Practical Yoga
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
I don't think I snored when I was younger. But once I reached my thirties, once I was deep in a career, a marriage, and then, fatherhood, I began to snore. It was increasingly loud! Sometimes my wife complained, and told stories of how loudly her father snored. Certainly, I wished it would stop, but I felt myself blameless. Curiosly, I had more sympathy for people in the mountains, because if I snored in a mountain hut, people who were exhausted and needed to exert themselves greatly would be troubled. Georg told me that it was quite bad, on those occasions we slept near each other in a hut. As time went on I felt worse and worse about that. Once, I went downstairs early to see a woman curled up on a bench in the shoe room. "Did I do that?" I thought, horrified.
Later, my girlfriend told me the same. I truly loved sleeping beside her. Mournfully, I saw that I would be consigned to sleep alone for the rest of my life because of this problem. That made my heart hurt. I began working to fix it. I tried everything: a chin strap. A set of plugs over my nose. Some kind of mouth insert made of plastic. Then a surgeon did something painful in my nose. He actually told me ahead of time that it probably wouldn't work, but that at least I would feel better knowing that I'd tried my utmost. Boy, did it hurt!
And no, it didn't help.
My next stop was to at least know more about it. I installed an app on my phone that recorded me during the night. Seeing the results was very sobering. They had a scale which went from silence, to soft snoring, to loud, and finally to "epic."
My readout was epic for long spans. Oh, how sad I was!
I was often slightly overweight, and for a period there in 2017 and 2018, I drank too much wine at night. These are contributing factors. However, I already snored loudly in 2012, when I was the fittest of my life, and didn't drink so much.
I started to look for psychological or spiritual reasons for snoring. I lost the original link, but this site offers an intriguing idea:
- According to Michael J. Lincoln PhD, in his, book Messages From The Body, people who snore are stubbornly refusing to let go of old patterns.
- They are in a chronically stuck situation in which they resent the past and fear the future. [emphasis my own]
- They have a strong distrust in the Universe and they are nursing a ‘broken heart’.
- They also feel they are personally responsible for everything and that they have to do something about it.
Resentment!
Inwardly, I felt pierced. Seen through.
It actually made sense to me.
Who have I been for the last decade?
Well, my adult life began with a compromise. I wanted to be a composer, but there was no money there. I had a wife, and wanted to do well for her. I'm not putting anything on her! I wanted a stable, financially secure life, and she helped with that tremendously. I wouldn't have pursued a computer science career without her patient tutoring in math, which slowly changed my idea that I was innumerate and unable to do such "scientific" work.
However, the sense of compromise was still there, embedded under many layers in my psyche. Fast forward about 10 years, and everything is going well. Now I've got kids, too. By now, I've experienced boring days at work, and encountered that sense of futility and unease that stalks the modern office worker. "Is this all there is?" and all that stuff. I'd even experienced very subjective states of consciousness that seemed to offer a glimpse behind the curtain and "point the way" to future understanding. If only I would or could devote the time.
So I was frustrated and torn at a deeper level. I used mountain climbing to mask the growing fault. To exert energy that, if not well-spent, might damage the life-container of which I was responsible.
As I thought about snoring from my perspective post-marriage, I realized that the stereotypical picture of the snorer was a middle-aged man, almost certainly a father. It's natural for such men, laden with responsibilities to feel resentment. Ideally they experience the resentment consciously and work through it, tracing the threads of feeling "put-upon" back to their first experience and discerning how much of it is true and how much of it stems from lazy egoic thinking. Remember, the ego may well submit to your plan of self-improvement, but it'll store up its complaints for later when you are feeling weak, and dump them on you in the hope that you'll quit.
Being a father is a kind of self-improvement plan. Who would dare, after all, to father a child? It's madness on some level. You are never ready -- you don't even know what you signed up for. It takes a decade to understand, but during that time your shoulders grew stronger. Actually, your spirit grew stronger in the bath of mingled love and exasperation that is daily life in a family. You gave up many notions, and mostly profited thereby. But the ego is there, ever-grumbling.
The snorer is a complainer, and makes sure to complain from a position beyond reproach. After all, he works hard and needs his sleep. From the coccoon of sleep, he can both get his rest...and let everyone know how put-upon he is. How much he sacrifices himself that you may live well.
So the idea of resentment connected to snoring struck a chord in me. And since I was moving towards the idea that matter descends from spirit, rather than the modern notion that it's the other way around, I had to take the idea on board and begin working with it.
I was starting to meditate regularly, and learned a few techniques to deal with people who upset me. The truth is, it is my duty to love them. And so I practiced holding my "enemies" in the heart, in the Light of the love of Christ. I practiced wishing the absolute best for them, and not my idea of the best, but theirs. I gave them energy to do with what they will.
This practice softened my approach to myself as well. I sometimes held myself this way in meditation. Resentment is better diminished not with the cutting sword of the intellect, though that helps at times, but with the experience of gratitude for the many gifts I have been given. It doesn't take long for the sense of being gifted by everyone around you to overwhelm the complaining voice and make its ideas about the world appear very cramped, very petty.
I also had to accept that I may well sleep alone the entire remaining life. I agreed that this was better than that someone sleep beside me and be constantly disturbed. I felt much more keenly the pain of that situation. I hated the thought that I would disturb anyone, and began to feel relief that I had my own room (say, on a trip somewhere with friends). So, over a period of years, as I continued to introspect and feel gratitude, I accepted that this is the way things are. I accepted my "plate of food" served up by the world and had no more request for changes.
Resentment was cured.
So then, recently, my girlfriend and I took a trip. I dug out the old snoring app and ran it at night for a few weeks. I was shocked.
I was no longer a snorer.
I wasn't completely silent. I made soft rustling noises. One night I had a beer after a tiring hike, and there was some snoring for about an hour, but it was never even "loud," much less "epic."
The right direction to look was the inward one. I did this. It took years.
It took years for resentment to pile up to such a level...to a physical expression. I can testify that there are physical consequences to such (understandable) error.
Watch yourself always.
When a negative turn of thought becomes habitual, know that it will grow like a weed, and find expression in the physical system. In fact, this whole physical system may well be a manifestation of a fundamental error. I am...we are all...working towards a truer understanding of physical reality. I am ready for anything. Each of my mistakes is precious to me.