The Resilient Heart: A family learns to sleep again

I live in the UK with my husband and 2 beautiful young sons Sam and Alex. Alex turned 2 in January and has for many months now been waking 4 or 5 times a night, and more recently ending up in bed with me in a bid that we would all get back to sleep. This indeed was only serving to reduce his ability to sleep on his own. I was feeling constantly exhausted. It was becoming more and more difficult to tackle the sleeping issue because of my exhaustion and I was becoming more and more stressed every day.

I acquired my emWave in February having received heart resilence training through one of your excellent partners in the UK (EI World), and was lucky zach spacer enough to enjoy a large amount of input from Bruce Cryer, President of HeartMath LLC at that training. I’ve used the emWave as often as two young children have allowed since then, and my husband has been helping to deal with Alex on alternate nights so that I’ve had more regular nights of less disturbed sleep.

One night last week I decided to crack the poor sleeping habit that my son has developed and when he woke at 12:30am crying for me I took him to my office where we’d laid out a tempoary cot so that his frantic screaming was less likely to disturb the rest of the household. I placed him in his cot and sat in my office chair so that he knew he was safe and I was there. I was determined not to comfort him because this pattern has led to more of the same behaviour, so I let him cry. As a mother this is incredibly hard to do because our natural instinct is to comfort. He screamed and screamed for 50 mins calling my name, and asking to come into my bed. Normally this would have wrenched at my heart and I would have given in. However, I attached the emWave to my ear and breathed slowly, visualising my heart swelling with love and compassion. The light went green and I can honestly say that for about 80% of the time the light stayed green. I was able to enjoy the view from the window of my office as the night sky twinkled over the sleeping town where I live. For the first time I could recognise my two year olds cries were his way of testing boundaries. Finally, he fell asleep on his own for the rest of the night and I went to bed beautifully peaceful and content.

Since that night my son has woken only towards late morning rather than every couple of hours throughout the night. I am now more watchful for the times in the day when he tests his boundaries and am able to calmly deal with his tantrums in an assertive and loving way. I shall continue to use the emWave and the techniques of care and compassion for myself, and for my family and look forward to transversing the stages of childhood in a much less stressful way.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>