Question: If we slept for two or three hours at night and then got up for a half hour and read your books or meditated and prayed and then went back to sleep, would that be better?

Sri Chinmoy: Unfortunately, it may happen that only after three hours will you enter into the deeper sleep that you need. For the first three hours you may not have slept properly at all, and then you are entering into a very nourishing and refreshing type of sleep. But mechanically you have set the alarm for three hours, so you may be getting up when you are just about to get the sleep that, in five minutes, will strengthen your nerves. At that moment, if you get up, it is not good.

You have to train the body in such a way that as soon as you go to bed, in five minutes or ten minutes you will fall asleep, before the mind starts thinking of incidents and events. Just think one sweet thought of me — that I gave you a smile one day, or something else. Remember that smile and swim in the sea of that smile as you go to sleep. Anything that gives you joy, that very thing remember. If you can remember that joy for five minutes as you go to sleep, from that joy, peace will enter into you.

Joy gives you peace. Even if you went to bed after quarrelling and fighting, or if unfortunate things have taken place at your job or with your friends, think of my smile, or of how I appreciated you once.

You should write these things down so that if they don’t come to your mind when you are upset, you can just look and refresh your memory. These sweet memories have so much power that they will immediately swallow all the bitter feelings that will prevent you from getting proper sleep.