In an earlier post I put down that a nap in a warm, dark place with good sound is a legitimate outcome, and I meant it, and then I moved on to the thing I was actually writing about. It was the wrong line to leave as an aside. It’s the question I get more than any other, and it deserves a page of its own.
Somebody catches me while I’m packing bowls and tells me they went out about fifteen minutes in and woke up when everyone started moving. Then they ask, in a slightly apologetic voice, whether they missed it.
Is it okay to fall asleep during a sound bath? #
Yes, and it happens often enough that I plan for it. On any given night a decent share of the people on the floor are asleep for part of the hour, and I have no way of knowing which part or who. From where I sit, a person deeply settled and a person asleep look about the same, and I’ve stopped trying to tell them apart.
What I do notice is the end. People come back up at very different speeds. Some sit up while the last sound is still in the space, and some take several minutes, and a few of those look like they’ve surfaced from somewhere further down than sleep. Nobody in either group did the hour wrong.
What the hour is actually for #
Here is the whole offer, plainly. You get the time, you get the space, and you get a practice. That’s what I can hand you at the door, and it’s enough.
An hour where nothing is asked of you is scarce, and most people, most weeks, can’t make one at home. If you spend that hour asleep, you made a reasonable call about what you needed most, and I’d rather you get what you came for than perform attention for me.
The three ways it goes #
People leave these sessions with different things, and I’d rather name the range than sell you the top of it.
For some people it’s a window: they set something down for a stretch that they’d been carrying, and they can tell you afterward roughly what it was. For others it’s an hour of real sleep, the kind they hadn’t been getting, and they drive home tired in a better way than they arrived. And for a few it goes further than either of those, and those are the nights people write to me about. I can’t promise you which of the three you get, and anyone who tells you they can is selling you something.
What I do when someone sleeps through it #
Nothing. I keep playing.
If you’d rather stay on the floor, that’s what the floor is for. I’m playing the same hour either way, and I stopped counting who was with me years ago.
What I think is happening, and I hold this as my own view rather than as a fact about you, is that the time is a practice for creating a state. You get into something on a Wednesday night with thirty people around you, and then on some ordinary Tuesday afternoon you find you can get most of the way back there on your own, faster than you could before. If the way you got there the first time was by falling asleep in a dark space full of sound, that still counts. You were still in it.
Come next month, sleep through the whole thing again, and see what your Tuesday looks like.