Updated 08.08.25

What can we do when we’re feeling in a rut with our practice? Breathworks Teacher, Ginny Wall shares her tips…

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How’s your meditation practice going? Are you having one of those periods where everything feels relatively smooth and you’re enjoying your practice? Great! Or are you feeling stuck, barely managing to meditate at all or hitting some kind of obstacle in your practice? No problem! That might seem like an odd comment, but bear with me…

Everyone feels ‘stuck’ sometimes

Not only is it normal to feel ‘stuck’ in your practice at times, to lose your motivation or rhythm with it for a while, or to experience a ‘choppy’ patch in your meditation, but it’s genuinely not a problem. The only problem is when you believe that it shouldn’t be like this! Challenging times in your practice
can actually be times of real growth and deepening in your meditation – it all depends on how you meet the situation. If you bring to it an inner judgement of ‘this isn’t how it’s supposed to be’ or ‘I’m just no good at this meditation business’ then you’re likely to stay feeling stuck and, in due course, probably abandon your practice altogether. You can end up feeling bad about yourself or simply miss out on an opportunity to find a way through the difficult patch.

“The way out is the way through.”

This can sound like a such a cliché, but it’s really true in relation to meditation! When you gradually learn to meet the challenge with a little bit of curiosity, a modicum of self-kindness and an openness to going deeper, it’s like a door opens into another kind of practice altogether. And it’s the very process of loosening the self-judgement, getting creative with the way you approach meditation, and giving yourself a break, that makes it possible. 

For me, as a person with ADHD who often experiences overwhelm, and who has a couple of long-term health conditions, it’s been a complete eye-opener to learn to see my practice from this perspective. Rather than looking at it and saying to myself ‘this is all a bit scrappy’ or ‘not proper meditation’, I’ve learned to feel my way into the wonderful ease that comes when I stop judging myself and my practice as somehow ‘wanting’, and to show up for it as I am in that moment, even when that’s ‘feeling stuck’ or ‘full of hugely distracting thoughts’ or ‘haven’t meditated for ages, how can I even start again?’

Let’s look at a few of the common ways that we can experience meditation ‘roadblocks’ and what might help.

Three common issues in meditation

Too busy

This is a really common issue for people, whether they’re new to meditation or have been meditating for years. Life just feels really too full for us to carve out 10 minutes to practise! Maybe we have young kids, or a busy job, or caring responsibilities. If this sounds like you, then you’re not alone. The thing that really strikes me whenever people say that this is their roadblock is that it reveals a belief that everything else, and everyone else, in your life is more important than you and your needs. Wow, that’s quite a place to be and, when you see this clearly, it can give rise to a bit of self-compassion. 

The best tip I know for helping with this roadblock is to reconnect with your motivation for practice. In my case, when I was struggling to meditate when my kids were very little and life was full-on, not just all day long but often during the night too, the thing that helped me was to connect with my own desperation! That was my motivation to practice: desperation. And I found that consciously connecting with it actually helped. I realised how low I was coming on my own list of priorities, and I felt compassion for myself. I realised that as long as I believed that I was too busy to take care of myself in this way, that it would probably get worse, if anything.

Then, get creative with finding opportunities. I would often meditate for 2 or 3 minutes in the car if I’d arrived early for the school pick-up, or as part of my bathroom breaks at home or work. I’d meditate for a little while the minute the kids were in bed, even though the house was a tip and the washing up wasn’t yet done. As you do this, you start to realise that the feeling you have that everything else has to take priority isn’t actually true, it just feels that way. Once there’s a chink of light which enables you to see that there actually are some choices, other possibilities for practice (and other ways of taking care of yourself) begin to open up.

Too sleepy

Every time you meditate you fall asleep before the timer goes off or the audio finishes playing. Sound familiar? Again, it’s good to know that this is really normal. That can help ease the self-judgment or feeling that your practice shouldn’t be playing out this way. Medical experts tell us that most of us in our modern culture are chronically underslept. So, is it any surprise that our bodies, usually on the go and full of tension, conk out when we finally stop for a moment and do a practice that may relax us?

So, fix number one for this roadblock is simply to stop giving yourself a hard time for being tired. It sounds a bit simplistic or obvious, but actually the deep practice here is one of self-compassion. We begin to meet ourselves and our experience with less judgement and more compassion. That can be a game changer.

Were there a few moments during your practice before you feel asleep, or after you came round again? Lean into those moments and enjoy them. Practise a little self-compassion about the rest of it and maybe just accept that you needed a little snooze too!

