← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Mishka and the Bear - A Story for Anyone Who Has Ever Felt Different
00:39:00
Loading summary
Transcript9 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey, it's Eric. Before we begin tonight's episode, just a quick reminder. You're about to hear a few ads that help to support Listen to Sleep. If you'd rather drift off without them, you can join Listen to Sleep plus and get every episode ad free, plus bonus stories and meditations. Just go to ListenToSleep.com and click on Support to learn more.
- [00:30]
B
We're lost. It feels like we're going round in circles. I'm gonna ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're trying to get to the state fairgrounds.
- [00:40]
C
Well, you're going to take a left at the old oak tree at this here road. Nah, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.
- [00:46]
B
How is their signal out here?
- [00:48]
C
T Mobile and US Cellular are coming together so the network out here is huge. We get the same great signal as the city, saving a boatload with benefits. And there's a five year price guarantee too. Okay, here's the turn.
- [01:00]
B
Actually, can you pull up the way to a T Mobile store?
- [01:04]
C
America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits the other guys leave out plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available at US Cellular stores in hermiston Best Mobile Network Based on analysis by Ooklo Speed test intelligence data second half of 2025 bigger network the combination of T Mobile's and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network' price guarantee on talk, text and data exclusions like taxes and fees apply ct mobile.com for details.
- [01:29]
B
Have you ever been stuck on a weight loss plateau? Trying everything and anything you can to lose that extra weight and reach peak health? We've all been there, but Noom's unlocked a secret to reaching the mountaintop. Go in micro the Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at noom.com that's n o o m.com micro changes big results Noom GLP1 RX program involves healthy diet, exercise and support. Individual results may vary. Meds and personalization based on clinical need. Not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. No affiliation with Novo Nordisk Inc. The only US source of FDA approved semaglutide. Not available in all 50 US states. Not feeling the spring energy yet? You're not behind with growtherapy, you can start small, like talking to someone who gets it covered by insurance. Built for real progress, whether it's your first time in therapy or your 50th. Grow makes it easier to find a therapist who fits you, not the other way around. You can search by what matters like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability and get started in as little as two days. And if something comes up, you can Cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. Grow helps you find therapy on your time. Whatever challenges you're facing. Grow Therapy is here to help. Grow accepts over 100 insurance plans. Sessions average about $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growtherapy.com acast today to get started. That's growththerapy.com acast growth acast availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
- [03:16]
A
Foreign. It's Eric welcome back to Listen to sleep, where ancient wisdom meets deep rest well, this week I've been thinking a lot about the things we hide about ourselves, all the things about us that we wish were different, and how this can leave us feeling like we're not good enough or something is wrong with us. I spent so much of my life feeling like that before I finally started to question those stories I was telling about myself. And that curiosity helped me begin to accept myself with understanding and compassion, the same as I would my family and friends. This acceptance was the first step on the path to finding the peace of knowing who I really am. Tonight's story comes from that exploration. It's about a girl named Mishka who lives in a village at the edge of a great forest. Like many of us, she carries something difficult in her dreams. She visits a bear living deep in the woods, a creature the whole village has misunderstood and made frightening. And she begins to see something she hadn't expected, that the things we fear most about ourselves are often not problems at all. They are gifts waiting to be recognized. Before we get to tonight's story, I have some exciting news. My first book is out in the world. It's called Awaken your Myth. And if you've ever felt stuck like the hard things you've been through don't quite add up to anything yet, or like the life you're living isn't quite the one you feel like you were meant for, well, this book was written for you. Six steps that weave together ancient myth and and modern mindfulness to help you move from that stuck place into a life of real purpose and presence. It's full of tools and stories to help you meet change with courage and finally find the peace you've been looking for. You can find it wherever books are sold or@awakenyourmyth.com book there's a link in the show Notes. Let's take a deep breath in and out. Just letting go of the day. Feeling the weight of gravity pulling you deep down into the mattress. Another deep breath in and out. