There is nothing that touches my heart more deeply than to hear of someone’s struggles with sleep. I have to say that sleeplessness has been the most painful, enduring and destructive things I have ever confronted, perhaps because issues relating to my sleep and perhaps so many others are so closely linked to fear, anxiety, spirituality, an unexamined mind, my struggles to understand my mind, and the cruel and greedy ravages of modern health care.

My sleep troubles began from first memory. I was a bed-wetter, well into my teens and this became a grinding and awful struggle between my father and I, one that echoed all through his life and mine. One of its consequences was sleeplessness. After bed-wetting, fear took over. My mind raced from one danger to another, fueled by the endemic Fear Machine that is so much of American life.  I could not get to sleep, or stay asleep, and the template was this: when I woke up, my mind racing, I was always in a panic. Beginning in the  years after adolescence, doctors prescribed one kind of medication after another, until we settled on Valium, which I took nightly for more than three decades. I can not count the doctors I saw, the remedies I tried, the pills I took. When I expressed concern about my drugged state – the pills only worked sometimes – doctor after doctor assigned more tests, tried different pills and expressed puzzlement that I was uncomfortable with medications. I cannot imagine how much money was spent, and how much was wasted.  I could not begin to relate how long and awful these nights were, how much of a struggle it was to write and live in so exhausted and disruptive a state. It is not a healthy way to live.  One doctor said I should just accept taking pills for the rest of my life. Another said anxiety was endemic to my family, so why not to me?

When I got divorced and broke down a few years ago, Maria witnessed my Hellnights, and I would not care to relate them – the nausea, panic attacks, awful nightmares –  more specifically.  I hope to never talk of them again in any detail. I changed course and stopped taking medications. They are not part of my life now. I stopped seeing conventional doctors. I began meditating. I found Maria.  Saw a spiritual counselor, my friend Mary Muncil. I saw a naturopath who suggested some gentle herbs and changes in diet. He asked me if I loved anything about my life, and I said I loved everything about my life, and he said you are well, you are healthy, you will sleep.  I found a chiropractor who taught me how to be more comfortable. I changed my evenings – after dinner, reading, talking, meditating. I gave up the news. I paid more attention to what I was thinking, reading, absorbing in the evenings, and throughout my life. I stopped telling struggle stories. Stopped arguing my life. Understood the importance of love and its centrality in a healthy life. I chose a spiritual, rather than a medicinal, cure. The other simply had not worked for me. It was difficult, frightening, wonderful.

It is so important that I pass along the news that I have been sleeping well for some months now. No medication, no visit’s to the doctor, no bloodwork, no MRI’s or sleep clinics. I am not here to say those things do not work or that nobody should use them, just to tell you that there can be another way, a different way. I woke up yesterday in the light and I started crying. What’s wrong, asked Maria? Nothing, I said. I just don’t ever remember waking up in the light. Not ever in my life.

I don’t share these stories to relate a difficult life. My life is wonderful, I am nothing but lucky. But some stories – fear is one, sleeplessness is another – need to be shared, especially when they offer hope. It is a wonderful experience to wake up in the light, only with the aid of your own pure soul. I am here to tell you it can be done.