplish the evening review backwards, in other words starting with events that just happened, in the evening, and working your way back to the morning.

[Federica]

Online there's this German guide on sleep disturbances by Christa-Johanna Bub-Jachens, an anthroposophic medical doctor in Bayern. Translated to English for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America:

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/s ... achens.pdf


It considers various types of sleep difficulties from a spiritual perspective, regularly referring to Steiner, Goethe and others, but also providing detailed practical advice in the section "Suggestions for treating sleep disturbances". It seems carefully written. I hope it can have some usefulness.

This summary or resources could also be of interest:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Process_of_waking_and_sleeping

[AshvinP]

Online there's this German guide on sleep disturbances by Christa-Johanna Bub-Jachens, an anthroposophic medical doctor in Bayern. Translated to English for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America:

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/s ... achens.pdf


It considers various types of sleep difficulties from a spiritual perspective, regularly referring to Steiner, Goethe and others, but also providing detailed practical advice in the section "Suggestions for treating sleep disturbances". It seems carefully written. I hope it can have some usefulness.

This summary or resources could also be of interest:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Process_of_waking_and_sleeping

Thank you for finding and sharing this, Federica. It has been an excellent read so far. Both informative for fleshing out spriitual scientific principles and practically useful. Starting on page 15, where I am now, there are many suggestions for preparing to sleep. However I would recommend deeply contemplating all that comes before as well, since it helps elucidate lot of other topics we discuss here often, such as the nested Cosmic-Earthly rhythms and how they influence our stream of becoming in body-soul-spirit.

[Cleric K]

Thank you Federica, for these interesting resources.

Anthony, I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties your family goes through. I'm surely in no position to give any opinion on this but I'm curious if you have noticed some correlation between physical activity and sleep with your son? Does a day of more intense activity (for example hiking, sports, farm work, etc.) lead to deeper sleep?

[Federica]

Online there's this German guide on sleep disturbances by Christa-Johanna Bub-Jachens, an anthroposophic medical doctor in Bayern. Translated to English for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America:

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/s ... achens.pdf


It considers various types of sleep difficulties from a spiritual perspective, regularly referring to Steiner, Goethe and others, but also providing detailed practical advice in the section "Suggestions for treating sleep disturbances". It seems carefully written. I hope it can have some usefulness.

This summary or resources could also be of interest:

https://anthroposophy.eu/Process_of_waking_and_sleeping

Thank you for finding and sharing this, Federica. It has been an excellent read so far. Both informative for fleshing out spriitual scientific principles and practically useful. Starting on page 15, where I am now, there are many suggestions for preparing to sleep. However I would recommend deeply contemplating all that comes before as well, since it helps elucidate lot of other topics we discuss here often, such as the nested Cosmic-Earthly rhythms and how they influence our stream of becoming in body-soul-spirit.

Ashvin,

I'm glad you took a look and found that the guide could be of help in this context! And thank you for generously sharing your personal experience, which is not only valuable for Anthony, I'm sure, as he is trying to help his son in new ways, but is also an example of empathy and support for everyone of us reading.

[Anthony66]

Thank you Federica, for these interesting resources.

Anthony, I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties your family goes through. I'm surely in no position to give any opinion on this but I'm curious if you have noticed some correlation between physical activity and sleep with your son? Does a day of more intense activity (for example hiking, sports, farm work, etc.) lead to deeper sleep?

I think there's a balance that needs to be found. It seems that if my son gets extremely tired (e.g. through sports), then his sleep suffers. But I'm generally trying to get him to move more during the day rather than be glued to the computer screen.

[Anthony66]

Thanks for all your input. Encouraging my son to perform a day review sounds like something that could be beneficial.