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. This is your time. Quiet time. One more deep breath in and out. If you get tired while I'm reading to you, that's okay. Just let yourself drift off. Mishka and the Bear There was once a village at the edge of a great forest, where the trees grew so tall their tops disappeared into the clouds, and the nights were so quiet you could hear the stars. Mishka lived there with her parents, in a small house with a blue door and a garden full of things that smelled good in the rain. She was 11 years old, curious about most things and uncommonly good at being still. She had learned to be still because of the nights. Every evening when the lamps were lit and the village grew quiet, Mishka would lie in her bed and feel the particular fear that had followed her since she was small. It lived at the edge of sleep. It came when the world went soft and dark and her body was almost, but not quite, at rest. She couldn't name it or explain it. She only knew it felt like it was there, waiting, the way cold air waits on the other side of a door. Her mother sat with her every night, and that helped. Over time, Mishka had learned a few things that helped too, noticing the weight of her blanket, the sound of the wind in the trees, the scent of the flowers drifting in from the garden outside her window. She had learned to rest inside those simple things and let the fear move through without fighting it. But she had never stopped being a little afraid. That is, until the night she found the bear. She didn't go looking for it. She was simply falling asleep, drifting in that soft, nameless country between waking and dreaming. When she felt the air change, it grew warmer. There was a scent she couldn't quite place, pine and dark earth and something older underneath, like stone that has never seen the sun. She opened her eyes and just inside the tree line, in the way that things appear in almost dreams, not quite like seeing, more like knowing there was a bear. It was large and dark and very still. It sat back on its haunches with a patience that seemed to have no beginning and no end, the way mountains are patient, the way rivers are patient. Its fur was deep brown, nearly black in the shadows, and its eyes caught the Faint light of the dream sky. And Held was looking at her. Mishka waited to be afraid. Some fear came, yes. A small, quick flutter in her chest. But underneath the fear was something else. The bear was not prowling or posturing. It was simply there, watching her. With an attention so complete and steady. That she felt oddly more seen than threatened. She had the sense, without knowing why. That it had been there for a long time. That it had been sitting at the edge of that forest. Patient as stone. Through many nights she had spent being afraid. Without ever looking up to notice. She looked at its face. It was calm, but not empty. There was something moving behind those eyes. Like it was taking in things she couldn't see. Knowing things she didn't know. Reading the air and the dark and the dream itself. And underneath that pressed down and kept quiet. Something that looked a little like loneliness. She recognized that. She pulled her knees to her chest and sat. And looked back at it. And waited. The bear did not speak that first night. It only watched her, and she watched it. And the dream held them both in its quiet. Until she slipped down into deeper sleep. And the forest faded. But she came back the next night, and the night after that. Slowly, the bear moved closer. Carefully. The way wild things approach when they are curious. But have learned caution. A little nearer each time. Until one night it was sitting close enough that she could hear it breathing slow and deep. And she could see the small movement of its ears and nose. As it was taking in the air around her. She began to understand that it was always taking in something. The weather moving in days before it arrived. The roots below the ground. And what they needed. The places in the forest where something was changing. Some tree falling sick. Some stream running dry. The fears and hopes of the village people sensed somehow from a distance. The way you feel heat from a fire before you see the flames. It knew things. That was simply what it did. It was made for knowing. On one of those early nights, she followed it deeper into the forest. The trees were enormous there. Older than the village. Older than any story she knew. The bear moved between them without sound. Its dark shape hardly darker than the shadows around it. And she followed as quietly as she could. It stopped at a hollow in a great old root. She looked inside and found a collection of small things arranged with care. A single glove, worn soft with years of use. A folded piece of paper with writing on it, too faded to read. A child's carved wooden bird missing one wing. A woman's ring with a dent worn into it from a long lifetime. Of wearing lost things. Not things the forest had claimed, things people had left. Not always on purpose. Sometimes grief makes you set things down and forget where. Sometimes the weight of something becomes too much to carry, and you find a quiet place and put it down and tell yourself you'll come back for it later. The bear had found them all, had gathered them, had kept them here in the dark where they would be safe. She looked at the bear. Do people come back for them? She asked. Sometimes, it said. When they're ready to carry what they set down. She thought about the ring with the dent, the woman who had worn it, whatever had become too heavy to hold. She thought about the bear finding it, feeling where it was, following that knowing through the dark trees to this hollow root and placing it carefully with the others, waiting through however many seasons in case that woman one day found her way back and was ready. She thought this is what the knowing is for. Not to frighten anyone, to tend to them, to hold what they cannot hold until they can. She began to notice something else, too. The bear had a way of pausing sometimes mid thought, mid movement, as though it had suddenly remembered something uncomfortable. In those moments, it