If Meditation and Restorative Yoga Feels Hard. Let's talk.

If you’ve been waiting for meditation, breathwork, or restorative yoga to “finally feel easy”… this is your loving reality check.

Learning to be still is a skill. And like any new skill — playing guitar, lifting weights, having hard conversations — it’s awkward at first. Your mind will wander. Your body will fidget. You will feel anything but enlightened and likely come up against anxiety at some point.

That doesn’t mean you’re bad at meditation or restorative yoga. It means you’re building capacity.
In this episode, we talk about why high-functioning women especially struggle with stillness — and why that’s not a flaw, it’s a training ground. We move beyond the fantasy of instant calm and into what actually creates embodied confidence and nervous system resilience: repetition, honesty, and small, devotional reps. 

If you’re ready to stop waiting for calm to magically descend and start practicing your way into steadiness, this conversation will give you both the gentle nudge and the grounded truth you need.

Want to get better at meditation and restorative yoga?

Get My -> Good at Meditation and Restorative Yoga Guide 

For self-aware women who feel like you’re bad at meditation and are ready to feel successful. Click here to get this free guide. 

Want to hear other episodes on meditation?

Check out:

• Why Meditation Feels So Hard - and How to Finally Find a Practice You Love
• On Meditation, God & Relationships with David Harshada Wagner

Meet Keri Marino 

Keri Marino is a Somatic Yoga Therapist and founder of The Nourished Woman, helping women move beyond overwhelm, anxiety, and self-doubt into embodied confidence and nervous system balance. Through women’s empowerment yoga, somatic healing, and inner work, she guides women to regulate their bodies, break old patterns, and reconnect with their strength, pleasure, and purpose. Her approach blends grounded spirituality with practical tools for real-life transformation.

Connect with her here:

https://www.kerimarino.com/ https://www.instagram.com/the_nourished_woman

https://youtube.com/@thenourishedwoman

🌿 Start Here  - Free Resources for Women Ready to Grow

Embodied Confidence Guide
For self-aware women who still feel insecure at times and want to trust yourself more. 
Get the guide here -> https://kerimarino.eo.page/embodied-confidence

