READ THIS FIRST!
In this course you’ll be learning internal tools to deal with an internal problem. It’s helpful to understand a little bit about why these tools work – and why they’re different from taking supplements or drugs.
Not that I’m against supplements or drugs – I’m not. When it comes to getting a good night’s sleep, I’m all for anything up to – but not including – what I call “the cast iron frying pan” approach. I’d rather not have to get bonked on the head in order to sleep!
This course is based on the principle that the underlying cause of insomnia is a problem with the regulation of your energy system. If you were brought up in the West as I was, then you learned that we have a circulatory system, a respiratory system, a digestive system etc. But nowhere did you – or your doctor for that matter – learn about the energy systems of the body.
This is why I created my guide “Energy Medicine – What It Is And Why It Works”. I urge you to read it, because when you understand why you’re doing something, it’s much easier to keep doing it.
In this class I have taken what I’ve learned from the East and the West and put together a series of practices, habits and information on dietary guidelines, acupressure points, yoga postures, herbs and supplements, meditations and more that have proven invaluable to me over time. I spent 3 decades running a successful practice in Eastern medicine and there’s great wisdom and simplicity in that approach to health. But there are times when even the most potent practices which have proven themselves to be effective, suddenly fall short. They’ve been working for the last couple of months, and then suddenly they don’t work anymore.
This is why I believe that we need more than one approach to insomnia. Whatever the causes – whether it’s medications, dietary issues, hormonal fluctuations, pain, or – my personal favorite – idiopathic – meaning “we have no idea why” – there are simple steps you can take that can help shift the body and mind into a calm and relaxed state, switching from perpetual fight or flight to “rest and digest”.
If your insomnia is caused by medication, you might want to consult with your doctor to see if there are alternatives. Even if there aren’t, all of the approaches I offer here can still help to shift your body back to it’s more natural rhythm. Most of them are completely free. A few would require you to purchase something inexpensive at your local health food store or drugstore.
The videos in this course are intentionally kept short. They are meant to teach you some simple moves – that’s all. Once you understand the moves, you can do the practices for longer than 3 or 4 minutes. As a matter of fact, 7-9 minutes is ideal. Research has shown that the brain can change in that amount of time. But Eastern wisdom says “Drop by drop, the bucket is filled.” So if you only have 3 minutes for a particular practice, then do it for 3 minutes. And then if you can grab another 3-5 minutes later in the day – do the same practice again. And then repeat it again when you can.
I recommend that you pick two practices to start with and just stick with those for about two weeks. If, at the end of two weeks, you feel you want to explore other practices, then you can switch. But don’t do one practice one day, another one the next day, and a third one the following day. Stick with a practice for at least two weeks in order to give it some time to work.
If two weeks seems like a long time to give to a practice which might not seem to be working, consider how long you’ve been struggling with insomnia. If like me, you’ve had it for a year or more, two weeks isn’t really that much time.
And one final note – while you don’t have to do all the practices in this course, nor take all the supplements, I highly recommend that you commit to doing at least two or three warmup exercises, and absolutely do the Standing Wuji practice. These beginning exercises will set you up for success in whichever additional practices you choose to take on.
I also want you to take seriously the dietary guidelines offered in this course. We don’t usually think about the relationship between what we have for lunch and how we sleep at night – but there’s too much research on this topic to ignore it. This is a part of the insomnia puzzle that has been ignored for too long – probably because MDs aren’t typically given courses in nutrition in medical school. In fact, nutrition is considered “alternative medicine.”
You can google “gut-brain axis” if you want more information on this topic. I’ve been researching it for years, and what I found forms the basis of my dietary guidelines.
And now onto the course……
