Tea Garden at Dusk | Guided Imagery for Sleep with Soft Rain, Slow Voice (55 min) (Video)

Transcript

Before we begin

This is a guided imagery session for sleep: a slow walk through a tea garden at dusk, with soft rain. Lie down somewhere safe and comfortable, and never listen while driving.

Nothing in this is medical treatment. If sleep has been difficult for weeks, that deserves a doctor's attention. Tonight is only a quiet place to rest the mind.

Settling

Let your body settle into the bed. Shift until nothing is pinching or pulling. Let the pillow take the full weight of your head.

Let the hands rest wherever they are comfortable. Let the feet fall open. There is nowhere you need to be for the rest of this.

If the room is warm, let the covers lie loose. If it is cool, pull them up to the chin. Make the small adjustments now, so there is nothing left to adjust later.

Take a slow breath in through the nose, and let it out gently through the mouth. Feel the shoulders drop a little on the way out.

Once more. In, slowly. And out, letting the whole body sink a little deeper. Now let the breath do its own quiet work. You do not have to guide it.

Notice the places where the body meets the bed. The heels. The backs of the legs. The shoulder blades. The back of the head. Let those places grow a little heavier.

I am going to describe a place. You do not need to picture it clearly. Some people see it, some only sense it, some just listen to the words. All of that is fine.

If you drift off part way through the walk, that is the whole idea. Nothing happens in this place that you could miss. Nobody is waiting for you at the end.

The path

Imagine you are standing at the top of a gentle slope, late in the evening, in hill country. In front of you, rows of tea bushes run down the hill in long, soft lines.

The bushes come up to about your waist. Their tops are flat and even, clipped by many careful hands over many years. They look like a green quilt laid over the land.

Between the rows, here and there, stand tall slender trees with thin leaves, planted long ago for shade. Their trunks are pale. Their tops move a little in air you cannot feel yet.

The light is going. The sky is the colour of weak tea, grey and faintly gold near the edge of the hills. The air has the cool, clean smell that comes before rain.

A narrow path of packed red earth leads down between the rows. You begin to walk it. There is no hurry. The slope does the work for you.

Your steps are slow and even. Each one lands softly. There is a rhythm to it, like breathing, and after a while you stop noticing that you are the one doing it.

You have a shawl over your shoulders, thick and soft, the kind that has been washed so many times it has gone gentle. You pull it a little closer. The warmth stays in.

Under your feet the earth is firm and slightly damp. Small stones press through the soles of your shoes now and then, and you step around them without thinking.

To your left the rows curve away around the shoulder of the hill. To your right they drop toward the valley floor, where the mist is already gathering in the low places.

On either side, the tea leaves brush your fingers if you let your hands trail. They are cool, waxy and smooth, with a faint green smell when you touch them.

Here and there a bush has been left to flower, and small white blossoms with yellow centres sit among the dark leaves, closing now that the light is going.

Somewhere below, a bird you cannot see calls twice and goes quiet. The hills answer with nothing. Only the rows, and the path, and the fading light.

Mist and rain

Mist is beginning to rise from the lower slopes. It moves slowly, like something breathing out. It softens the far rows until they fade into grey.

The first drops of rain arrive. They are small and far apart, and they land on the leaves with tiny sounds, each one separate, like someone tapping a fingertip on a table far away.

Then more of them, until the sound thickens into one soft, steady hush across the whole hillside. The leaves shine. The path darkens to the colour of brick.

You stop for a moment and simply listen. Rain on leaves, near and far. Rain on the path. The faint sound of water beginning to run in a ditch somewhere below.

The rain does not reach you much. The shawl covers your head and shoulders, and the drops that land on it are only cool points that fade as soon as they arrive.

You keep walking. Slowly. The rain and the mist have closed the world down to this path, these few rows, the next step and the one after it.

The smell has changed. Wet earth, and wet leaf, and a faint smoky sweetness from somewhere lower down, where a kitchen fire has been lit for the evening.

A little further down, the path passes under a line of taller trees, and the rain changes again, heavier drops, fewer of them, falling from leaf to leaf before they reach you.

Breathe it in. Cool, damp, green. Let the breath out as slowly as the rain is falling.

Lamps coming on

Ahead and below you, the first lamp comes on. A small yellow point in the mist, by a low house with a sloping roof. Then another, further along the hill.

One by one, lamps appear along the valley. Nobody is lighting them for you. It is only evening arriving in a place where evening arrives the same way every day.

Their light is soft and does not travel far. Each lamp makes a small warm room in the mist, and then the mist closes in again just beyond it.

Smoke rises from a chimney near one of the lamps, flattening out in the wet air and drifting along the hill. Somebody is making dinner. It has nothing to do with you.

You pass a wooden gate standing half open. Beyond it, a verandah, a single bulb under a tin shade, two empty chairs. Someone has gone in for the night. The chairs are waiting for no one.

The rain on the tin shade makes a brighter, closer sound than the rain on the leaves. You listen to the two together for a while as you walk slowly on.

A low wall runs beside the path here, old stones fitted together without mortar, furred with moss. You rest your hand on it as you pass. Cool, rough, solid, patient.

Nothing is asked of you here. Nothing needs deciding. The path only goes one way, down, and gently.

The bench

A little further, where the path bends, there is a bench. It is old wood, grey with weather, set under a wide tree whose leaves hold most of the rain off.

You sit. The wood is cool through your clothes for a moment, and then it is not. You draw your feet in a little and settle the shawl around your knees.

Above you the tree spreads wide and low. Its leaves are big, and the rain gathers on them and runs to the tips and drops in slow beads to the earth. Most of it never reaches you.

From here you can see the whole valley. The rows of tea going down into mist. The scattered lamps. The hills behind, almost gone now, just a darker grey against grey.

The rain is steady and soft. Drops gather on the leaves above you and fall in slow, irregular ways, one here, one there, onto the earth beside the bench.

A lamp hangs from a post not far from the bench, under a small tin hood. Its light is yellow and steady, and moths have found it, turning slowly in the glow.

You feel the weight of your own body on the bench. Heavy and warm inside the shawl. The breath coming and going without any help.

Far below, a door closes gently. A dog shakes itself and goes quiet. The valley is going to sleep the way it does every night, with nothing to mark the moment.

The mist climbs toward you a little at a time, closing the rows below, one after another, until the nearest lamp is only a warm smudge and the furthest ones have gone.

You could sit here for as long as you like. There is no one to meet, no reason to move. The lamps will stay lit without you watching them.

The shawl is warm. Your hands are warm inside it. Your feet are warm in your shoes. The only cool thing is the air on your face, and even that is soft.

Let the eyes rest, even the imagined ones. Let the valley be there without looking at it. The rain will keep falling whether or not you listen.

Thinning out

The mist is closer now. The furthest lamps have gone soft, then softer. Only the nearest ones remain, and they are only a warmth, not a shape.

The sound of the rain is the same sound it has been all along. Steady. Soft. Asking nothing.

Warm shawl. Cool air. The weight of the body on the bench, and the bench on the earth, and the earth holding everything up.

The lamps. The leaves. The rain.

You do not have to walk back. Nobody needs you to. You can stay here, and let it grow darker, and let the rain carry on.

The valley has gone to sleep, and nobody noticed when. That is how sleep comes to places. Quietly, while the rain keeps time, without anyone deciding.

Breath coming in like mist. Breath going out like rain.

Heavy. Warm. Held.

The sound will stay with you for a while, and then it will fade. There is nothing more to do.