would go very still and seem to compress itself slightly, making itself smaller than it was. It would stop whatever quiet knowing it had been doing and look at the ground and wait until the moment passed. She watched this happen many times before she understood what she was seeing. The bear was hiding. Not from her, from something older than her, a habit that had developed from trying not to be what it was. At the far edge of the dream, there was a village, small and lamplit, ringed by the same tall forest she knew from home. And in that village, the people were afraid of the bear. She could hear it in the stories they told. The bear knew things it shouldn't, they said it appeared at the edge of the wood before storms came, before losses came, before things changed. And the people had decided long ago that this was not right, that knowing things before they happened was not a gift, but a warning sign. That something so large and so strange and so watchful could only mean harm. They had seen it to be right too many times. They had told their children to stay away from the forest when the bear was near. They had told the story so long and so firmly that it had become the only story. And the bear had heard it, had felt it in the way it felt everything which was completely. Which was all the way down, and had learned to distrust its own knowing, had learned to press it down and keep it quiet and pretend when it could to be just an ordinary bear. Who did not sense the shape of things before they arrived. But it was not an ordinary bear. And the pretending had made it lonely in a way that had no bottom. Mishka thought about that for a long while. On the fourth night, she asked, what is it like, knowing things? The bear was quiet for a moment. Then it said, like standing in a river. Everything moving through. You don't choose what you feel. It just comes. She waited. When I was young, I didn't know it was unusual, the bear said. I would tell the birds where the berries were. I would feel the ice thinning before anyone had walked on it. And stay away. I found a child once who was lost in the forest. Because I felt where she was the way you feel warmth. And I just followed it there. But people saw me finding things, knowing things. And they didn't understand it. So they made it into something frightening. And when they were frightened, you started to think they were right, Mishka said. The bear looked at her steadily. I started to think there was something wrong with me. The. That the knowing was too much, too strange. That a creature who could be ordinary should choose to be ordinary. Mishka was quiet for a long time. Then she told the bear about her nights. About the thing that waited at the edge of sleep. About how she had spent so long being afraid of it. She told it about learning slowly. How to stop fighting, to notice what was soft. To let the fear move through without treating it like the whole truth. The bear listened without moving, without interrupting. When she was done, it was still for a long time. You learned to trust what you already knew, it said. I suppose I did, she said. She hadn't thought of it that way before. That's what I've forgotten, the bear said. How to trust it. She took her time with the next part. She didn't rush it. She knew from her own nights that trust comes back slowly when it's been gone a while. It comes back the way warmth comes back to cold hands. Gradually, from the inside out. So she sat with the bear night after night. And she let it know things in her presence. Without making it strange. When it raised its head and read the air. She didn't look at it with fear or fascination. Only with ordinary acceptance. The way you look at a friend. Doing what they are simply good at. When it went still, with that quality of deep attending, ears forward, nose lifted, reading something invisible. She waited and let it pass and said nothing. Sometimes it would tell her what it had sensed. Afterward, a storm coming from the northwest, three days out, carrying more cold than usual. A fox with a lame leg in the eastern part of the forest, managing well enough, but worth keeping an eye on. A deep unhappiness in one of the houses at the edge of the village. The kind of sadness that needs time. And she listened to all of it. She didn't question it or test it or ask how it knew. She just received it the way you receive a story, openly letting it settle, trusting that it meant something. She noticed over those nights that the bear wasn't pausing as often to remember to be smaller. The old habit ran deep, and it didn't vanish all at once. Some evenings it still caught itself and went careful and quiet in that same way. That meant it was hiding a little. But the gaps between those moments began to grow longer, and in the space between them the bear was simply and fully itself, large and still and knowing and present. She understood that this was what it had always been, that all those years of making itself smaller had not changed what it was, only hidden it. The knowing had gone right on happening underneath, faithful and patient, like a river running under ice. On the fifth night, Mishka walked to the village. In her dream, she stood at the edge of it, where the lamplight met the dark, and she spoke to the people there. She didn't argue or accuse. She told them what she had seen. The bear sitting patient at the edge of the wood. The way it felt the weather coming in and stayed where it could warm the forest. The child it had found years ago by following the warmth of her life through the trees. She told them that the knowing was what the bear was made for, that being good at something unusual is not the same as being dangerous. The people were quiet. Some of them shook their