When Practice Is Hard

If you are in crisis right now, go straight to “When to get help now,” below.

Sooner or later, practice gets hard. It happens to everyone, and it happens in two ways.

The first is slow and quiet. Life gets loud. A deadline, an illness, a move, a new relationship, a bad month. The morning practice slips “just for today,” the phone comes back to the bedside, and within weeks the old world is entirely convincing again. You have not stopped believing in the path. You have simply been pulled back under.

The second is sharp. Practice itself brings up something difficult: fear, grief, old memories, strange sensations, a sense that the ground has shifted. You did nothing wrong, and yet you feel worse, not better.

Both are normal. Both have a way back. This page is for both.

When Life Pulls You Back Under

The hook, again

You met shenpa in the Waking Hour: the hook, the charge that pulls you toward the screen, the drink, the old argument, the familiar story. Here is the plain truth about it. You will be hooked again, a thousand times. Being hooked is not the failure. Staying hooked without noticing is.

The five hindrances you met in Deeper Seeing, which the Shaolin master Shi Heng Yi teaches as the “five hindrances to self-mastery,” are the same forces that pull you back under in ordinary life: craving, ill will, dullness, restlessness, and doubt. They do not stop at the edge of the cushion.

The dream, again

The Yoga Vasishta calls this pull maya: the power that makes the passing scene look solid, urgent, and final. It is “such that it brings delight through its own destruction,” the text says, and “it ceases to exist even while it is being observed.”

That last phrase is the whole way back. You do not have to defeat maya. You only have to look. The moment you notice that you have been swept away, you are no longer entirely swept away. The noticing is already the waking.

The signs

It helps to know your own signs of drifting, because the drift itself makes them hard to see. Common ones:

The phone is back before your feet touch the floor.

The daily sit has become “tomorrow.”

You are speaking without the pause, and regretting it more often.

Old resentments feel righteous again.

You have stopped writing, stopped reading your intention, stopped meeting your practice partner.

The stories in your head feel completely true.

Write down your own three signs, and give the list to your practice partner. Ask them to tell you when they see one.

The way back from the drift

Do not wait for Monday, or for a better week, or for the feeling of readiness. The way back is always smaller than you think.

Start with the smallest form of the practice: three breaths in the morning, one line at night. Tomorrow, add the ten-minute sit. Next week, the full Waking Hour.

Do not punish yourself. As The Nightly Review in Coherence puts it, guilt is often the ego demanding attention so that it can build a story. You do not need the story. You need the next breath.

If you were counting days, begin again at day one, without drama.

Go back to an earlier writing rather than pressing on. If you were deep in Coherence, spend a week with the Waking Hour. There is no shame in this; the foundation is the practice.

Tell someone. A practice partner, a friend, a teacher. Drift hides in silence.

A Japanese proverb says it simply: fall down seven times, stand up eight.

When Practice Itself Is Hard

Ordinary difficulty

Most difficulty in practice is ordinary: restlessness, boredom, sleepiness, doubt, an aching knee. These are the five hindrances, and Deeper Seeing gives you their antidotes. Adjust the posture, shorten the sit, open the eyes, walk instead of sitting. None of this means you are failing.

Harder experiences

Less often, but more often than most people are told, meditation brings up experiences that are frightening or disorienting:

Waves of fear or panic.

Old grief, trauma, or memories surfacing with force.

Strange sensations: heat, energy, trembling, involuntary movements.

Changes in perception: lights, sounds, a sense of unreality, of the world or yourself seeming far away.

A loss of the ordinary sense of self that feels frightening rather than free.

Trouble sleeping, or swings in mood and energy.

A 2017 study from Brown University, The Varieties of Contemplative Experience, documented all of these among experienced Western Buddhist meditators. Some traditions call the hardest of these stretches the dark night. When a spiritual opening becomes overwhelming, the psychiatrists Stanislav and Christina Grof called it a spiritual emergency. They are not proof that something is terribly wrong, and they are not proof of spiritual attainment either. They are signals to adjust.

What to do

Reduce the intensity. Stop or shorten intensive practices: long sits; insight and inquiry practices; the lookings that empty or dissolve the body and the world (20 to 25, 29 to 31, and 33 to 35); any looking that holds or seals the breath (4 and 13); breathwork; fasting; and retreats.

Ground the body. Use Landing. Walk. Eat regular, substantial meals. Do physical work. Spend time outside and with people. Keep your eyes open when you sit, if you sit at all.

Stay within your window. The psychiatrist Dan Siegel coined the phrase “window of tolerance” for the range of arousal in which a person can feel and still function. Practice inside that window, not beyond it. Trauma-sensitive approaches to meditation, such as those described by David Treleaven, are built on this idea.

Keep the routines that hold you: sleep, meals, work, family.

Talk to someone who knows. Look for a meditation teacher experienced with these difficulties, or a therapist or doctor who understands them. Cheetah House, founded by the researcher Willoughby Britton, offers information and support for meditation-related difficulties.

Do not stop any prescribed medication without first talking to your doctor.

If you have a history of psychosis, bipolar disorder, seizures, or severe trauma, talk with a clinician before you return to intensive practice.

Many of these difficulties ease with time, grounding, and good support. If they persist, seek specialist help early; for some people they last for months, and they are easier to work with sooner than later.

When You Doubt the Whole Thing

Sometimes the difficulty is not an experience but a question: is any of this real, or worth it?

Doubt is one of the five hindrances, and it is also sometimes wisdom. Test the path by its fruits, not by its experiences. Are you kinder than you were? Steadier? More honest? Less driven by the hook? If so, the practice is working, whatever it feels like. If not, take an honest look at how you have been practicing, and ask someone you trust.

You may also simply need a rest. Taking a break is not quitting. The desk will be here.

The Way Back

Whenever you are lost, in drift or in difficulty, the way back is the same, and it takes less than a minute:

Stop: Whatever you are doing, stop for one moment.

Feel your weight: Feel your feet on the floor, or your body in the chair.

Breathe: Three slow breaths, the out-breath longer than the in-breath.

Name it: Silently, one word: “hooked,” “afraid,” “lost,” “tired.”

Take one small step: A glass of water, a short walk, a call to someone, a single line on paper.

Then begin again, with the smallest form of the practice, tomorrow morning.