If you just hit play, I'm guessing that you're feeling very hot and very awake and pretty fed up with this, the sleeplessness. Maybe you've been lying there for 20 minutes already, doing that thing where you try to breathe your way back to sleep, and it isn't working, and that's making you more annoyed, not less. This is perimenopause, or menopause, depending on where you are in it.Your body's internal thermostat is being thrown off by hormones that are shifting. Your temperature regulation is getting confused by chemistry that's in flux, and that same chemistry is why your mind might be racing right now, instead of easing back towards sleep the way it used to. This is a real physical thing happening inside of you.You're not imagining it. You're not being dramatic. Your hormones are doing exactly what they do at this stage of life, and it is genuinely disruptive to sleep.So here's what I would like you to do, before we do anything else together. If you're too hot, get the covers off you, all of them, if that's what it takes. If you can, splash some cool water on your wrists or the back of your neck.If you have a fan, turn it on. Do whatever you need to do to your bed and your body right now. Remake the pillow.Flip it over to the cool side. Open a window. The night air will help. Take your time. If you have to hit pause, then when you're ready, when you're cooler, come back to me, and we'll start. And if you did hit pause, and now you're back, or you didn't need to do any of those things, this is how we're going to help you find your way to sleep tonight.In a few minutes, we're going to slow your breathing down together, and then we'll work through your body, piece by piece, releasing whatever heat and tension it's still holding. And after that, I'm going to take you somewhere cool and quiet. A visualization designed to bring your temperature down and your mind down with it.There's a very good chance that by the end of this, you will be asleep. But before we start, please make sure that you are somewhere safe to fall asleep tonight. Preferably your comfortable bed, and not anywhere you need to stay alert.And if this is your first time listening, I'm glad you found your way. We put out two new episodes every week, and between them, we try to cover just about everything that might be keeping you awake. And it also doesn't hurt to have a voice at the end of the day, telling you that you're doing better than you think, especially when you're the person who is usually saying that to everyone else.So now, let's get you settled. Find whatever position lets your body actually rest. Adjust your pillow. Let your body settle wherever it wants to go. Let's start by bringing your attention to your face. Maybe there's a low-level frown that you don't even know you're wearing.Let it smooth out. Let the muscles around your eyes and mouth become loose. And feel your eyelids get so heavy that keeping them open starts to feel hard.And your jaw is next. You've been clenching it. Everybody clenches their jaw sometimes.But maybe for you, it's been a little more lately. So let it go. Let it relax.And your shoulders now. No wonder they're tight. Everything you're carrying for other people.Every responsibility. Every worry you haven't had time to put down. Your shoulders have been holding all of it, but they don't need to hold it right now. So let them drop. And feel the weight of your arms pulling them down. This tension. This wired, held-together feeling. It's not just stress. The same hormonal shifts that are disrupting your sleep also amplify the way your body responds to stress.Your nervous system is running hotter than it used to. It takes less time to wind you up and more to wind you down. But this is temporary.Your nervous system will eventually find its steady ground again. It's finding it right now with every breath you take. Breathe in deeply and imagine your chest expanding.Be aware of how each inhale opens it a little wider and how the tight band that wraps around your ribcage when you're frustrated and awake and trying too hard, that band is loosening. It's your breathing that's moving it. It's opening your chest.Check your hands and let your fingers uncurl until your palms are open. There's nothing you have to hold on to right now. Nothing to carry.Nothing to fix in your stomach. That constant low-level tightening that happens when your body is on alert and can't find the off switch. Let it go soft and notice what's underneath the tension.Just your own body. Breathing. Doing what it knows how to do. Because your body is still working in the middle of all this disruption, all these long nights. Your heart is beating. Your lungs are still filling.Every system that matters is doing its job. The part that's struggling right now. The thermostat.The sleep. It's a temporary malfunction in one department. It's not.The whole building. The whole building is sound. Now imagine that your