Achieve Restorative Sleep Through Mindfulness & Responsibility

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Thank you for having me.

Audrey Wells, MD

I wonder if you can start by telling the audience more about your background, especially as it pertains to sleep problems.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Sure. Well, part of my back story is that I spent 14 years in a federal prison on drug charges between 1985 and 1999. I am of the baby boomer generation, and I was one of those people of that era who went headlong into the counterculture of the time. But I was also always a spiritual speaker and interested in personal development. I had this kind of mixed-up, twisted life, so to speak, in Baltimore. Craziness, too, and some good things. By the time I earned my way into a federal prison sentence for drug trafficking, that arose from living as an expat in Latin America and just falling into that as a way to continue to support myself and kind of live outside of society. Just applying that with a lot of other sources and thinking that I was caught up in back then, having become alienated from my culture, from our society culturally and politically back in the sixties and seventies. At any rate, by the time I arrived in prison, I had completed a three-year master’s degree in a deep clinical psychology psychotherapy training program that was very contemplative, integrative, Buddhism-Western approaches to psychology, and psychotherapy. I have also trained in the Buddhist tradition for about ten years already. I came into prison with a lot of skills, and at that point, all the craziness stopped. I was able to take those 14 years to work on myself. Sleep was a major issue in prison, as you might imagine. A lot of people had difficulty sleeping in prison. I had difficulty at times in an incredibly noisy environment, a high-stress environment, a lot of violence, and ever-present danger. I was released in 1999 to a halfway house, where I struggled with sleep during my time there. and a lot of residual trauma from that experience. I have my share of childhood stuff. I grew up in a decent family but with alcoholism. that created a lot of childhood stuff. I’ve had a lot of significant losses in my life since coming out of prison. Many very significant people and partners in my life have died of cancer, as well as the loss of my son. So these combinations of things have at different times created sleep issues. My experience during my prison years of working with my fellow prisoners, I was very involved, and I led a meditation group there for 14 years. I was in school for 14 years. I helped out with the Texas hospice program in prisons anywhere in the world and then developed a national organization to support that and also support prison mindfulness work. So I was working with a lot of prisoners in lots of different settings, and sleep issues were incredibly common. Over the last 22 years or so, I’ve been a business and organizational consultant and generally become a personal advisor to the CEOs of the companies I work with. I have worked with a lot of people dealing with sleep issues and access more. I’m not a medical provider but in the sense of being in a coaching consulting relationship. That’s kind of my background with it. So have done a lot of work to support others and develop healthy sleep patterns, and then doing a lot of work to develop that for myself.

Audrey Wells, MD

Yes, I like that you pointed out that, as human beings, we sort of accumulate these layers of stressors—of grief, of loss—and going through life just kind of presents challenges that can culminate when you’re lying in bed at night and it’s dark and quiet. I identify with that personally. Even as a sleep medicine physician, I have gone through periods of insomnia, and I like to kind of bring that up in conversation because, even with all of the academic expertise that I have, there’s nothing about that that makes me immune to the challenges of insomnia or poor sleep. I struggled mightily for about ten years with loss and grief. Sleep was a big hurdle for me to get over. The truth is when you’re not sleeping well, it impacts your ability to self-actualize. It impacts your decision-making and your ability to sort of sit with yourself, grow, and become more of the person that you can be. I wonder for you: what was it that sort of got you past difficult nights with trouble sleeping?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Well, when I find myself in that situation, there are lots of things I do now and have been doing for a long time, so I don’t find myself in that situation. But when I have found myself in that situation, it’s generally been a combination of various meditation techniques and breath regulation techniques to try to downregulate my nervous system. Often, when we can’t sleep, our nervous system is too upregulated. We have we’re too much as most. Most of us probably know that there are two branches to our autonomic nervous system. One branch upregulates, and the other downregulates. sympathetic branches upregulate, and we need that just for alertness. and when we get to upregulate that touch to move into the stress response of fight or flight, most people have heard those terms. Then we have the parasympathetic branch, which is about downregulating. So when we can’t sleep, often what we have is too much sympathetic branch activation and too little parasympathetic branch activation. We find ourselves involved in rumination, and we just feel awake; we can’t sleep, and there is a lot of cognitive activity, rumination, and so forth. If we can engage a parasympathetic response, we can all get up and move ourselves into a landscape within our nervous system where it’s easier to fall asleep. One of the easiest ways to regulate our nervous system is through regulating our breath because our in-breath is connected with sympathetic branch activation and our out-breath with parasympathetic tract activation. By doing very simple breath exercises that emphasize the out-breath, we can engage the parasympathetic branch and gradually move into that relaxation response and rest and digest to find recovery spots. It can be difficult to do sometimes when what’s sort of triggering the overactive, sympathetic branch response is some real deep concerns or some present stressors in our lives. Some things that we’re worried about or concerned about, where it’s the activation of some trauma, or where it’s something like a loss, which has been so destabilizing to us that we’re in a sense of shock, and, just our whole sense of self as disabled life itself. It can be very difficult in some situations, even when using effective breath regulation techniques, meditation in general, simple mindfulness, or the body mindfulness of breathing. We’re not particularly regulating the breath, but we’re just bringing our attention to the body, and the breath can be quite helpful. Although it can also stimulate wakefulness and alertness, We have to kind of learn to work with that and also practice things like what’s called a body scan, where we bring mindfulness to the body and gradually move our awareness through the body, perhaps beginning at the soles of our feet and working our way up to the core of the head, down the arms, and so forth, and focusing not only on the sense of touch externally, external sensations on the surface of the skin, but everything we notice and feel inside the body. Internal sensation, often a gentle effort to do that, will gradually move us into a nervous system landscape where it’s much easier to fall asleep.

