Fast Asleep, Wide Awake: Discover the secrets of restorative sleep and vibrant energy. Dr Ramlakhan Nerina
this awakening, I began to learn about balance and life, but in a different way to the way I’d been taught in conventional academia. What I’d been feeling and sensing suddenly began to make sense, and as if by magic, as I learnt more, opportunities to teach others from my experiences started turning up.
The most significant shift was in my relationship with fear – which had been blocking my happiness, my energy and life force, and stopping me from sleeping – and as I learnt how to sleep deeply and balance my energy, so my work with others deepened and flourished. I was so excited about these changes in my life and how I was feeling that I was hungry to learn more. I devoured books on healing and Eastern philosophy. I read about energy medicine and physics (a favourite subject at school), and the work of medical practitioners and doctors such as Dr Deepak Chopra and Dr Lissa Rankin who had both turned to holistic practices to bring about healing in their own lives and their patients. I attended workshops and seminars and experimented with different types of yoga and meditation. As I learnt I continued to heal myself and my own life, I took this learning into my work and delighted in finding new ways of bringing exhausted, sleep-deprived cynics (those corporate auditoriums) along with my thinking.
When I started delving deeper into the Eastern sciences, I began to get very excited by what I was learning about energy (probably because of my own personal challenges to manage my own energy). Western science and physics had taught me that energy was ‘the physical capacity to do work’ but in the ancient texts I started to learn more about life force energy.
Our life force, our energy, sits at the centre of our lives, enabling us to realise our potential, to achieve, to do whatever we need to do to get through the day and more, to be well and healthy and free of disease. When this energy is vibrant, it enables us to be the best that we can be. When we’re wide awake and filled with this life force, living just seems so much easier. We can cope with life’s challenges and demands. We make better decisions and more informed choices, acknowledge what is possible, sort the wheat from the chaff and get through our days feeling bright and in control.
Living with extraordinary energy fuels every day with more happiness and joy.
We can now measure this energy, as the Russian-born physicist Dr Konstantin Korotkov – a pioneer in the field of human energy measurement – has developed highly innovative technology for measuring the life force of all living organisms, including plants. His Gas Discharge Visualisation (GDV) technology has identified that all living things have an energy field that is measurable and is affected by their environment, external forces and influences.4 GDV technology is now being used in Russia for medical diagnostics and increasing numbers of clinicians are using it in everyday practice. Now it is also being used in more than 40 countries for research and for the analysis of human energy fields. What this tells me, and I hope it makes you excited too, is this:
Our life force not only exists but we can supercharge it by applying the Fast Asleep, Wide Awake formula.
How the FAWA Formula Works
Starting in 2010, and looking over the data from thousands of clients, I began to see a clear pattern of how my clients and patients were overcoming their sleep problems to finding the energy to truly engage with life. I noticed that whether I was working face to face in my consulting room or with hundreds of people in an auditorium, healing seemed to follow the same five-step formula:
Step 1: Shifting Awareness
The first step of the formula is focused on helping you understand what is going on with your sleep and your energy. This stage of my work often brings about a shift in awareness, which is crucial in being able to take responsibility and make different choices. In Tired But Wired I describe this as the ARC of transformation:
awareness
responsibility
choices
So an important part of this process is digging deep within so that you can understand why things have become a certain way and, importantly, what you need to do about it, as well as undertaking a personal reality check. You’ll also find how your beliefs can play a significant role in how you sleep. The questions I invite you to reflect on in your Personal Reality Check (see Chapter 5) are the same ones I would ask you if you were sitting with me in a consulting room at my clinic.
Step 2: Cleaning Up Your Energy
This next step is where my expertise as a physiologist really comes into play, and I cannot overemphasise the importance of this stage of the programme.
Often very soon after meeting my client/patient, I can make an intuitive assumption of how their nervous system is running – whether it’s in SAFETY or SURVIVAL mode. The questions I then ask – the ones you will reflect on in your Personal Reality Check – will validate this assumption.
Next I recommend five strategies, the 5 Non-negotiables (5NNs), to be implemented for at least the next 21 days. These five small strategies change the tuning of the nervous system and shift it from SURVIVAL mode to SAFETY mode. Once this vital recalibration has taken place the other sleep and energy tools can be applied to even more powerful effect. Conversely, these tools are totally ineffective if you’re running in SURVIVAL mode.
Another important aspect of using the 5NNs is that when you’re in a state of exhaustion you need some quick wins. You need to experience some positive changes – improved sleep and energy – to keep you moving forwards and to prepare you for the deeper work to come, and this is exactly what this step of the FAWA formula is designed to do.
The 5NNs are simple and doable – important if you’re exhausted and running on empty.
Soon you will learn exactly how to apply these 5NNs, but if you’re feeling intrigued they are to do with:
How and what you eat and drink.
What you do before your head hits the pillow.
Your relationship with information and technology.
Step 3: Refining Sleep Quality and Depth
Once the 5NNs have been applied, your body and nervous system are in a much more responsive state and you’ll be ready to work with the Pure Sleep Programme. The tools in this section range from simple, commonsense and practical Essentials to weird and wonderful Deeper Tools, incorporating techniques that I’ve learnt from Eastern philosophy and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). These techniques are based on sciences that have been around for thousands of years and they really work – I have seen this even with clients who’ve come to me with a lifelong history of sleep problems that has run in the family for generations. (Don’t forget, my original training is as a Western scientist and I am constantly looking for data to support my findings.)
These tools work by activating the branch of the nervous system that enables you to sleep. Your sleep will start to be more refined and deeper. You may still experience occasional sleep difficulties but they will feel less catastrophic because your energy levels will have lifted due to the energy clean-up in Step 2. You will notice that, as you worry less about not sleeping, this in itself – the absence of worry – leads to better sleep. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
To sleep beautifully you almost need to not care about how you sleep.
Step 4: Doing The Real Work and Tapping into Vibrant Energy
At this point, you’ll be ready for me to share a very special programme with you. The Energy for Life Programme will support you in doing The Real Work. With these tools you can explore happiness and meaning along with dealing with relationships, uncertainty and fears.
Years ago my work with sleep took a strange turn and I, a physiologist and sleep expert, found myself on stages in packed-out auditoriums talking about such things. But why? It’s quite simple really – in my quest to solve people’s sleep problems (and my own) I ended up talking about the very things that were stopping people from sleeping and draining their