Trauma’s Sleepless Nights: A Healing Meditation

“So I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’ But the night is long and I am full of tossing until dawn.” Job 7: 3-6:

Meditation

Nights, when the world seems quiet, lengthen in trauma’s internal pain. Skies full of stars and moon and clouds watch our hearts racing without winning. Earth perceives perpetual pulsating sensations in our veins. Rivers, lakes, and oceans hear our repeating thoughts. Some with images. All stuck in minds’ auto replay.

In our beds, our bodies toss. This way. That. Left, right, back. Never finding comfort on couch, mattress, floor. Sheet, too cold. Blanket, too hot. Pillow hardening with weight of our head. Mattress not holding us as partner in rest’s work. Sleep, a bad dream with no escape. Night, endless. Never-ending. First light, a mirage. Dawn, not full of joy as the psalmist promised. Instead hazy with dread. Another day unfolding onto more pain.

Healing Activity

The next time tossing begins, when your mind spins with thoughts and images. And your body stiffens. Becomes harder than a board on a sweltering summer night. And you just have to move, change positions, find a cooler place on the sheets. Because if you don’t and even if you do, breath catches in your chest. Stiffening from chest to throat. Sending tremors traveling downward from stomach into limbs.

The next time, before you toss, breathe in deeply. No shallow breath. Deep from your hips. Take a few breaths in and out finding some sort bottomless breath. Then on the toss breathe out as you flip to your side or back or other side. Keep breathing out with each toss. Just breathe in and then out on the toss. Continue until you are tossed out.

Creation occurs on the exhale like “a wind from God.” (Genesis 1:2 NRSV) Your tosses? Small moments of creative healing waiting to happen in the middle of your night. Both sleep and sleep-less-ness asks life’s regenerating force into our nights. In inhales. Followed by exhales. Repeating over and over again. Healing occurring with each completed breath. God’s creative wind flowing around, over, under, out, and in. Even deep into our nights of pain.

Prayer

Spirit sailing through night and day, surround my sleepless tossing with your breath. Inhale my pain. Exhale healing within me. Amen.

*This healing meditation is created to accompany trauma recovery along side working with a state licensed, certified trauma mental health professional and should not take the place of clinical healing. 

**Please form this healing activity to fit your needs. And please share with me your creative ways of refining the experience for yourself

***All scripture quotes are NRSV.