Tuesday morning, 6 AM. I sat down on my cushion and within three breaths, I was in that place. You know the one. Where the room disappears, your body disappears, and there’s just this immense, quiet, humming stillness that feels like it was always there underneath everything. Twenty minutes passed like twenty seconds. I stood up feeling like I’d been washed clean from the inside out.
Wednesday morning, 6 AM. Same cushion. Same room. Same me. And nothing. For thirty minutes I sat there wrestling with my grocery list, replaying a text message I wished I’d worded differently, and wondering if the meditation was working at all. I stood up feeling more agitated than when I sat down.
If you’ve meditated for any length of time, you know this pattern. The maddening inconsistency of it. The way a practice that felt like touching the infinite yesterday can feel like staring at a blank wall today. It made me question everything about my practice until I found what Yogananda had to say about it.
What Yogananda Taught About Inconsistent Practice
Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian master who brought Kriya Yoga to the West in 1920, was startlingly honest about the difficulty of meditation. He didn’t present it as a smooth, steady climb. He described it as a process with inevitable fluctuations, and he told his students to expect them.
“Do not be discouraged because you are not able to meditate uninterruptedly. When the mind wanders, bring it back. Again and again, bring it back. This patience, this persistence, is your real spiritual practice, not the moments of stillness.”
Paramahansa Yogananda, “Autobiography of a Yogi” (1946)
That last sentence was a revelation for me. I’d been measuring my practice by the peak moments, the Tuesdays. But Yogananda was saying the practice is the Wednesdays. The practice is the returning. Not the arriving.
Why Sessions Vary
Yogananda offered several explanations for why meditation is inconsistent, and they’re more practical than mystical:
Physical state matters. Yogananda was emphatic that the body and mind are not separate. If you’ve eaten heavily, slept poorly, or are physically ill, meditation will feel harder. He didn’t see this as failure. He saw it as reality. The instrument you’re using to meditate, your body and brain, has good days and bad days, just like a musician’s fingers do.
Emotional residue from the day accumulates. If you meditate in the morning after a night of anxious dreams, or in the evening after a stressful workday, there’s emotional debris that the mind needs to process before it can settle. Sometimes the entire meditation session is that processing, and that’s not a wasted session. That’s the session doing its work.
The subconscious releases material on its own schedule. Yogananda taught that deep meditation stirs up stored impressions, what the yogic tradition calls samskaras. These old patterns, memories, and emotions surface during meditation to be dissolved. On the days when meditation feels chaotic, it may be because something deep is being cleared. The discomfort is the healing.
Spiritual growth happens in waves, not lines. Yogananda compared the spiritual path to the ocean’s tides. There are periods of expansion and periods of apparent contraction. Both are natural. Both are necessary. The contractions aren’t setbacks. They’re the gathering of energy before the next expansion.
The Story That Reassured Me
In Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda describes a period early in his own practice when he felt completely dry. He’d been meditating diligently, following his guru Sri Yukteswar’s instructions to the letter, and yet for weeks he felt nothing. No bliss. No stillness. No contact with the divine. Just empty silence and a racing mind.
He went to Sri Yukteswar in frustration, and his guru’s response was characteristically blunt: “You are exactly where you need to be. The dryness is the seed being planted. When the rain comes, and it will come, the harvest will be greater because of the waiting.”
I’ve read that passage many times during my own dry spells. It doesn’t make the dryness pleasant, but it makes it bearable. It gives it meaning.
“A saint is a sinner who never gave up. Do not judge your spiritual progress by any single meditation. Judge it by the direction of your life over months and years.”
Paramahansa Yogananda, “Where There Is Light” (1988, posthumous collection)
What I’ve Learned to Do on “Bad” Meditation Days
After years of practice, I’ve stopped categorizing sessions as good or bad. But I have developed strategies for the days when nothing seems to be working:
Shorten the session, don’t skip it. On days when thirty minutes feels impossible, I’ll sit for ten. Yogananda valued consistency over duration. A short, honest sit is infinitely better than no sit.
Switch from concentration to observation. If I can’t focus on a mantra or the breath, I’ll switch to simply observing whatever’s happening. Racing thoughts? I watch them. Physical discomfort? I notice it. Boredom? I note it. This is still meditation. It’s just a different kind.
Use the body as an anchor. Yogananda taught several techniques involving physical awareness: focusing on the point between the eyebrows, feeling the breath at the nostrils, sensing energy in the spine. On scattered days, I’ll choose one physical sensation and use it as a tether. The mind still wanders, but it has somewhere to come back to.
Accept the session for what it is. This is the hardest one. My ego wants every session to be transcendent. Yogananda would gently remind me that the ego’s expectations are not the measure of a practice. Some sessions are for transcendence. Some are for processing. Some are simply for showing up.
Exercise: The “Whatever Comes” Meditation
This is for the days when your usual practice feels impossible:
- Sit comfortably and set a timer for ten minutes. Just ten. Not twenty, not thirty. Ten.
- Close your eyes and take three deep breaths. Feel the breath in your belly, your chest, your nostrils.
- Now let go of any agenda. Don’t try to achieve a state. Don’t try to silence the mind. Don’t try to feel blissful or peaceful. Simply sit and let whatever comes, come. Thoughts? Let them come. Emotions? Let them come. Nothing? Let the nothing come.
- Your only job is to not get up for ten minutes. You can think the entire time. You can feel restless the entire time. You can feel absolutely nothing the entire time. The practice is the sitting, not the experience during the sitting.
- When the timer goes off, sit for thirty more seconds with your eyes closed. Notice how you feel. Not judging. Just noticing.
This exercise is based on Yogananda’s principle that the willingness to sit is itself the practice. On the days when everything flows, that willingness is easy. On the days when nothing flows, that willingness is the entire point.
The Long View
I’ve been meditating regularly for about four years now. If I charted my sessions on a graph, the peaks and valleys would look like a mountain range. There’s no steady upward line. There’s no “I’ve arrived” moment. There are stretches of depth and stretches of drought, and they alternate in ways I can’t predict or control.
But here’s what I can say: the average has shifted. The average experience of my practice, taken across months, is deeper, calmer, and more grounded than it was a year ago. And a year ago was deeper than two years ago. The trajectory is right, even though any individual session might not show it.
Yogananda would say that’s exactly how it works. Not session by session. Life by life. Not in moments but in the accumulated weight of every time you sat down, whether it flowed or didn’t, and chose to stay.
Tomorrow morning, if you sit down and nothing happens, remember: the sitting is the practice. The returning is the practice. The willingness to show up on a Wednesday after a transcendent Tuesday is the practice. Everything else is grace, and grace comes on its own schedule.