Audrey Wells, MD

Yes, to your point,  these are activities that a person would engage in during wakefulness, even during the day. One thing I like to remind people of is that how you spend your day affects how you spend your night. especially for those who have trouble getting to sleep or getting back to sleep. I find that when you’re lying there with your thoughts and feelings, it can kind of be in three categories, not enough. There’s some component of scarcity, not safe, some sort of fear or agitation by the sympathetic nervous system, as you describe, and not congruent. I’m not living with integrity. Something’s out of alignment. When I looked at your book, Radical, Responsible Party, I loved the title of the first chapter, There’s Nothing Wrong With You. For me, this brought up the notion that your brain, which is responsible for sleeping, is going to react in a particular and predictable way. If you don’t support what it needs to sleep, Can you delve into more about what you do during the day, especially with meditation and mindfulness, to kind of promote that sleep state at night?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Yes, I think that’s very important because when we find ourselves unable to sleep, we wake up in the middle of the night, we’re not able to go to sleep, to begin with, or we wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. But it’s already too late in a sense, although there are certain things we can do. I’ve been successful in using breath regulation, or sometimes just getting up and reading for a while. People have lots of other home remedies and things to do. There are some things you can do, but in a sense, it’s too late. It’s the preventive work that you want to do. It’s not just preventive; it’s a whole lifestyle issue. I mean, our sleep patterns and not only staying asleep, but also the amount of restorative sleep we get, the amount, the percent of the time spent in deep sleep, in REM sleep, the quality—in other words, the quality of our sleep is a reflection of our overall health and well-being, mental health and well-being, lifestyle, and all the rest of it. You brought up those three areas. But if I can remember and I’m not, I think maybe the last one was congruence, that sense that we feel aligned with our values and mission in life, that we feel a sense of well-being and purpose. We’re like, we feel like we’re on track. And another one you mentioned, I think, was a sense of safety and what was that third one you mentioned?