heads. Some moved closer to their fires. But some of them seemed to be recognizing something. An older man near the back of the group looked at his hands. For a long time, Mishka thought he might be someone who had his own kind of knowing, that he had spent many years keeping quiet. A woman with a young child on her hip said, my daughter sees things, knows things. We've been telling her to stop. Mishka looked at her. Please don't, she said. Change in a village is slow. It moves like weather, not like a door opening. It takes seasons. But something shifted that night, and in the nights that followed. Some people began to leave space for what they didn't understand. Some of them began to tell a different story, not the old story of the strange and frightening thing at the edge of the wood, but a newer, truer one. About something steady in the dark. Something that sensed what was coming and held the knowing, carefully offering it to whoever was willing to receive it. And the bear felt the story change. It felt it, the way it felt everything, completely, all the way down. It began to move more freely, to follow its knowing, where it led without pausing to apologize for it. One evening, three days before, a late frost arrived. It moved to the edge of the village and stood there in the moonlight. Visible, patient, unhurried. Just standing, just being seen. A few of the farmers watched from their windows. They were afraid, some of them. But a few of them, watching that enormous, dark shape stand there at the tree line with no aggression, no threat. Only that steady, watchful presence. Well, they felt something shift in the place where the fear lived. In the morning, the frost came, hard and sudden. The kind that takes seedlings. But several families had covered theirs in the night. Not because a messenger had warned them or the sky had looked particularly ominous. Because something in them had responded to the bear standing patient in the moonlight. And they had thought perhaps. Perhaps there is something to know here. And their seedlings survived. No one spoke about it directly, but something had shifted slightly and permanently. In the way the village held the story of the bear. A little more room had opened in it. A little more possibility. Mishka watched all of this from the dream. And felt something she didn't have an exact word for not pride, not quite. Something quieter than that. The feeling of watching the right thing happen slowly, in the right way, at the right pace. Mishka thought about the bear often in the days that followed in the waking world. Going about ordinary things. Opening the blue door, Smelling flowers in the garden. Walking to the village and back. She would think about what they had found together in the dream. She thought about how the things that make us different are so often the things that go deepest. The ways of seeing and knowing and feeling. That don't fit neatly into ordinary life. The parts of ourselves that get called strange before anyone thinks to call them gifts. She thought about her own nights. How years of lying afraid in the dark. Had made her someone who knew how to be present in hard moments. How to sit with discomfort without being pulled under. How to find the small and steady things when everything else felt uncertain. How to wait without fighting for something difficult to pass. She had learned that by going through what she'd gone through. She could not have learned it in any other way. The very thing that had frightened her most. Had been quietly making her into someone particular. Someone who Knew the dark from the inside. And this was not a small thing. She was beginning to understand that it was, in fact, a very rare thing. The kind of thing that would matter in ways she couldn't yet see for the whole of her life ahead. She did not know yet exactly what she would do with it. She was 11, and the story of what she would do with it had barely begun. But she had a kind of knowing that had come the hard way, which is the way that lasts. In Mishka's dreams, the bear was still there. Every night. It was different now, more itself. It sat at the edge of the dream or moved through the forest with a settled quality. A creature at home in its own nature. When it raised its head to read the air, it did so openly, without hiding. When something came through, it followed where it led. There was still the occasional hesitation, the ghost of the old habit pressing in. Those things don't vanish entirely. The marks of years of making yourself small take a long time to fully clear. But the bear met those moments now with something that looked like patience. Like it knew the hesitation for what it was and could wait for it to pass. This is how it goes with the things we fear about ourselves. We make them strange. We press them down and keep them quiet. And try to be more ordinary than we are. And something in us waits, patient as a bear in a dark forest, keeping the knowing safe until we're ready to trust it again. Until the night we see the whole of us clearly and we are not afraid. And the forest opens. And what comes out into the light is not strange at all. It is simply, finally us. So when you lie down tonight and the world goes soft and quiet, and sleep begins to come, let it come. If there is something in you that has been waiting to be seen, something you've been carrying quietly, not sure if it was a gift or a problem. You don't have to do anything about that tonight. Just let it rest near you in the dark. Let it breathe. Let it be a part of the dream. There is a forest at the edge of your sleeping. There is something patient in that forest. Steady and unhurried, keeping watch. It has always been there. And it knows the way home. Rest well, friend. Good night.