Feeling Sleepy After Meditation: Failure or Transformation?

AVAlexander Volchek

After meditation, someone says they feel sleepy and immediately tries to decide: is this transformation or regression? Is it good or bad? Did I go through and experience something, or did I fail? But every kind of state can arise in meditation. You may feel sleepy or want to run. You may feel calm or sad. A great stream of thoughts may arise, or thoughts may disappear. Anger may come up, or a state of love for everything around you. Meditation is not an action aimed at calming you down.

You enter a process of expanding perception, and that process can take very different forms. Sometimes it brings peace, sometimes intense tension, sometimes recovery of the physical body, and sometimes a transition into a state the person simply does not know how to recognize. Sometimes people feel sleepy because the physical body really is receiving an impulse to recover. The system is tired and needs to recover. You can relate to that calmly. But something else can happen: someone may enter a deep state in which they stop experiencing their mental and material world in the familiar way. 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 is not to turn sleep into a new benefit to pursue: “Oh, then I will meditate so my body can recover. Or my internal organs or cells will recover. That means it is very beneficial.” Once again, the person turns toward usefulness and benefit. The point is not to attain a beneficial state. The point is for truth to become your first priority. When someone develops a thirst for truth, they do not sit down to feel better.

They sit down to meditate—figuratively speaking, of course—because they want to understand. Then sleep, alertness, silence, a flow of thoughts, joy, or sadness is not a criterion at all. It is not merely that these are not the main criterion; they are not a criterion. The main criterion becomes where your attention is directed.