Feeling sleepy after meditation is not a criterion at all: any state can arise during practice.
After meditation, a person says they feel sleepy. And they immediately try to determine: is this transformation or regression? Is it good or bad? Did I go through and live through something, or, on the contrary, did I fail?
But every possible state can arise in meditation. You may feel sleepy, want to run, feel calm or sad. A great stream of thoughts may appear, or thoughts may disappear. Anger may rise up, or a state of love for everything around you may arise.
Because meditation is not an action aimed at calming you down.
You enter a process of expanding perception, and this process can be very different. Sometimes it brings peace, sometimes intense tension, sometimes recovery of the physical body, sometimes a transition into a state that a person simply does not know how to recognize.
Sometimes a person feels sleepy because the physical body really is receiving an impulse to recover: the system is tired and needs to recover. Then relate to it calmly. But there is another story too, when a person may enter a deep state in which they stop feeling their mental and material world in the familiar way. And the only comparison available to their consciousness is: “I fell asleep.”
But it is not always sleep. It may be a deep immersion with a fine thread along which you can always return, while continuing to go deeper.
The important thing here is not to turn sleep into a new benefit: “Oh, so I will meditate so that my body recovers. Or my internal organs or cells will recover. Or it’s very useful to do it for that reason.” And once again the person turns toward benefit, toward usefulness.
The point is not for you to get a useful state. The point is for truth to become primary for you.
When a person develops a thirst for truth, they sit down not in order to feel better. They sit down to meditate — figuratively speaking, of course — because they want to know. And then sleep, alertness, silence, a stream of thoughts, joy, sadness are not a criterion at all. And the main criterion becomes where your attention is directed.
🎥 Video for this article
Original video · Russian audio