Sleep is my superpower. — Yoga The World

Sleep is the most basic form of self-care. It also happens to be my superpower. It really doesn’t matter what is going on: I can usually sleep through it.

When my partner went MIA while in Sierra Leone for work during the 1997 coup, I slept for 16 hours, woke up for 4, then slept for another 6 until he was back home in London. The week I was waiting to hear back on my greencard application, I slept 10-hour/night minimum.

Over the decades, I have fallen asleep in airports waiting for long-delayed flights, in nightclubs waiting for friends to be ready to leave, and on my office floor waiting for stressful or happiness-inducing phone calls alike. In the early aughts, when I was living in Washington DC and part of a group of friends who got together once a week, it was such a regular occurrence for me to fall asleep underneath the dining table of whomever was hosting that week’s dinner, that my friends started calling me the clueless camper. Thus, my personal Twitter and IG handle: @cluelesscamper.

What I love about sleep — apart from it allowing me to actually function — is that it feels like a light reset: an opportunity to shortcut emotions running amok or to reconnect with a key intention: it’s a new day, so we start afresh. It doesn’t change base conditions (nothing, as the saying goes, is solved overnight), but it often provides much needed perspective.

Now for the kicker: there is a clear and demonstrated link between yoga and sleep.

Yup.

Next up: Saturday July 9 online vinyasa 13H00 UTC (9am EDT).

Originally published at https://www.yogatheworld.org on July 7, 2022.