hips are getting heavy.These are the joints that carry everything. Every step. Every flight of stairs.Every time you stood in a kitchen or paced in a hallway or walked to the car. They've done enough today. Imagine your thighs heavier and your knees and the muscles in your calves.All of it is getting heavier. All of it is sinking into the bed. Your whole body is heavier than it was 10 minutes ago.Quieter. The tension has been put down. The way you'd set down bags after carrying them a long distance.And what's left is just you. Not the version of you that holds everything together. Just the body that does all of that carrying.Finally, lying still. In a moment, I'm going to take you somewhere and all you need to do is to follow my voice and let the images come. Don't worry about seeing everything clearly. If your mind drifts, that's fine. We'll drift back. And if you fall asleep before I finish, good.That's the whole point. Even in sleep, your mind will still be listening. The suggestions that I weave into what comes next will settle in whether you are awake to hear them or not. So let go of any effort. This is the part where I do the work. And you, you just rest.I'd like you to imagine that there is a door in front of you. And the room that you're in right now is one that you have been in for too long. It's a room with too much noise in it.It's too warm. And there are too many people here that need things from you. You know this room.And right now, looking at this door, you understand something very simple. You can leave. So imagine yourself reaching for that handle.It's cool under your hand. And you turn it. You push the door open.And you step through. The door closes behind you with a soft click. And everything falls away.The buzzing, demanding, overstimulating world that you just left is on the other side of that door. And this side is something very different. It's a garden.Not a manicured garden. It is a place where things have been growing however they like for a long time. The grass is long and soft and deep green.And it smells like summer. It's cool here. The kind of cool that exists under old trees on warm afternoons, where the shade has been building all day, layer upon layer.And the air underneath is 10 degrees lower than the air in the sun. There's shade everywhere. The trees are enormous.And there are branches spreading out and interlocking overhead. So the sunlight only comes through in pieces, tappled, shifting. Small coins of gold landing on the grass and moving slowly as the leaves shift above them.You can smell wild roses growing up through the lower branches of one of the oaks. A tangle of pale pink flowers with open faces and soft petals. A fat bumblebee is moving through them, visiting one flower and then drifting to the next.You walk further into the garden. The grass is soft under your bare feet. There is the faintest movement of leaves overhead when the breeze comes through.And the breeze does come through. Every so often, a current of cool air finds the back of your neck and moves gently through your hair. And there, between two trees, is a hammock.It's not a narrow, tippy hammock, the kind that dumps you out the moment you shift your weight. This is a double hammock. It's made from thick woven cotton, cream-colored. The weave is tight enough to hold you, but open enough that air moves through it. The ropes are thick and knotted around the trunks at exactly the right height. And it hangs in that perfect curve.That means you'll sink into the center of it and be cradled, held on both sides. There are pillows in it, three of them, different sizes, covered in soft linen, slightly rumpled and folded at one end. A blanket, a thin cotton throw, so soft, the kind of fabric that has been washed a hundred times until it has no memory of roughness left. You lower yourself into the hammock. Your body finds the deepest part of the curve. And the sides rise above you just enough that you feel held, enclosed, but not trapped.The sky is right there above you through the canopy. And the air is moving across you. And you can see the garden on both sides, the long grass, the roses, the shifting light.You arrange the pillows, one behind your head, one between your knees, one under the arm that isn't doing anything. And you lie there above you. The canopy is a ceiling of leaves, green on green on green, with the light coming through in small, bright pieces that move when the breeze moves, throwing slow-shifting patterns across the hammock, across your arms, across your closed eyelids. The shade is deep and complete, even on the longest, hottest day. The sun cannot reach you here. Beside the hammock, within arm's reach, there's a small wooden table.And on it, a glass pitcher filled with water that is so cold. You can see the condensation running down the outside. The water is clear.And the pitcher is full of ice, not a few cubes, but packed with ice, the kind where