For years, I tried to make meditation work. After meeting a teacher on vacation, I joined a weekly group and kept at it for years. I even went on a silent retreat before this one. Still, most sittings felt like endurance tests. I’d hold on for thirty or forty minutes, counting breaths, quietly begging for the bell. Whatever ease other people were finding, I couldn’t feel it.
It wasn’t the apps, or the technique, or my posture. I just couldn’t make contact.
The shift didn’t come from switching methods. It came from a different container—a seven-day silent retreat where the guidance, the rhythm, and the language finally matched what my nervous system could hear. That retreat sits at the heart of my film, Sit Walk Listen Repeat.
Every week, there’s another headline claiming that meditation “works.”
And it’s true—the data is impressive. Mindfulness lowers stress, reduces anxiety, improves sleep and focus. But “works” in scientific terms means statistically significant. It means it helps more than doing nothing.
For years, I heard those claims and wondered why they didn’t apply to me. I was practicing—regularly. I had a community. I’d even tried retreat. And still, most sessions felt like white-knuckling my way through silence.
The research is clear that mindfulness programs help on average—typically with small-to-moderate improvements in anxiety and depression.
That’s good news, but it also means many people don’t feel much change in short, casual practice.
Trials rarely report simple “works for x%” numbers; instead, they show averages.
For some of us, it takes a different container—longer silence, steadier guidance, and time—before the same basic practice begins to work.
A ten- or twenty-minute sit can be a helpful pause. A weekly group builds rhythm and support. Even a retreat can miss if the fit isn’t there—teacher, framing, community, the way the days breathe. What changed for me wasn’t the posture or the breath count. It was the fit: a teacher whose words landed, a Jewish frame that gave language to the heart, a schedule that carried me instead of something I had to carry.
At first, the noise got louder. By day four, something subtle gave way. The restlessness thinned. The mind began to quiet by itself. The same practice that had “failed” me for years finally began to work—not because I tried harder, but because the setting made softening possible.
A retreat isn’t primarily about calm. It’s about transformation.
Daily practice can grant a brief clearing; a retreat allows the fog to lift. The length and silence let patterns surface—the fear, judgment, striving—and then soften. What’s left is contact: not perfection, but a steady presence with life as it is.
For me, this wasn’t an escape from myself. It was a reconnection
Why “not working” might be the beginning
If meditation hasn’t worked for you, you may not be doing it wrong. You may just need a different container—more silence, a teacher whose language meets your life, a community that helps you stay.
When the conditions are right—long enough for the body to remember ease, steady enough for the stories to settle—something begins to shift. Not always dramatically, but unmistakably.
That’s when meditation starts to work.
Not as a trick or technique.
As a way of remembering how to be alive.