Audrey Wells, MD

Something’s not enough. There’s a complete scarcity.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Yes. the way that we can create an abiding feeling of workability. Safety can sometimes be a loaded word because, ultimately we can’t make life completely safe. We can’t live in a bubble, but we can create relative safety and a sense of workability—a sense of basic competence about our lives. We can deepen our sense of being up and having enough—a sense of fundamental kindness. I think the most profound way to do this is through meditative practices where we’re able to drop beneath all the noise of all of our conditioned reactivity to life, the cognitive and emotional activity, and even some of the physiological activity and drop it all into a profound stillness at the depth of our being, and even touching into that for a moment can be profoundly healing and nurturing. Any time that we spend there in the stillness of the depths of our being, we’re reorganizing our brain. The brain is learning how to return there and how to have greater access to that depth through our being. When we are resting in that, it’s unmistakable that we’re not broken, that we don’t need fixing, that we are unconditional, basic goodness, unconditional worthiness is truth, and that all the lies we’ve received all our entire life, we have a whole consumer culture based on the message you’re not enough, but if you purchase this, you might be at least for a moment. We’ve been getting these messages in the culture. There is no one to blame. In part, it’s the human condition. But we’ve been getting these messages all our lives. But there’s some part of our being. It’s always known that that’s not true. We can tap into that through meditative practices and have developed that experiential competence in our innate wholeness; our innate worthiness is innate goodness. To whatever level where, it’s not an all or nothing, but, to whatever level we begin to develop it radically changes everything in our life. It affects every aspect of life, including how we lead our lives. It also increases the sense of basic safety and confidence about it, like the workability of life. All that profoundly helps us to have ease of mind and peace of mind, which generally is going to allow us to sleep better at night. I think there are many, many things we can do. I think there are many practical things we can do in terms of our lifestyle and getting into the nitty-gritty of how we organize our day. That’s going to set us up for quality sleep. But I think, for me anyway, a foundational one is having some kind of contemplative practice, some kind of mindfulness practice, or meditation practice that we do daily. Then having established that, being able to bring that into the way we lead our lives throughout the day, like continually coming back to moments of spaciousness, coming back to the body, becoming more embodied, coming back to the breath, bringing more space into our lives. You can be a very busy, professional person, but learn to infuse your activity with more of the meditative mind and more mindfulness, and then this all supports good restorative sleep.

Audrey Wells, MD

I love what you just said, because to me, what you’re describing is an improvement in your relationship with yourself, like examining different needs and different states of mind to achieve that peace that you need when your head is on the pillow and you need to sort of fall into sleep. One of the things that you talk about is the ability to choose. You choose for yourself, and you take responsibility for your choices. I want to relate this to experiences that I see often for people who have been diagnosed with sleep apnea and are prescribed a treatment like CPAP, or auto-pap therapy, which is currently the gold standard for treatment of obstructive sleep apnea. In my experience, people have an internal resistance to the idea of sometimes the diagnosis itself, but often to the idea of using a treatment like this to get their sleep apnea resolved so that their sleep becomes healthy. I wonder if you can speak to the idea of sort of making that choice for yourself. Here’s my diagnosis. Well, I accept it or not. Here is the treatment that’s been recommended to me. Will I accept it or not? How do I sort of actualize that?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Yes, I would like to just say, well, to begin with, I just wanted to come back to the meditation for a moment. Dropping into the depths of our being is easier said than done. I just want to let people know there are many meditative techniques and practices, and I don’t think there’s any more powerful way to change our relationship with ourselves, to truly defend ourselves and forgive ourselves, to develop a positive relationship with ourselves, and to have beyond doubt the experiential competence that we’re not broken and that we don’t need fixing. There’s nothing wrong with us. I don’t think there’s any more powerful way than dropping into the depths of our being. But that’s, as I said, easier said than done. This is why I teach a very embodied approach to meditation that allows people, even beginners, to have that experience, as well as those many specific meditation practices around self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance. Some people believe that self-compassion practices are classic loving-kindness practices. There are a lot of different practical ways that people can follow that path of gradually shifting their internal landscape to be one that’s much friendlier, more self-compassionate, and more self-accepting and developing. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing. I just wanted to say that now to the extent though, and this ties these two things together to the extent that we lack that, we tend to operate in life in a relatively fear-based way with a kind of survival fear and survival focus. This is the human condition. Until we develop the capacity to live from a place of that kind of unconditional competence, it’s quite natural that we tend to feel like life is happening to us. also the importance of being able to regulate our nervous system because we’re not regulating our nervous system, which means everyone but us is regularly our nervous system. We live at the interface between our childhood conditioning, which for most of us is a mixed bag. We got most of that before we were seven years old. We had no choice in any of that. then the world around us now if we had a benevolent childhood and we live in a benevolent world, it may be okay to live in that space somewhat relatively unconsciously, but most of us don’t have that kind of benevolence in our childhood or the world we live in. So we’re kind of getting pushed around by life, and it does feel like life is happening to me. But so it’s a combination of developing these self-regulation skills, which are part of meditation and part of being able to drop into the depths of our being and shift that internal relationship. We have with ourselves that we can begin to relate to life, that that is based on choice, that we realized we have a lot of self-awareness, and that our real personal power is in choosing to live a choice, because otherwise we’re choosing basically, and maybe unconsciously, it may not feel like a choice, but we’re living with a kind of victim mindset where we feel like life is happening to us. I can well imagine that someone who suddenly gets a diagnosis of sleep apnea or any other diagnosis can get that. Why me? Why do I have to deal with this? Life is hard enough. I don’t want to deal with this. It feels like a disability of some kind. There are expanded suggestions that a million reasons why this is uncomfortable. I don’t like this, and this is happening to me. Why is it happening to me? And we’re all kind of culture at it in many ways to embrace that kind of victim mindset, which is also part of having been kind of acculturated into the consumer mindset, which is a very disempowered mindset. Learning to live a choice, the idea of living, learning to live with choice has been in all cultures throughout human history. But unfortunately, it’s not the dominant voice we hear. By learning to develop our capacity and competence and our capacity for self-regulation and self-agility, we’re much more in a mindset when an issue arises. It’s kind of like, “Oh, okay, well, this is interesting. How do I work with this, what are my options here, and what is the most creative way I can respond to this that’s going to move me forward and in a very beneficial way for myself and for other people in my life, those that are important to me?” We relate to things in a much different way. We don’t have that kind of initial reactivity where,  again, life is after me, life is happening to me, and I’m being victimized. It’s more, “Okay, life has all of its challenges. I realized that if I’m learning to live a choice, these are simply choices, challenges, and places to focus. My energy is on what I can do.” We call the name of my book Radical Responsibility. We call that question a magical radical responsibility question because no matter what’s going on, no matter how much I’m stewing and feeling aggrieved or feeling victimized by something or put on, I can simply remember to ask myself that question: “Okay, I don’t like this, and what can I do?” The minute I do that, I’ve shifted out of the mindset of limitations and victimization into the mindset of possibility, because there are always a million things I can do. When we start doing some research, we self-educate, and we find that in this case with sleep apnea, maybe the choice of a CPAP machine makes a lot of sense, whether it’s an ongoing situation or maybe it’s a temporary thing that’s going to allow us to make some lifestyle changes to where maybe we won’t need it anymore. But it’s that spirit of living by choice that changes everything about how we approach our lives.

