Hello and welcome back to the practicing human podcast the podcast where every day we are getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra.

In yesterday's episode we talked about sleep and open that in the context of

meditation and how deepening a meditation practice often leads to sleep.

We also talked about three other things that you can do before falling asleep that can help you

go into deeper sleep, but it did open with a conversation around meditation and sleep, which

can bring up the question of what is the difference between meditation and sleep? That's what we'll discuss today.

But first, it is two-bell Tuesday,

which means instead of our usual single bell,

we will be ringing two bells, and you can use this as an opportunity

to deepen your focus, deepen your presence. I'll ring the bells twice, bring your

full awareness to the sound until each one dissolves into silence. The I think anyone who has started a meditation practice or dabbled with it in any way is

familiar with the experience of wondering,

am I doing this right?

And often, when we start to get into a more relaxed, dreamy like state

in the meditation, where we're not quite awake, but we're also not quite sleeping.

We start to think, wait, maybe this is it.

Maybe this is the meditative state that I'm trying to get to.

And this is a question that I get a lot. Is that what meditation is? And although it's

impossible for me to accurately respond to that in a generic way, since there

are a lot of nuances to this answer, in general, if you're wondering if you were sleeping or not in your meditation, you most likely

were very relaxed, perhaps you were even sleeping, but you were not meditating.

...