Want great Sleep? Look to your day

5 Tips for improved sleep quality

1. Express in full. If you hold back, those unexpressed feelings don't go anywhere but deeper inside you. They'll circulate around your mind/body, keeping your physiology awake with processing, whilst you think you are sleeping because your body is horizontal and your eyes are closed. Open your eyes in the morning and what do you know, the thoughts are still there, only more intense. Use your day to express and work through things and surrender your night to rejuvenation.

2. Appreciate. If you held your body as your temple and your sleep as sacred, how would you live your day? If this were your baseline, a standard you did not drop below in your day, how would you eat, how would you work, how would you move, how would you communicate? What would this level of responsibility look like in your waking life?

3. Cultivate conscious presence. The more your mind moves in unison with your body (conscious presence) the more you become aware of your innate quality of stillness. With this increased awareness, the less likely you are to stray or overstretch yourself and put pressure on your nervous system. The further you stray from your innate inner stillness during your day, the harder you'll have to work at night to surrender to sleep, and rejuvenation will remain out of reach. Gentle Breath Meditation focusses on connection and cultivating conscious presence and how to bring this quality into your waking life.

4. Wind Down is golden. The golden hours of sleep pre-midnight are when the spleen carries out its deepest form of cleansing of the body both physically and energetically. If this cleansing can complete before midnight, imagine the depth of rejuvenation that can take place during sleep after midnight! This makes our state of being in the hours before we lay down absolute gold. The way in which we prepare our body to be surrendered enough to receive this cleansing is so crucial to the quality of sleep we'll experience. How will you prepare?

5. Go to Resources that focus on Quality. We are awash with resources that assist sleep and the preparation for it. But most focus on the art of distraction or activities that may improve sleep only if you continuously do them, wear them, ingest them or repetitively practice them. Stop doing them and your sleep reverts back to the disturbed state you began with. Inherent in the practice of The Yoga of Stillness and Gentle Breath Meditation, or the Esoteric Healing Modalities such as Healing, Chakra-puncture and Connective Tissue Therapy, is the cultivation of your return to move and live in the innate quality of who you are. The focus is not maintenance but true healing.