sleep

Recently I have been needing less and less sleep. Part of it is the shifting of my life to late night DJing and having to maintain my day job, but part is Tokyo summer and a cat that likes to be fed at 5:30am. When I started regular all night DJ/clubbing it was hard, but now I have shifted so much that I am actually needing very little sleep almost every day. At first it was very disturbing since western thinking calls this pattern "sleep deprivation" or "sleep disorder". But it doesn't feel like a problem to me, just different.

One of my spiritual teachers lived on almost no sleep. I think she told me that she usually gets 4 hours every night but does meditation and other practices during the day. She is an amazing woman, super energetic and in her 60s I believe. She was convinced that 4hours of sleep + meditation + balanced life was more healthy than the 8hr sleep western medical thinking.

But traditional western thinking is the 8hr sleep doctrine. Maybe that makes sense for western life styles: work long hours at stressful jobs, demanding family life and social schedule. Maybe 8hrs of sleep makes sense to counter balance that kind of stressful waking life.

But maybe healthy life can be attained along many different paths of waking and sleeping practice. I know many yogi friends will do daily morning, 5am/6am practice (real ashtangi do this), and I am almost certain many yogis have deep but short sleep patterns. Life is about balance, and there are many ways to achieve that balance.

Wouldn't it be strange if becoming a DJ and doing regular all night clubbing actually helped me place more healthy boundaries on what my day job can demand of me, become a more spiritual person, and helped me become the kind of daily practice ashtangi I have been trying to become the last 8 years of yoga practice. What a wonderful paradox that would be.