Audrey Wells, MD

I agree with that. I think that coming at it from a place of curiosity, with some willingness to accept discomfort, sort of having a balance with how you look at the pros and cons of treatment or not treatment, and then kind of leaning into that choice for you is something that I encourage people to do because the truth is that even if you’re prescribed treatment for any medical condition, it’s still up to you whether you want to move forward and take that treatment or not. It may be 100% effective, but it may not be for you. So taking control of that choice for yourself is going to make it a lot easier to move forward and a lot easier to sleep. I think that when you’re lying there feeling like the treatment has been forced on you, then that’s incompatible with sleep, and it only adds to the problem.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Absolutely.

Audrey Wells, MD

I wonder if you mentioned the idea of dropping into your deeper self and the kind of practice that it takes to get there. For anyone who may want to start trying meditation with breathwork, what can you advise them as they start and give some perspective, if you can, on what sort of practice this entails and how long it might take to see some results?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Well, I mean, see, John, a neuroscientist who’s done a lot of research with veterans, and my plus in her recent book review—I don’t remember the exact title—held to a focus, and she determined that the minimal effective dosage was 12 minutes a day. There were 12 minutes of practice. You can move the needle now. Practicing more would be very beneficial, but it doesn’t take a lot of time if regularity and consistency are what’s important. Either you miss a day or you just always start again. Even if you missed all week, you can just start again. But I think the important thing is getting good instruction now. There’s a lot of instruction out there today, and I teach meditation in a very embodied way because a lot of people when they begin learning to meditate, are doing the practice sort of from the neck up. When they try to pay attention to the body of the breath, word, or some focal point, maybe they’re even using an app, or maybe they’re listening to music or using great tools that are out there. They just find themselves continually distracted; their minds are very busy. They find it very difficult. They find it kind of boring. It all involves sitting still. They feel restless. It’s hard to sit still. It can just feel very difficult and not very pleasant. and I think it’s important to receive good instruction to bring the body into it, because by bringing the body into it and developing a deeply felt physical presence—the deeply felt anchor of the body—it makes it so much easier to do the practice. People have a lot of misconstrued notions about meditation. It’s about stopping our thoughts or getting rid of them. This is not the case at all. We don’t need to struggle with our thoughts. Many people spend years in meditation, struggling with their thoughts because they haven’t received effective instruction. When we focus on the body and develop a deeply felt physical presence, we’re making a shift from one of the neural networks in our brain that are related to that continual discursiveness that is overstressed discursive to rumination. It’s called the default mode network, which is overactive in most modern human beings. By focusing our attention and synchronizing body and mind, we deactivate that and activate something called the positive network and they’re mutually inhibitory, so we just find the mind naturally quiets down. We don’t need to struggle with our thoughts. A basic approach to meditation is creating a spatial, nonjudgmental awareness in which we can allow our complete experience to just be as it is, so thought can come and go. All our scent perceptions can come and go. Emotional experiences can come and go. Memories can come and go. If we’re not resisting it and we’re not getting caught up in it, there’s a gradual kind of emptying process. That’s what allows us to drop deeper and deeper into the depth of our being and experience—that stillness. But the body, for me, is critically important. The body is the portal, and very few instructions out there emphasize that. So I think people spend a lot of time on ineffective practices. Now, there are some apps out there that can be very helpful, and a lot of people like using apps. There’s a lot of guided practice. On my website, I have a lot of guided practices for both meditation and self-regulation that are completely free. They’re, I think, listed under resources. We had a lot of resources that we put up there during the time of the pandemic and the lockdowns. So, there are many places, but I would just look for someone who’s teaching mindfulness in a very embodied way, emphasizing the body, because that’s going to make the practice much more effective.

Audrey Wells, MD

I’m curious if you can say more about embodiment, just to make sure that I understand that embodiment is sort of an awareness of the body movement and honoring of the body, as it is sort of the portal to the world. Can you describe embodiment practices?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

This is key to quality sleep as well. The more we live our lives throughout the day in an embodied way, the better the quality of our sleep will be, for sure. I have a friend who says in modern Western culture, our bodies have been relegated to being nothing but brain taxis, just something to carry around a supercomputer that’s up on our shoulders. So embodying that practice, is there anything that brings us back into the body, feeling the body being located in the body? Now it’s quite natural that we get located up here because we’re very visual to be oriented; we have this overactive, intellectual, cognitive brain, and so we tend to be focused up here. We have to consciously drop into the body. We can do exercise. We could do it at any time throughout the day if I just felt like, “Where am I kind of oriented? I’m looking around, I’m hearing, I’m focused, and I’m trying to read something on the computer. I’m up here, okay?” Just let myself drop down through the neck to the shoulders, the upper back to church, and just down to the soles of my feet. anything we can do to feel present in the body now—the sense of touch. That’s what we’re talking about. There is a physical sensation here. We have two forms of it. We experience the sense of touch on the surface of the skin through what’s called external perception. that goes to a particular set of neural networks in the brain that’s highly myelinated and therefore very efficient. So we’re very sensitive to touch. Those sensations quickly travel to the brain, whether we experience them as what we feel as touch internal sensations within the body, go through a different set of neural networks that are less myelinated, so they tend to be subtler, although we can certainly experience extreme pain in the body. Now, our capacity to feel the body from the inside out, so to speak, is called interoception, which is short for internal perception. The entire body is a living organism, all the way down to the bones, including the marrow, all of which contain neuronal cells connected to the central nervous system. But we tend to ignore that whole internal landscape, except when there is discomfort. Now everyone in your audience is very familiar with interoception, even if they haven’t heard the word, because that’s how we know them. We’re hungry or thirsty. It’s how we know when we need to use the restroom, when we’re sleepy, and so forth, and certainly when we experience internal discomfort like a headache, indigestion, or muscle pain. This is all the internal landscape of our body. Imbibing the practices or practices, the problem is absent that kind of discomfort; we tend to ignore that internal landscape completely, and our focus tends to be mostly up here.

