On showing up when it feels pointless — and what daily practice actually does to the self

Nobody warns you about the middle bit.

You hear about the awakening — the sudden crack of clarity, the moment something shifts and the world looks different. And you hear about the peace that supposedly waits on the other side: the stillness, the compassion, the unshakeable sense of okayness. What people talk about far less is everything in between. The grey stretch. The Monday morning of spiritual life, when the initial fire has dimmed and sitting down to meditate feels about as inspiring as doing your tax return.

That's the part we need to talk about. Because it's in that middle ground — messy, unglamorous, entirely ordinary — that the real work actually happens.

Consistency. Daily practice. Showing up when you'd rather not. These aren't the exciting parts of a spiritual path. But they might be the most important ones. And if you're somewhere on that path right now — whether you're navigating an awakening, learning to quiet your mind, or simply feeling pulled towards something deeper — this is for you.

The Honeymoon Phase Is Real. So Is What Comes After.

Most people who begin a spiritual practice — meditation, reiki, breathwork, journalling, whatever it might be — experience an initial burst of enthusiasm. Things feel vivid. Insights arrive easily. There's a genuine sense of something opening up, of a different relationship with your own mind becoming possible.

And then, somewhere around week three or month two, it gets harder. The practice feels flat. Life gets busy. You miss a few sessions and feel vaguely guilty, and then miss a few more. Before long, the practice you were so committed to has quietly slipped away — and you're left wondering whether you were just fooling yourself.

You weren't. What you were experiencing is entirely normal. In fact, it has a name.

In Buddhist tradition, the path is often described in stages — and one of the most well-documented is sometimes called the dukkha ñana, or the 'knowledge of suffering'. It's the point where practice stops feeling like revelation and starts feeling like friction. Where the insight you had starts to feel abstract, and the mind's old habits reassert themselves with surprising force. Practitioners across centuries have written about this phase. It's not a sign that you've failed. It's a sign that you've gone deep enough to hit the layer beneath the easy stuff.

What Daily Practice Is Actually Doing

Here's what most people don't realise about consistency: the point isn't the individual session. A single meditation isn't going to restructure your nervous system. One reiki session won't dissolve years of accumulated tension. The point is the pattern. The habit of returning. The signal you send — to your body, your mind, your energy system — that this matters. That you're choosing, again and again, to show up for yourself.

Buddhism speaks a great deal about samskaras — the deep grooves of habit and conditioning carved into us over years of automatic, unconscious living. Every time we react the same way to the same trigger, the groove deepens. Every time we choose differently — even slightly — we begin, very gradually, to smooth it out.

Daily practice works the same way. Each session, however unremarkable it feels, is a repetition in a different direction. You're not going to feel it happening in the moment. It's cumulative. Quiet. A bit like compound interest — modest at first, then suddenly, one day, you notice that something has genuinely shifted. That you're less reactive. Less consumed by your own narrative. A little more at home in yourself.

And that — that quiet, durable change — is what consistency actually produces.

The Self That Shows Up (And the One That Doesn't)

Here's an interesting thing about regular practice: it starts to show you the self more clearly than almost anything else.

Not in a flattering way, always. Sit still for long enough and you'll meet the part of you that's restless, resistant, quick to find reasons to stop. You'll notice the stories you tell yourself — about why today isn't a good day to meditate, why you'll do better tomorrow, why this probably isn't working anyway. And slowly — this is the beautiful part — you start to see those stories as just that. Stories. Patterns. Not truth.

This is precisely what the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or non-self, is pointing at. Not that you don't exist, but that the fixed, solid 'I' you've been treating as real is actually more fluid than you thought. More constructed. And constructed things can be — gradually, gently — reconstructed.

The self that resists practice is the same self that resists life. And every time you sit down anyway, despite the resistance, you're loosening its authority just a little. You're not destroying it — you're just learning to watch it, rather than be entirely driven by it.

On the Highs: What to Do When It's Going Well

Funnily enough, the highs come with their own challenges. When practice is flowing, when insight is sharp and meditation feels effortless, there's a subtle temptation to grasp at it. To try to hold the feeling. To make it mean something permanent.

Buddhism calls this upadana — clinging. And it applies just as much to pleasant experiences as painful ones. The high of a breakthrough session, the bliss of deep stillness — these are real, and they're valuable. But the moment we start needing them to happen in order to keep practicing, we've made the practice conditional. And conditional practices don't last.

The instruction here — from teachers across traditions, from Thich Nhat Hanh to Ajahn Chah — is the same: receive the high with gratitude, and hold it lightly. Let it be information, not identity. Then show up tomorrow regardless.

On the Lows: What to Do When Nothing Seems to Be Working

The lows are harder to navigate. When practice feels hollow, when the mind is loud and restless, when life is pressing in from every angle — consistency asks a lot. It asks you to trust a process you can't currently feel.

A few things that actually help. First: shrink the commitment. If thirty minutes feels impossible, do five. If sitting feels wrong, walk. If formal meditation isn't landing, try something somatic — a reiki healing sessioncan reach the parts of you that the thinking mind can't access, especially during heavy or low periods when words and concepts feel blunt.

Second: don't practice alone if you don't have to. There's real support in shared practice. Something about meditating with others — even virtually — creates a quality of collective stillness that's harder to generate on your own. Our free weekly live meditation exists precisely for this. A live, communal session you can join from wherever you are, as often as you need.

Third — and this is the one most people skip — be honest with yourself about what the resistance is actually about. Sometimes a flat practice is just a flat practice. But sometimes it's pointing at something that needs attention: unprocessed emotion, a decision you're avoiding, a part of your life that's out of sync with your values. Practice has a way of surfacing these things. That's not a malfunction. That's it working.

Building Something That Lasts

The spiritual path isn't linear. That's not a cliché — it's genuinely true, and worth sitting with. You will have expansive periods and contracted ones. Weeks where everything clicks and months where nothing does. The question isn't how to eliminate the lows; it's how to stay on the path through them.

One of the most practical things you can do is build a structure that makes consistency easier — not because you're disciplined, but because the decision is already made. Same time, same space, same basic form. Remove the daily negotiation with yourself. Let the practice just... be part of your life, like washing your face or making tea.

If you want a structured starting point — something that removes the friction of building a practice from scratch — the 30-day Quiet Mind trial is a genuinely good place to begin. Available on any device. Start with five minutes. That's not a gimmick — a five-minute daily practice, kept consistently for thirty days, will do more for your mind than an occasional hour-long session when the mood strikes.

And if you're in Scotland and want hands-on support alongside your practice, Awakened Energy Healingoffers Reiki Glasgow sessions designed to complement exactly this kind of inner work — clearing what's stuck, restoring flow, and helping the body catch up with wherever the mind is trying to go.

Show up. Even on the flat days. Especially then.

That's the practice. That's all of it, really.