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Transcript

The Guitar Analogy For Practice

SPEAKER_00 0:54

If you wanted to learn how to play the guitar, then you would expect to need to drive to a guitar store and buy a guitar and some pics. And you would either buy a book or watch some videos or a subscription service or pay for some lessons. You would invest yourself in the time and energy that it took to learn the skill of playing the guitar, right? And your fingers might get sore as you play, and it might, you might not want to do it sometimes. And then other times you might be really excited about it. And there would be this sort of inner commitment that it was something that was important to you and that you were choosing to do it and that you were going to put in the time and energy for it. And I use this as an example because I have a lot of conversations with women where they are talking about longing for a sense of lasting peace inside of themselves and longing for the ability to stay with themselves through the ups and downs of life, to be deeply self-connected and present in the way that really opens up the kind of self-confidence and soulful connection to yourself and ease and resiliency that I know so many of you are seeking. And you may not even know that you're seeking those things yet. You might be looking for lower stress levels or less reactivity or to have a healthier, stronger body, more comfortable, pain-free body, right? Like when you start to practice yoga, or when you're even years into practicing yoga, you might still be looking for things that are a little closer to the surface. But I venture to the guess if you've been practicing for a while, and I know many of you have noticed that there are these different benefits that come from practicing, right? You're less reactive to the stress in your life. You see possibilities where you didn't before. You navigate a triggering moment and you stay rooted in yourself rather than totally lose yourself to the situation. Maybe you start making bolder choices for yourself, whatever it is. Maybe you feel a sense of spiritual connection that you didn't even know was possible. And so you're getting a lot from your yoga practice. And I know that many women that I talk to already know the value of the yoga practice and you see the difference that it makes in your life. And then maybe you want to go deeper in your practice. Like maybe you want to go just from a physical movement-based yoga practice, which is awesome by the way, into embracing more of the stillness practices. Maybe you want to get into meditation further. Maybe you want to go further down the path of pranayama and breath work and energy work. Maybe you want to go a little bit deeper into the yoga philosophy and really looking at how you're approaching your life and your emotions and your thoughts and your everywhaking moment based on more of a spiritual perspective. And here's what I find to be so fascinating. And I don't know that what I'm about to say here is just uniquely you, if you're that woman that's like, I want to do those deeper, more contemplative aspects of the practice. Because it's natural that you're going to want to evolve there over time. And also true, I find this very interesting phenomenon where women expect meditation to be easy and they expect restorative yoga and the stillness practice of holding poses for longer periods of time and learning how to meditate deeply in those poses and go into states of deep rest and relaxation or doing breath work practices. Like you expect those to be easy. And then when they're hard, women over and over again get frustrated with that process, discouraged with that process, they quit showing up for that process. You avoid it. And I think it's kind of funny because these practices weren't made to be easy for you. Like if you look into my analogy of learning to play the guitar, nobody was like, let's make a guitar so that it can be easy for people. No, like you have to actually invest your time and energy. You have to embrace the discomfort. You have to be willing to literally put your money into having the ability to play the guitar. You have to put your time, you have to do the finger work, you have to train your fingers, you have to get the timing down, you have to learn musical notation. Like nobody made this easy for you. And frankly, like you wouldn't fucking expect it to be easy to learn how to play the guitar. So why, why, why are so many of us getting hung up on the fact that meditation and stillness and breath work and learning the yoga philosophy, like, why are we getting caught up on the fact that it feels hard? Because it's going to feel hard. If your main way of relating to your body is through movement and you find that, for example, maybe shavasana is like one of the hardest poses for you, which is a very common thing among yoga practitioners. Like if you find that you are the kind of person who has a hard time slowing down and being deeply present, especially when things are quiet and chill and like not high stimulating. If you find that you are a woman who really focuses a lot of her attention outside of herself, or who doesn't have a kind of active daily devotional connection with the divine as you understand it, like I would full on expect meditation and restorative yoga to feel confronting and stillness practices and breath work. I would expect them to feel hard. And also, hard is not a stop point. Hard is an initiation point, hard is a learning opportunity. The kind of hard that we come up against in our yoga practice is difficult to move beyond. And I see a lot of women just kind of stall out here and think about doing the meditation or think about doing the restorative yoga or think about doing the yoga philosophy study or whatever it is. Like there's parts of you that feel like you want that. If if this is you, like if you're the woman that really resonates here with this, but then you avoid it. And I think it's the same with learning how to play the guitar, right? Like I have a guitar, for example, and I haven't moved past that point with my guitar because frankly, it's just not important enough for me to do that. But I also have a harmonium, right? It's a different instrument. It's the kind of instrument you often hear in yogic chanting practices. And for me, the harmonium, like it was worth, and it's still worth. I'm still very much in the beginner stages, uh, even after many years of practicing it. Like it's this consistent thing that I'm learning and growing with slowly as I can as a busy mom and householder and business owner, right? But it is something that it's worth it to me to move through it. And I have this full understanding that learning how to play that harmonium is stretchy for me. Like I am having to master all of these musical skills each time I want to learn a new song. And I think that what all this really boils down to is really sitting with what your actual priorities are. Because meditation is not just meditation. Restorative yoga is not just restorative yoga. There are a lot of different therapeutic and healing and medicinal qualities that come from these practices. And obviously, like we could look at the mainstream scientific evidence out there about like stress reduction and sleep improvement and even like hormonal health, which are real things that matter a lot. But also, I think that for me as a yoga therapist, I'm really interested as a women's empowerment yoga therapist. I'm really interested in how this translates into how you feel in yourself and about yourself and how you move through your life. So these meditation practices, the stillness work, the contemplative work, the quieter work of yoga, can open up so many doors inside of you. And it can be a resource that you can turn to when it's 3 a.m. and you're anxious and having a hard time sleeping. And it can be a resource that you turn to as a way to allow yourself to be held and supported so that you don't have to just feel like the strong one all the time. And it can be a way of really rooting yourself down into a relationship to your own soul and to your the connection that your soul has with the infinite that is God or goddess or the divine or whatever you want to call it. These practices, I think it's what this is really about, is not actually about complaining that they're hard. It's this conversation of realizing that these are skills that you're building. You're learning to play the instrument, right? The instrument is obviously a metaphor for the instrument of you, right? And so if meditation feels hard and you want it, hard is not a barrier. And if you practice restorative yoga and it really bumps up against an edge for you that has a hard time being still and a hard time slowing down and a hard time relaxing and a hard time receiving, that's not a stopping point. That's not like a I need to avoid that cue. And if you really have a conscious acknowledgement of that with yourself, like, oh, I'm feeling uncomfortable. This makes me feel uncomfortable. But maybe me being uncomfortable is literally part of the point, right? And it's like part of actually the gift of this. Like if we look into brain science and aging brains, like literally learning new skills is great for your brain health. And so expect it to be hard. Really have an honest conversation with yourself about whether or not this is something that you want to pursue right now. Because just saying, like, oh, I want to meditate, but you know, I don't do it because it feels hard. I don't know that that really like how's that helping you? Because what you're really doing is giving yourself an excuse not to move forward. And that can that you can like really spend some time like circling with that and circling with that and avoiding that and circling that and avoiding that. And you can tell yourself and you can tell other people that you want to lean in and do these practices. But at the end of the day, if you're not actually putting in the time to do them, and you're not acknowledging that although these practices can be uncomfortable, that they are actual spiritual and devotional practices that you want for yourself and choosing to do them in ways that really meet you where you are and help you make progress along the way, then what are you doing, babe? Just like forming a logbook of yoga complaints or meditation complaints and looking for evidence of why you shouldn't. Because if you're listening to a podcast like this, if you're telling yourself you want to meditate, if you're seeing the restorative yoga practices that I'm sharing and you're like, oh, I want to do that, but it really like bumps up against an edge. So what? You wouldn't expect to do literally anything if you wanted to plant a garden. That's hella complicated, right? You got to figure out like the soil and the balance and how much sunlight am I getting versus how much sunlight does this need? Can this handle more or less water? Oh, can that plant be beside this plant? Like it's all complicated. It's just a matter of do you want it bad enough? And are you willing to put in the time and the effort to do it? Because if you are waiting for it to feel easy, if you are expecting for it to be comfortable all of the time, then you'll miss out on all the goodness of these practices because there really is so much value inside of them. I see it every single day in my clients when they choose to actually show up and make the commitment and put some structures in place and to follow through and do it. So consider this a little bit of a kick in the booty, like in the most loving and kind way. I think as a culture, we've kind of come to expect things to just be easy and comfortable all the time. And that's simply not how it is. And so if you're expecting that here in the yoga arena, think again, my love. Think again. It's something that you work towards, it's skills that you build over time. And I am absolutely here for those of you that are in my world and want to learn how to be good at these things and for it to and to make real meaningful progress. I'm absolutely here to have those conversations with you and to help you figure out how to do that because there are ways to make it go smoother and faster. And I actually have a whole episode on why meditation feels hard and how to fall in love with it that you can find in the podcast episode list. All right. Happy meditating, happy restorative yoga, happy yoga philosophy. I know there's so much value for you, and I think you know it too. I'll see you next time, love.