Also, you can try a few practical tweaks that may help you stay a bit more alert. Try opening a window and sitting near it so you can feel the breeze on your skin. Experiment with meditating at a time of day when you’re naturally a bit less sleepy. Get a few early nights and try to top up your sleep ‘bank’. If you usually lie down to meditate, try sitting up. Make sure you’re well supported as you sit to meditate and not slouching on a comfy sofa. Create a little corner somewhere in your space that is associated with meditating and not sleeping or watching tv. Meditate outside. Meditate standing up for a couple of minutes. Have a play and see what helps you….

Too many thoughts or feelings

It’s not unusual for people to find that when they stop to meditate, their mind seems to be even busier than usual, or they become aware of emotions or feelings that didn’t seem to be there before. That’s also really normal, and not a sign of anything wrong. In fact, what’s happening here is that you usually ignore or supress your awareness of these inner states and experiences because you’re busy focussing on what’s going on around you – work, family, traffic, tv, exercise, housework etc. So, when you stop to meditate, you’re suddenly more aware of these inner experiences and it can feel like there’s something wrong, especially if it carries on throughout your meditation. Sometimes people abandon their practice altogether as they don’t like this experience, or judge it as a failure in their meditation. Sometimes, we’ve absorbed an idea that meditation is about ‘clearing your mind’ and that our busy mind full of thoughts shows we’re doing it wrong.

So, first, let’s bust that myth. Meditation does not mean you have to clear your mind! You can’t even do it when you try, right? This shift in attitude can help a lot in itself. There isn’t a problem with having a noisy, active mind or lot of emotional stuff going on during our meditation. Maybe knowing that helps us relax just a little and begin to let everything be exactly as it is in that moment. Maybe then we start realising that we’re not as stuck as we thought, that the thoughts do actually keep coming and going, that feelings also change and flow moment by moment, even the less pleasant ones.

For me, I found it really helpful when I decided to look at the busy twittering thoughts in my head as ‘brain-song’. If I sit out in the garden or the park, I enjoy the birdsong, rather than thinking it has to stop for me to relax. So, what if I take that same attitude to the twittering of my mind? I can still sit here and do my meditation while the mind twitters on! In fact, when I stop hooking in to every thought that goes through my mind, I begin to see that I can be here, be present, feel a little bit more peaceful, whatever my mind is saying. Frankly, there’s something pretty wonderful about stopping trying to control something you can’t control! Trying to do that was exhausting, wasn’t it?

Use something to anchor your attention to help you unhook from thoughts. It is often a real support in our practice to bring our attention to something other than our thoughts, to help us not get so caught up in thoughts and seemingly ‘stuck’ there. Some people find focusing on their breath to be a great ‘anchor’ for their attention in meditation. For others it may be tuning into sensations in the body, or sounds in the environment. If you’re someone who really struggles to keep your attention on one thing like this, try ‘turning up’ the sensory experience in some way, for example hold something in your hand that you like the feel of and squeeze it / turn it over and over / play with it as you meditate. Then you just keep bringing your attention back to the sensations in your hand, whenever you notice that you’re lost in thought or feelings. And, crucially, do this without giving yourself a hard time, even if you’ve been distracted for 90% of the time you set aside to meditate!

Going Deeper with your practice

As I mentioned before, the key to any of these ways of unblocking your practice is really about realising that the main problem lies in the way that you’ve been judging your practice or yourself.  When you see that there isn’t a problem with being exactly as you are, you may find that you can reconnect more with your own motivation for practice, give yourself a break and use one of the tips I’ve mentioned to support yourself, or get creative and find something else that will help. It’s like becoming a beginner over and over again, starting afresh and realising that this is really what meditating is all about!

One of the ways you can support yourself in this process is to practise with others. Maybe there’s a group near you, or you’ve got a friend who might be up for meditating together once in a while? Perhaps you can join in with one of the regular, free meditation sessions that Breathworks runs online via our Community of Practice? Or use an app on your phone?

We also have an online course specifically designed to help you explore ways forward in your practice and address places where you’re feeling stuck or blocked, called Going Deeper. It’s for anyone, whatever stage of practice they’re at. During the course, you meet one-to-one with one of our team of experienced mentors, and as part of a group with other meditators during three group sessions, to reflect on what’s happening in your practice and any places that you’re feeling stuck. With your mentor’s support, you identify what might help and how you might deepen in the areas you’ve been struggling with. You experiment a little and then come back together to see how you’re getting on. What people often report is that it’s precisely the places they’ve been struggling that end up becoming the openings into more rewarding practice and a deeper level of self-compassion. I wish you well with that exploration, however you go about it.

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