Hallo, my name is Bin Song. I am a Ru scholar, and a college professor in the disciplines of philosophy, religion and theology. This audio is written and recorded by me to guide your Ru meditation using the posture of sleeping.

Sleeping meditation takes a very important role in Ru meditation. Rightly at the beginning of the Ru tradition, Mencius lived around 3 century B.C.E and was a staunch follower and wise interpreter of Confucius’s thought. He wrote beautiful passages about “night vital-energies.” （夜气）. He likens human body to a mountain, and says that a daily good sleep for a human being will be like a regular amount of sunshine, air, rain, and other necessary natural elements to nourish a mountain. As a result, the mountain will become lush, vital and fertile, which is able to grow, feed and bring joy to the life of many living beings. However, if humans are deprived of sleep, that will be like hunters and peasants who dare to use axes and hatchets to exploit the mountain every day. In this case, the mountain will eventually become bald and barren, and is completely stripped of any ability to nurture other beings. What is distinctive about Mencius’s thought on sleeping meditation is that he says when people get a good sleep, and have a clear, calm, and sensitive mind in the morning as a consequence, this will help us to be more moral. This is because it will become easier for us to feel the interconnection of all beings in the world, and when a baby is about to fall into a well, or any other similar distress happens to our human fellows, we will be more likely to have a feeling of empathy and try to care and help them. In other words, if we have a good sleep to continually nurture the vital-energies within our body day and night, we will become more moral. I do not know how many classes of ethics in modern universities and colleges are teaching how to sleep, but as inspired by Mencius’ thought and practice, I definitely believe they should.

In the period of neo-Confucianism, Ru masters’ writings about meditative sleep became more abundant.

There are beautiful poems written by Ru masters such as Chen Baisha (1428-1500 C.E), who described his sleep as “thousands-of-meters-high clouds float under my pillow.” (千丈雲根枕底眠) It was also said that when Wang Yangming (1472-1529 B.C) stayed in the army as a general and lead a troop for a military expedition , using the method of meditative sleep, he could have no normal sleep and thus, remained to be awake for about 40 days. In general, for these Ru masters in the period of neo-Confucianism, they understood meditative sleep from two perspectives. Cosmologically, a good sleep is to preserve and nourish the yin side of humans’ daily routine. In other words, If you cannot recharge yourself during a restful and peaceful night, you cannot be full of yang power to act and function in the busy daytime either . Ethically, a good sleep is thought of being able to nurture the innately good human nature, and therefore, like Mencius said, to make humans’ practice of morality more ready and steady.

As shown in the pictures below the audio, I will introduce two postures of meditative sleep, and they are very suitable for practice before one’s sleeping.

One, you lean towards the right side, to avoid the pressure on your heart. When you lean towards the right, put your right hand under your neck. The part of the right hand that supports your head refers to the ulna bone part of your wrist. Please do not put the part of your wrist where you can feel the pulse under your head; in this case, it will bring pressure to your system of blood circulation, which causes no good. Also, where your head gets supported is the part of your neck below your ear. The final point for the head part in this sleeping posture is to put a nice pillow under your head and hand. So, in a word, lean towards right, on a nice pillow, put your right hand under your head, and use the bone part of your wrist to support your neck. If you position yourself well in this way, your head will be slightly higher than your knees, and you would not feel heavy-headed during the practice of meditative sleep.

Another key point of this posture is your knees. Do not let one knee directly upon another; you can put your left knee on your right lower leg, and in this case, your two legs would pass each other in a small angle. Then, you would not feel any extra pressure on your body.

The last point is a natural consequence of the aforementioned two points, that is when you lean right, do keep your tract of breathing relaxed and unblocked.

If you position yourself well in this sleeping posture, what remains for you to do is to focus upon breathing using the method of Ru breathing as I explained.

Sounds good? Yes, let’s move on the next posture of sleeping meditation. In this posture, You face upwards, and then, completely relax your four limbs. As indicated in the picture, there is almost no technique whatsoever for this posture other than using a pillow, which we all do.

In this completely relaxed sleeping posture, since we can feel our belly’s up and down more obviously, it will be a very good moment to practice the extra breathing practice I mentioned in third stage of Ru breathing. That is, you can deliberately extend the length of your inhale so as to let breathed oxygen more abundant, running deeper and broader in your body. So, when the belly rises a bit, breathes in a bit; rises a bit, breathes in a bit. There is a short time of holding breath after each bit of inhale. Sometimes, even without any further discipline, for mature practitioners of meditative breathing, this state just happens naturally. In this natural case, a deep, slow and delicate inhale will take a length of time longer than usual, and you will have an utterly joyful and even gratified feeling because of this deep breath. As a consequence, when your consciousness feels modified during the process, you will fall into a sound, fast, and deeply healing sleep.

Good. This will be the end of this session, and I hope you can have a very good sleep every day. Take care!