Embodiment practices are practices where we consciously bring our attention back to the body, not only feeling the body externally, which is an important part of it but also feeling it internally. Of course, we can do this through any body-mind practice. We can do it through hot yoga; we can do it through martial arts. We can, as people with various forms of dance, use mindful walking, mindful hiking, and mindful stretching, or we can do exercises like the body scan that I referenced earlier. We can practice meditation and even just sit still in a deeply embodied way and train ourselves to open up that internal landscape with this vast universe of sensate experience. The world of somatic awareness is this kind of untapped universe that we can explore, and we can do that even by sitting still. We can as we do this, go out in nature and being out in the woods or out in the forest or out in the mountains or out of the water, and learning to practice embodiment. The more embodied we are, the more we connect with the world around us. Some of the same neural pathways involved in enhanced interoceptive awareness and embodiment are also involved in our ability to connect with the natural world, but also to connect with others to create safety and connection with others. All of these things that we can do will not only improve the quality of our sleep, but they will also improve our overall health and well-being, the quality of our relationships, and so on. It’s all interconnected; obviously, having quality relationships impacts the quality of our sleep. All these things we’re talking about are about lifestyle. I have a colleague who talks about lifestyle as medicine. I love that term, and it is an overall lifestyle issue.

Audrey Wells, MD

That’s one of the things that attracted me to sleep, which is that sleep affects everything you do. It affects how you’re able to function in the world. I like the idea of looking at the whole person, as I’m assessing their sleep now. I want to kind of go back to something you mentioned before, even in your own experience, and that’s the idea of trauma. I think I’m a believer that the body keeps the score. I think that we hold onto our trauma, and it affects us in subtle ways and not-so-subtle ways. In my experience, the ability or inability to sleep is one way in which unprocessed trauma comes to the surface. Are you able to talk about how embodiment and meditation practices can help with trauma?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Yes, absolutely. I like the way Stephen Porges, the founder of the Polyvagal theory, talks about trauma—that our nervous system gets locked into a fight or flight response because we’re in a situation that overwhelms our coping skills. But that doesn’t mean that it completely stays that way. But there’s a pattern that develops in our nervous system that can then be triggered by a memory or an association—something familiar. And so it’s not that; our entire nervous system remains locked on, but there is a stuck pattern in there that, if that gets activated, suddenly our nervous system locks into that fight or flight response. So anything can trigger that and associated similar anxieties, fears, memories, or all kinds of things can trigger that kind of response. So how do we heal that? I think one way to think about it is to think of our nervous system and our entire body, mind, heart, and spectrum. Think of it as flow and process. Think of it as flow and process. What do beautiful flows and processes look and feel like? then what happens when, when you get tangled wires, broken wires, and broken circuits, or the highways and pathways, the infrastructure is breaking down, or the waterways are obstructed? Some things interrupt that natural flow and process, and that’s what trauma does. How might we allow our nervous system—our whole body, mind, and heart—to have its level of being quite physical, from the very tangible to the immaterial? The whole body-mind spectrum, which could include the spirit as well, is all a cohesive system, and trauma is like these knots in there, these blockages, and these places where we get locked into maladaptive responses. How and what might allow that to heal? Well, I think if you imagine just spending time when you’re in the most relaxed state possible and you’re inviting a palpable sense of flow, that’s what’s going to allow the nervous system to naturally kind of untangle itself. Many things can release trauma or activity; we can release trauma through meditation, and relaxation. All these body-mind exercises that we’ve been talking about can, of course, be therapeutic work that combines those things, and maybe some kind of talk therapy and recovering stories and narratives can be part of the process. But even at a physiological level, One of the reasons that I think meditation can be looked at through two sorts of paradigmatic windows. One is that of healing, and the other is that of awakening. Human beings have been engaging in contemplative practices for millennia to awaken and to awaken whatever the ultimate qualities of being human are, and what my people might describe as spiritual liberation, enlightenment, and so forth. People meditate for healing. My view of what creates healing in the body is twofold. One is that, over time, we’re learning to cultivate a space of nonjudgmental awareness, and we simply allow our experience to be as it is. We train ourselves because we have a lot of self-critical judgment going on opinions, and we have a natural proclivity as a human condition to judge opinions, dicing, and dissect. Over time, we train ourselves to create an environment of nonjudgmental awareness, and we simply allow ourselves to be, which means we allow ourselves to be physiologically, emotionally, and cognitively in terms of our thoughts. We just allow things to be nursed. This gradual emptying and emptying can be cognitive. It can be emotionally emptying, it can be emptying narratives, and it can be a physiological emptying. The other part of that is practicing in a deeply embodied way. The more deeply we go into the body, When you think about it, you just close your eyes and feel the body for a moment. How physical does that feel? Suddenly, what we think of as very physical is feeling more like the mind and starts to be very subtle. We’re already on that body, mind, and even spirit spectrum. The deeper we go into the body and the subtle levels of sensation we’re able to tap into and feel in the body, we’re going deep into that body-mind spectrum. As we do my experience with contemplative yoga and yogis, but also what’s being studied in neuroscience, is that all the internal systems in our body, which all have their way frequencies—we have our heartbeat, we have our brainwaves—but all the internal organs, all, the glands, and so forth, all have their way frequencies. These begin to cohere. The deeper we drop into our being in a most relaxed way, the more we begin to touch into and feel this palpable coherence, resonance, coherence, and flow that’s very powerful. To me, any time we spend in that state of flow is healing trauma. It’s allowing our nervous system to untangle itself and rewiring the brain to heal trauma. I think it’s a combination of developing this capacity to cultivate a very non-judgmental space of awareness and shifting our relationship with ourselves in that way, having vehicles for emptying whatever they are. This could be therapeutic in conversation. It can be through exercise and activity. It can also be through the stillness of meditation, but also, very importantly for me, spending time and allowing myself to flow.

