How To Fall Asleep Fast Naturally

I'm Lee Holden and I've been teaching Qigong and Chinese medicine for the last 30 years. Now, Chinese medicine and Qigong has solutions to our everyday ailments, like sleep and how to sleep better. And this practice comes from ancient China. It's a natural way to reset your mind and body for things like better sleep. I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, well, you could sleep when you're dead, meaning that he just didn't have enough time to sleep. And I was like, no, no, no, no. Sleep is so important to your health and longevity. That's why I wanted to make this video. In this video, you're going to learn techniques and tools that will help you sleep better. So you'll fall asleep faster and you'll stay asleep longer. Now, sleep is so important to so many functions of your mind and your body. Now, all kinds of research is showing that sleep is crucial for our immune system, for mental, emotional health, to get out of depression, to have more energy, for better digestion, for weight loss, all kinds of things rely on good sleep. So let's sleep better. I mean, we often do sleep about one third of our lives. So sleep well. These are going to be some tools and tips to how to sleep better. I'm even going to show you some routines and some pressure points on how to sleep better. Are you ready? Okay. A couple of things. First, sleep in the dark. Your body will sleep better if it's dark in the room, wear some night shades across the eyes, maybe some earplugs. Because even small sounds, our body's designed to wake up and look for danger. So if you get in the dark, put some earplugs in, cover your eyes, you're going to sleep deeper. Now, how do we set up our minds and bodies to rest well? Often we're really busy during the day. Our minds are active and thinking, and to turn that off can be challenging. In Qigong and in energy medicine, we say, you need yin energy, as in yin and yang. Now, yin is the energy of relaxation, of unwinding, of just being. Yang is the energy of doing, yin is the energy of being. So to have good sleep, we need good, solid yin energy, a surplus of yin energy. In fact, one of my teachers said, don't go to bed if you're too tired because you won't sleep well. And I was like, huh? What do you mean? And what he meant was, cultivate some yin energy so you sleep well. Because when you're sleeping, your body's doing all kinds of things and you need energy. Think about somebody sleeping. How do they breathe? Like they're running a race. Your body is working to detoxify and do all the processes that need to happen while you sleep. So give your body a little energy. And to give your body a little energy, a little relaxing energy, is this workout right here. Are you ready? We're going to stand like this. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a movement called pulling down the heavens. You're going to float your arms up. Slow breath in through your nose. And a slow exhale through the nose. And this movement goes downward, pulling down the heavens. And what it's designed to do is to clear the mind. So as your arms come down, drop into the present moment just by feeling your feet on the ground and paying attention to your breathing. And as you move your body slowly, your mind starts to slow down. So we do this for between one and three minutes. Inhale and exhale. It's very simple. Nice, relaxing, slow movement, clearing the energy of the day, clearing mental stress, letting go of tension. And then what I want you to do is a healing sound that promotes good sleep. And you're just going to inhale through the nose. And as you do this movement, you're going to go H-A-W. And that is the sound of the heart to clear emotional stress. And in Chinese medicine, they say that heart is the ruler of sleep. So if we calm down the heart, we let go of emotional stress, your body and mind will sleep better and rest longer. Do that one more time. And those little movements, if you wake up and can't fall back to sleep, you can do that little routine to spend a little longer with it, maybe five minutes with it, and then try to go to sleep. Now I'm going to show you one more thing, a pressure point for good sleep. And you can do this sitting on the edge of your bed in a chair, or I'm going to do it on the floor, and I'll show you how. You can sit on a cushion or a blanket. Like I said, on the chair. If you do it on the chair, you're just going to put one foot on your lap, on the edges of your bed. You can do it one foot at a time. On the floor, you can do both feet. So the pressure point is kidney one. It's called the bubbling springs. It's on the very bottom of the foot, right under the ball of the big toe, in the center of the foot. So right here is the point. If you curl your toes, that point kind of shows up as the deepest point in the foot, under the ball of the big toe, but a little bit more to the middle. Now when you're sitting on the floor, you can take your thumbs and put it on that point called bubbling springs, kidney one. You can google it if you want a little further description and illustration, and I want you to just circle your thumbs right on the bottom of the foot. And the bottom of the feet, anywhere along the bottom of the feet, can be very helpful for bringing energy down, clearing your mind. And so as you massage this point, I'm just squeezing it and making little circles. I'm going to breathe slow and deep through my nose, eyes closed, and just feeling the pressure on the foot. And then what I'm going to do is just thumb walk. I'm going to go left, right, left, right with the thumbs on that point, and do a little thumb walking. And you see when I'm on the floor, I'm going to rock my body a little bit, just to loosen up the low back. And this is a great point to do at the end of the day or before going to sleep, to promote deep rest. And like I said, you can do it like this because you can do both feet at the same time, or you could do it in a chair, one foot in the lap, and do the other foot afterwards. And if you really want to get fancy, you could do it on your partner, and they can do it on you. Massaging the bottoms of the feet can help promote great sleep. Do one more deep breath. Wonderful. I hope you enjoyed that little routine to promote deep sleep yin energy, and really focus on that part of our lives that can really help us with everything else, because when you sleep well, you wake up with more energy, and you can get a lot more done. It's yin and yang balance. Now if you like that, and you want more exercises like this, please click that little thumbs up button, subscribe to this channel, and you'll get more videos just like this with tips and tricks on how to use ancient practices and ancient medicine for our modern day ailments. Now if you want more routines like this, I have a 20-minute sleep video that's on my video class subscription. And if you click the link below, you can get that for free right now for two weeks. You can try that class, the sleep class, plus a lot more classes. We do weekly classes three or four times a week that you can join live or on demand, and we have classes in there for the morning, for the evening, for the spine, a seated routine, all kinds of wonderful things. All right, so click the link below, join that video class subscription, try it out for two weeks, see how you like it, and do that better sleep workout. All right everybody, have a great rest of your day and a beautiful night's sleep. Thanks so much.