How do YOU retain awareness as you fall asleep?

**Squaddle** · 03-06-2015 12:28 PM

What do you use for an 'anchor'? The thing you keep your mind on while trying to sleep to fall asleep but still retain awareness to WILD.

**mimihigurashi** · 03-06-2015 12:57 PM

So far the only things that offered consistent results for me was counting and repeating a mantra. Things like SSILD, FILD, awareness of breath and others have only worked once or not at all.

**JustASimpleGuy** · 03-06-2015 01:12 PM

When I do decide to work on WILD, I'm thinking for me a good anchor would be attending awareness.

So when I meditate I start my sitting with body scans to relax physically. Then I switch to mindfulness of breath to relax the mind. After body and mind are sufficiently relaxed and calm I switch to attending awareness.

Now the difference is when I'm being mindful of bodily sensations for both body scan and breath, I'm aware of my body/physical sensations, however when I'm being mindful of awareness that all goes out the window. All that's left is a vague perception of body in the form of a general numbness and weird vibration/resonance. Where for me awareness is usually perceived as being right behind my eyes, when I attend awareness it draws back and sinks deep down. At least that's how I can put it into words.

**Ctharlhie** · 03-07-2015 07:57 AM

I have (more or less) memorised the sequence from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkx88_3cD-s through listening to it so many times. As I fall asleep I focus on each body part in turn and repeat this process until my body has fallen asleep, at which point I'll get vibrations or super obvious HH and then transition. Depending on timing (and, presumably, other factors) when I do this I'll either WILD or fall into a deep and restorative sleep. Since the beginning of February I have achieved WILD twice this way, but both times were quick and effortless. Not to say that you should try this and you will WILD, but that you need to experiment to find out how you fall asleep and the anchor that will work for you. It has taken me near four years of off and on experimentation to start making serious head way, and 2 years to see my first success.