Reaching Nirvana through reading ebooks

In last nights "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee" lesson (week 3, lesson 2), I did alternate Cobra and Downward Facing Dog poses. It was interesting because as I repeated this sequence throughout the lesson, I found myself thinking about the entire curvature of my backbend, especially the upper part of my back, which has a tendency to be very rigid. I could feel that thinking about the rounding of my entire back and trying to keep my legs active took the edge off of my lower back receiving most of the workload.

As I walked up and down the hall today at work, I found myself thinking about this, and as I walked, I had the sensation that my lower back even in the walking position seems to get more than its fair share of the workload. I concentrated on trying to give my upper back more of a backbend -- which to people with good posture it would seem more like my moving from a tendency to be hunched over, to a more upright position -- and felt that it helped to bring my spine upright into a more holistically balanced position.

I've had a funny revelation lately. I have had chronic sleep issues since my cancer treatments in 2001, due to all of the myriad of subsequent side effects and health issues that followed. I keep thinking that I need to resolve them the "spiritual" way, and use the awake time to put myself into a meditative state and clear my mind. The other night, I lay awake for about 3 or 4 hours. Finally I gave in, opened my ebook, read a page of it, and promptly fell asleep. When I told John about it in the morning, he said "if the ebook puts you to sleep immediately, why don't you just read it instead of laying there trying to meditate?" Now, I read my ebook to put me to sleep. If I wake up in the night, I read another page of it and then fall asleep within minutes. Another example of how I'm learning to live my life, not in the way that I try to put pressure on myself to (or feel pressure from the outside world to), but in the way that makes it work.

My question is, if I do not use this sleepless time to meditate, and instead us it to read ebooks, will it take more time for me and my subsequent lives to reach nirvana? A somewhat puzzling conundrum to me.

This morning I did a full headstand, legs in the air. I didn't feel at all uneasy about doing it, and found a nice balance where I was able to relax the muscles in my neck. Afterwards I got up and started for the bathroom to brush my teeth, and then it occurred to me that coming out of a pose as demanding as a headstand should have a more gentle transition, so I went back into my office and did a child's pose for a minute. As I walked out of the office, I wondered whether getting the blood to my head would help me think better at work today.