Quote of the Day: Dalai Lama on Daily Inspiration

If you have ever tried to “power through” your inner life, journaling at midnight, meditating on fumes, calling exhaustion discipline, then this insight from the Dalai Lama is the permission slip you’ve been waiting for: “Sleep is the best meditation.”

It sounds almost mischievous, as if spiritual progress could be achieved by doing less. But the line lands because it tells the truth about how the mind actually works. The clearest intentions collapse when the nervous system is overdrawn. Rest is not a detour from practice; it is the ground that makes practice possible. Sleep is the original act of letting go: no mantras, no striving, just the body returning you, quietly, to baseline.

Modern science has, in a way, backed into the same wisdom. Sleep consolidates memory, regulates emotion, and clears metabolic waste from the brain. When we skimp, we become more reactive, less empathic, and strangely certain about the wrong things. Meditation can soften those rough edges, but so can the simplest intervention: a full night’s rest. A well-slept mind can notice thoughts without fusing with them, meet anger without obeying it, and sustain attention without white-knuckling it, an everyday form of resilience.

Coming from Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, the point carries unusual authority: a lifetime of rigorous Tibetan training paired with a global message of practical compassion and peace. His teachings insist that wisdom is inseparable from humane care, especially toward oneself.

So on this June Thursday, apply the lesson with disarming simplicity: if your meditation feels like a fight, go to bed. Treat sleep as the first, most available form of humanity, and let clarity return on its own.