Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: There is no need to fear. Just chant Om Namah Shivaya before sleeping at night, or Jai Gurudev, or you can say both and then sleep.
See in our country, and in other countries around the world, before sleeping, children were made to say prayers, is it not? Does anyone follow this now-a-days? How many of you here do it? (A few people raise their hands) See, very few sitting here follow this. Before sleeping all of you should pray and make the children pray too. Chant one shloka (prayer verse), or take the name of some deity you revere, or just offer thanks to God for the day given to you.
There is no need to pray in Sanskrit only. Even saying a prayer in Hindi will do. God does not only know Sanskrit. He understands your regional languages as well. So just pray. What is important is the feeling. So before you sleep join your hands and pray, ‘Thank you God for the gift of today. Bless me that I may sleep well tonight and may my day tomorrow be good’.
So you may recite a few lines like this. Or you may just remember God, and chant any name of the Lord that you know. You can chant the name of your deity or your Guru, or any saint. Pray and surrender everything to them and go to sleep. In the ancient days, children would pray to their mother and father and then go to sleep. But nowadays children don’t have such devotion towards their parents. If parents keep fighting with each other the whole day then how will the children feel like praying to them? They think, ‘The parents keep fighting with each other, how we can treat them as God?’
If you do not believe in God, or any other deity, then also it is fine. There is no compulsion to believe in God. In that case sit silently with yourself for a few moments and just quiet the mind. Simply remind yourself, ‘My soul is eternal and I am pure’. In the Ashtavakra Gita, it is said, ‘Aho Aham Namo Mahiyam’, this means, ‘I bow down to myself’. We can say this (bowing down to oneself) only when there is no sense of guilt within us. Thinking this way, just relax within yourself. You should do this much at least. So meditate for some time and then sleep. Then you will not have bad dreams and you will have good quality sleep.
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