# Why Your Meditation Practice Isn't Working
Most people who try meditation quit within a few weeks. Not because they lack discipline, and not because meditation doesn't work. More often than not, it's because the instructions they were given set them up to feel like they were failing from the very first session.
I recently sat down with Kit Laughlin, a teacher and practitioner with over 35 years of experience in meditation, stretching, and somatic awareness, to talk about what actually gets people started, and why so many commonly repeated instructions create more confusion than clarity.
This is a summary of the core ideas from that conversation.
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## The Most Common Misdirection: "Watch Your Breath"
If you've ever tried to start a meditation practice, there's a very good chance the first instruction you received was some version of "watch your breath" or "focus on the breath at the nostrils."
Kit's view is that this is a serious misdirection, and after spending time working with this material myself, I think he's right.
The word *breathing* is a concept. It's a label we apply to a process. And when we instruct someone to "watch the breath," we're asking them to attend to the word rather than the experience. We're pointing at the finger instead of the moon.
The instruction that Kit prefers, and the one that seems to actually work for most beginners, is this: **feel the movements in your body that we call breathing.**
Feel your abdomen. Feel your ribs expand. Feel the subtle shift in the body as air moves in and then out. The sensations are already there, happening right now, in this body, on whatever surface you're sitting on. You're not trying to create an experience. You're learning to notice what's already happening.
This is a small shift in language. The practical difference, however, is enormous.
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## The Four Postures of Meditation
One of the most liberating ideas Kit shared comes from the Satipatthana Sutta, one of the few early Buddhist texts that deals directly and in detail with meditation practice.
In that text, the Buddha describes four postures of meditation: standing, moving, lying, and sitting. And crucially, none of these postures is privileged over the others.
What this means in practice is that there is no moment in your day where the practice is unavailable to you. Walking down a corridor. Eating a meal. Doing a set of curls in the gym. The practice of attending to present-moment sensation doesn't require a cushion or a timer or a dedicated room.
This also has an important implication for how we think about lying meditation. For most people in the West, Kit argues, developing a lying practice is actually more valuable than working on a seated one. The nervous system is already in a calmer, more receptive state when the body is horizontal. Rather than treating this as a shortcut or a cheat, it's worth treating it as a useful asset, especially in the early stages.
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## You're Not Bad at Meditation Because You Get Distracted
This is probably the single most important reframe in the entire conversation, and it's worth dwelling on.
Nearly everyone who tries meditation and quits will say something like: *I just couldn't do it. I kept getting distracted.* Or: *My mind won't switch off.*
The problem is that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the practice actually is.
Getting distracted, meaning having your attention pulled away from your meditation object by thoughts, is not a failure state. It's the raw material of the practice itself. The moment you notice that your awareness has drifted away from the sensations in your body and into the thought stream, that noticing is meditation. You just did a rep.
As Kit describes it: when you catch yourself, smile. Don't be harsh on yourself. Just acknowledge that the mind has done the thing it does, which is generate a constant stream of thoughts, and gently return your attention to whatever your meditation object is. Then stay with it until something else happens. That's all.
What you're building through this process, every time you notice and return, is the capacity to concentrate. Not in the sense of productivity or output, but in the deeper sense of being more aware of what's actually going on inside you.
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## The Method, Step by Step
For anyone who wants a simple, practical place to start, here is the method as Kit describes it:
**1. Find a chair.**
An ordinary kitchen chair works perfectly. Sit so that your back is not supported by the chair back. You want your spine to be reasonably upright and self-supporting.
**2. Feel your body.**
Before you do anything else, spend 20 to 30 seconds just moving around slightly. Rock your hips forward and backward. Shift left and right. Lift your chest a little. Bring your chin back so your head is balanced over your centre of gravity. The goal here is to actually arrive in your body, not just sit down and immediately try to concentrate.
**3. Direct attention to the sensations of breathing.**
Not the concept of breathing. The actual movements. Feel what happens in your abdomen as you breathe in. Feel the subtle change as you breathe out. If the abdomen isn't clear to you, try the nostrils, or the chest, or simply the sense of the whole body. One is not better than the other. What matters is that you're attending to sensation rather than concept.
**4. When a thought appears, notice it.**
At some point, probably quite quickly, a thought will arrive and your awareness will follow it. That's fine. The moment you notice it has happened, that is your first act of meditating. Smile, and gently return to the sensations of breathing.
**5. Repeat.**
That's the entire practice.
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## Your Body Only Speaks One Language
One of the more striking claims Kit makes is this: your body has only one language, and that language is sensation.
On a simple continuum, sensations range from unpleasant at one end to pleasant at the other, with a large middle territory of sensations that are neither. Most of us, in ordinary life, only attend to the extremes. We notice pain when it's bothering us. We notice pleasure when something feels particularly good. The vast middle range of neutral sensation goes completely unregistered.
Meditation is, in part, the practice of developing the capacity to hear the full range of what the body is communicating.
Kit takes this further with a claim that sounds abstract until you actually experience it: thoughts are never in the present moment. They are always about a future that may or may not arrive, or about a past that has already passed. Even a thought you are thinking right now is, by the time it has formed, a representation of something rather than the thing itself.
Sensation, by contrast, is the only thing that actually lives in the present. And this is why attending to physical sensation in the body is such an effective anchor for presence. Not as a metaphor, but as a direct practical observation.
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## The Type-A Trap
There's a particular failure mode that tends to affect people who are very driven, very goal-oriented, or accustomed to making progress through sheer effort and will.
They try to grind their way through meditation. They clench down on the meditation object and attempt to force concentration through effort. And the result is the opposite of what they're after.
Kit uses a simple image to describe this: imagine a glass of water with sand settled at the bottom. If you want the sand to settle, you don't shake the glass harder. You stop, and you wait. Meditation is the practice of stopping. Applying more force to the system adds more energy, which keeps the sand in suspension.
This doesn't mean the practice requires no effort. But it requires a different quality of effort, something more like sustained, gentle attention than muscular concentration.
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## Why Bother at All?
Kit's answer to this question is context-dependent, and deliberately so. For a room full of junior doctors, the case for meditation looks like improved emotional regulation, better pain tolerance, enhanced concentration under stress, and improved cerebral blood flow during demanding cognitive tasks. These are real, evidenced benefits.
For someone further along a contemplative path, the goal looks more like developing an alternative perspective on the thought stream, one that allows you to notice that thoughts are arising without being fully captured by them. And further still, the original intention of these practices was something more radical: the direct investigation of what we actually are, beneath the noise of the mind.
Kit is careful not to oversell the deeper end of this. If you're sitting down to meditate for the first time, you don't need to have a view on the nature of consciousness. You just need to sit down and do it.
That is, ultimately, the point. The doing is worth more than any amount of thinking about doing.
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## Where to Start
If this conversation has been useful and you want to take a next step, Kit has released a free instructional video called *How to Sit for Meditation*, along with a follow-along audio for beginning practice. Both are available through his website at stretchtherapy.com.
The full conversation with Kit is available on the Propane Fitness YouTube channel. If you haven't heard our previous episodes with Kit on the physical side of his method, those are worth going back to as well.
And if you're thinking about starting a meditation practice and not sure whether to begin: sit down. Find a chair. Feel your body. That's the whole first step.