I mean a deep physiological and actual physiological flow, which also includes emotional and cognitive lows. But to me, that’s one of the most profound ways to heal trauma and also one of the more profound ways, I think, to set ourselves up for restorative sleep.

Audrey Wells, MD

Fantastic. I thought that was a great explanation. As you’re talking, I am more aware of myself in my body. It just seems to me that being in that stage of acceptance, of emptying, is entirely conducive to getting to sleep or getting back to sleep. Is that something that you do at night?

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Absolutely. Well, I do it throughout the day, and I spend the first two and a half hours of every day doing a whole set of self-care, meditation, breath regulation, exercise, and stretching practices to set my day up. But throughout the day, I come back to that. Then, when I lay down in bed, I have a very brief routine. I’m able to fall asleep pretty quickly these days, but I try to move into sleep in that way. We can use our bodies for all sensory experiences that arise across the spectrum, from pleasant to neutral to unpleasant, from comfort to discomfort, pleasure to pain, and everything in between. That’s just the way it is. We’re pretty hardwired to chase comfort and avoid discomfort. that keeps us locked into a very mechanical way of being. It’s embracing the totality of our experience and just being willing to feel so many things. I mean, we have the worst opioid epidemic in history because people don’t want to feel so many things that are going wrong in our culture. Our society has to do with the way we’ve been acculturated to not feel and to not want to feel, so we can train ourselves to be willing to feel the full spectrum. Making a conscious choice, I think, is one of the ways we reclaim our dignity as human beings. I’m not going to live addicted to pleasure and comfort and the terror of discomfort and pay more. I’m just going to embrace the totality of my experience as a human being, and in doing so, the whole thing becomes much more workable. But even though there’s always going to be discomfort and there’s always going to be forms of suffering, we’re all going to grow old and die at some point. Having said that, the body is designed to experience bliss and being in the body absent some cause of present discomfort. Being in the body and feeling the full aliveness of being awake to the body from head to toe inside now and then and being connected to the natural world is an incredibly blissful and joyful experience. It’s how we become alive.

Audrey Wells, MD

I love that. I think that one of the reasons people want to sleep is to be awake. When you’re awake, you feel alive. I think the discussion today was so powerful. I want to thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for sharing your experiences. I wonder if you can tell the audience where they can find you.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

Sure. Well, you can go to my basic website, fleetmaull.com. And then if you’re interested in my courses and all the online summits we do, you can go to my institute, which is heartmind.co. You can also get there through fleetmaull.com.

Audrey Wells, MD

That’s great. Thank you so much. Dr. Maull. It was a pleasure to see you today, and thanks for sharing your wisdom.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P

It’s a pleasure to be with you, Audrey.