Sleep and the Spiritual-Religious Life

33Sleep
Having a deep, meaningful spiritual-religious life is important.
And it’s really not that hard to do.
In fact, it can be as simple as sleep.
Sleep
Although many people struggle with it, sleep is quite natural. There are a host of issues known to disrupt sleep – like insomnia, snoring, stress, bad mattresses, food sensitivities, and more.
We’ve created sleep numbers, sleeping pills, sleeping aids – but they’re not really necessary. They might help you, but they’re not needed. You can sleep just fine without them. Cavemen slept just fine. Most of our ancestors throughout history did just fine without these “sleeping aids.”
Sleep is natural. It’s a part of life.
You don’t need to go to school to learn how to close your eyes and drift off. You don’t need an advanced degree to learn how to do what even infants know how to do naturally. (Although, for those of you who seriously need help with sleep, I was recently informed of a book called Good Night: The Sleep Doctor’s 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health by Dr. Michael Breus.)
There are two bits of information to note about sleep before I move on to my main point:

  1. Sleep isn’t a location. It’s not something you “arrive” at. It’s not binary – something that is “on” or “off.” It’s more of a spectrum. A night without perfect sleep is still restorative. (It might behoove us to keep that in mind.)
  2. We do ourselves a huge disservice when we wake up in the morning and calculate how little sleep we got. Instead, we should think of how much sleep we did get. This is just a different way of looking at the glass half-full – that we should look at and appreciate what we do have, and not what we lack.

Spiritual-Religious Life
Your spiritual-religious life operates the same way. Your spiritual-religious life doesn’t have to be “hard” either. To have a life filled with admirable ethics, enviable virtues, and sane priorities – it’s nothing too hard. It’s simple. You don’t need that much help in order to well.
Certainly, there are marketers who will tell you otherwise. There are countless books, seminars, podcasts, and newsletters on the topic. (And let me be honest – ROTB offers all of those.) But really? Really, truly, you don’t need any of those as much as you need a commitment to do good, and to be well.
That’s all you really need – just make a commitment to do good and be well, and you too can have admirable ethics, enviable virtues, and sane priorities.
Spiritual-religious advice:
Keep it simple
With love,
i best

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