the cubes are slightly cloudy and are beginning to crack with cold. There's a glass beside it. And you pour the sound of water over ice. the clink of cubes shifting in the glass. You bring it to your lips and drink. The cold moves through you, down through your chest, into your stomach, radiating outward from there, a spreading cool through your overheated body. You drink slowly. Nothing has ever been this cold and this perfect, and it's exactly what you needed. You take a piece of ice. It's slippery and already melting in your fingers, and you press it against the inside of your wrist. The cold is a shock for half a second, and you can feel your heart rate responding, and your blood cooling as it passes under the ice. You press the ice to the other wrist, and then to your temples, one side, and then the other, and the cold on your temples is the one that really does it. That's where the heat has been sitting all night, that tight, plushed, overheated band across your forehead, and the ice is drawing it out, replacing it with something clean and sharp and calm. You run the last of the melting cube across the back of your neck. The water trickles down between your shoulder blades, and you feel it all the way down your spine. The hammock is rocking. You didn't start it. The breeze did, the same breeze that keeps finding you, keeps arriving exactly when you need it, moving the hammock in a slow, shallow arc, back and forth. Not much, just enough to feel it, just enough that your body is being moved without moving itself, carried on a gentle rhythm it doesn't have to maintain. You're not doing anything. The trees are holding the hammock. The hammock is holding you. The breeze is doing the rocking, and for the first time in longer than you can remember, you are not the one keeping anything going. And this, this is what you needed. Not a device. Not a list of things to do differently. You just needed to stop, to be in a place where nothing is being asked of you, because you've been carrying so much. And underneath all of it, this, this body that won't cooperate, this sleep that keeps breaking apart, in this stage of life that nobody prepared you for, and that you're navigating mostly alone, mostly in the dark, mostly at three in the morning. You're doing an extraordinary job. You might not feel like you are. But from here, lying in this hammock, with a little distance from all of it, hopefully you can see it, how much you hold, how well you hold it together. This stage will have an end, and on the other side of it, something better is waiting. And even now, even in the middle of it, you've never been stronger than you are right now. You've never known yourself as well as you do now. The decisions that you make today are grounded in decades of experience, of surviving things you didn't always think you could survive, of figuring out who you are. By doing the hardest things possible, and not falling apart. The woman that you are right now, lying in this hammock, sometimes frustrated, sometimes tired and fed up, she is formidable. She just can't see it tonight, because she's tired. So rest, right here, in the shade, with the ice water, and the breeze, and the roses, and the bees. The light is changing, and the shadows between the trees are longer, and deeper, and cooler. The roses are closing, slowly pulling their petals inward for the night. The bumblebee is gone. The air is cooler now. You reach for the blanket folded at the end of the hammock. You shake it out, and it settles against your skin, like it weighs nothing at all. It's not for warmth. It's just for the feeling of being covered, of being tucked in, of being the one who, for once, is being taken care of. The sky through the canopy is turning from blue to deeper blue, and the first star is there, just one, visible through a gap in the leaves. Bright and steady, the evening sounds are arriving, crickets, darting up in the long grass, somewhere far away. An owl. The hammock rocks. The breeze is gentler now. A night breeze, even cooler and steadier, moving across your face, across your arms. Your breathing has slowed. It's deep now. It's even. Each exhale, it's carrying you further down into the hammock, further down into the dark. The hammock rocks. Your breathing moves it, or the breeze moves it, and you can't tell the difference anymore. And it doesn't matter. You are safe here. You are held here. And you are going to sleep now, because your body has been asking for this all day. And tomorrow, when you are awake, you will be closer to the other side of this. Than you were when you closed your eyes tonight. One night closer. One night further through the passage. One night nearer to the woman who is waiting for you there. Rested and fierce and full of an energy she hasn't felt in years. She is magnificent. But tonight, there is just this. The hammock. The stars. The cricket song. The slow, slow rocking. And sleep.