Nobody teaches you how to fall asleep. You learn nursery rhymes, the alphabet and the periodic table, but one of the most basic human skills is left to chance, and millions of people lie awake every night because of it.
That is the point Dandapani makes in this short clip from his 2016 London Real interview. A former Hindu monk who spent ten years in a monastery, he shares the simple routine he was taught there for switching off the body at night, and explains why his guru cared so much about his monks getting a full night’s rest.
▶ Watch the full episode: Dandapani – Master Your Mind
The skills school never teaches
Dandapani opens with a complaint about education. We are drilled in geography, history and science, he says, yet the everyday skills of being human are never taught. Sleep is his example. People assume everyone simply knows how to do it, so nobody explains it, even though so many struggle.
Brian Rose admits straight away that he is one of them. It is an honest moment, and it sets up the practical part of the conversation: what does a monk actually do when he goes to bed?
A simple routine for switching off
The process Dandapani describes is short and easy to remember. You lie on your back with your arms by your sides and your palms facing up. Then you picture your nervous system, and imagine the energy in each part of the body being drawn into it and flowing towards the spine.
He takes it limb by limb: the left leg first, then the right leg, then the left and right sides of the upper body and the arms, each one pulled in towards the spine. As you work through the body, he says, “your whole body goes to sleep.”
His explanation is a chain of relaxation. Calm the nervous system and the muscles relax; relax the muscles and the limbs go limp. In his experience, the next thing you know it is morning, and you have slept well.
Why his guru cared about sleep
Brian asks whether this is something he learned in the monastery, and it was. Dandapani’s guru, he says, wanted “well-rested monks” who could help him carry out his mission. A tired monk was not much use, so sleep was treated as something to get right, not something to leave to luck.
The aim, as Dandapani puts it, was for their batteries to be charged to 100 percent each night, not 75.
Charging your own battery
He finishes with an image anyone with a smartphone will recognise. Nobody likes waking up to find the phone on 30 percent because it was not charged properly overnight. Yet many of us, he suggests, go to sleep and wake up with only about 60 percent of the battery in our own lives.
His goal is the opposite: to be fully rested and wake up with “100 percent of energy”, ready for a dynamic day. It is a small habit with a big promise, and it costs nothing to try.
What to take from it
The routine itself takes a few minutes, but the bigger idea is that rest is a skill you can practise, like concentration. Dandapani’s wider teaching is about where you place your awareness, and this is that teaching applied to the end of the day.
This is Dandapani describing his own practice, not medical advice. If you have ongoing trouble sleeping, speak to your doctor.
Who is Dandapani?
Dandapani is a Hindu priest, speaker and entrepreneur. He lived as a monk for ten years at a traditional monastery in Hawaii under his guru, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, where he was trained in understanding and concentrating the mind. Since leaving the monastery he has taught focus and concentration to audiences around the world.
This clip comes from his first London Real interview, Master Your Mind, recorded in 2016. He returned to the show in 2019 for How To Raise Your Consciousness.
See everything Dandapani has done with London Real on his guest page: Dandapani on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Dandapani – How To Fall Asleep Like A Monk
0:00 Dandapani: We’re just born into this world and people say: here, learn your nursery rhymes, learn your ABCs, your 1-2-3s, go to school, learn geography, history, science, the periodic table. Why? When are you ever going to use the periodic table again? But the simple things of basic life, human skills, we never get taught. Who teaches you how to go to sleep? How many people out there struggle to go to sleep?
0:23 Brian Rose: Me.
0:24 Dandapani: Millions, right? Because they assume everybody knows how to go to sleep.
0:27 Brian Rose: How do you go to sleep? How do I go to sleep without any problem? Do you have a process, where you do this, this and this?
0:35 Dandapani: Yeah, and it’s a simple process. You lie on your back with your hands by your side, your palms facing upward. You visualise the nervous system, and you visualise all your energy coming into your nervous system and flowing from the different limbs into your spine.
0:51 Dandapani: So imagine all the energy in your left leg being absorbed into the nervous system, flowing up the nervous system into your spine. Then the same thing with your right leg, the left side of your upper torso, the right side of your upper torso, and your arm, pulling into your spine, and your whole body goes to sleep. Because when you relax your nervous system, you relax your muscles. When you relax your muscles, the whole arm goes limp.
1:20 Brian Rose: And this was a teaching that you learned in the monastery?
1:23 Dandapani: Yeah. And then you just fall asleep, and the next thing you know it’s time to wake up and you’ve had great sleep. Because my guru wanted well-rested monks that could help him fulfil his mission. So in order to do that, he needed to make sure that when they slept, their batteries got charged to 100 percent, not 75 percent.
1:42 Dandapani: How terrible is it when you wake up in the morning and your smartphone has only got 30 percent battery and you’re like, oh, I should have charged it? Because you want to wake up with 100 percent on your phone, not 30 percent. Most people go to sleep and wake up with about 60 percent of the battery in their life. For me, the goal is to go to sleep, be fully rested and wake up with 100 percent of energy, so that I can go and have a dynamic day and do the things that I want to do.
