The Nourished Woman with Keri Marino

Finding Stillness in a World That Won't Stop Talking

• Keri Marino • Episode 8

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Amidst the constant clamor for our attention, finding moments of intentional silence has become both revolutionary and essential. Drawing from personal experience, I share how even a simple 30-minute drive home in silence became a profound challenge—catching my hand mid-reach for the radio dial, repeatedly recommitting to the practice despite my wandering mind.

This struggle isn't unique. Every woman in my Nourished Woman community shares similar experiences with meditation and mindfulness. We live in a world where gas pumps blare advertisements, social media bombards us with content, and the sacred resource of our attention is continuously pulled outward. Many of us have developed habits of filling every potential quiet moment with some form of input, leaving no space for inner stillness.

Yet it's precisely in these moments of inner quiet where the magic happens. When we create space for silence, our intuition speaks more clearly, answers emerge naturally, and we reconnect with our deepest selves. This episode explores meditation myths—particularly the misconception that successful meditation means maintaining perfect focus. As spiritual teacher Ram Dass noted, holding attention on anything for even ten seconds is nearly impossible. The wandering "monkey mind" isn't a meditation failure; it's simply part of being human. True meditation mastery lies not in perfect focus but in the humble commitment to keep returning to presence.

Ready to reclaim your attention and rediscover the power of inner quiet? This episode offers practical insights for creating sacred silence in your life, approaching meditation with both discipline and playfulness, and measuring your practice not by perfection but by devotion. Your relationship with inner quiet may be the most important relationship you cultivate—it's where true nourishment begins.

Did something about this episode move you? Tell me about it on Instagram @the_nourished_woman or dive in and start putting what you've learned here into practice inside The Nourished Woman Sanctuary. For $47/month members say, it's "stacked with value," and that they can't believe how powerful these short somatic yoga rituals are. 

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Nourished Woman podcast, a space for women on a growth and healing journey who want to experience more joy, play and pleasure while feeling deeply rooted within themselves. Body play and pleasure while feeling deeply rooted within themselves body, mind and spirit. I'm your host, keri Marino, somatic yoga therapist, mentor and mama of three. Let's dive in love. Back in 2013, I used to drive up to Asheville once per month for my yoga therapy training and these weekends they were jam-packed. From the moment I stepped in the door, I was around all the other yoga therapy trainees. We were learning, we were discussing things, we were practicing what, we were learning on each other and leading experiences. I mean, it was just like full on from the moment we got there until late in the evening and then on repeat for three days, and at the end of these training days we would have the opportunity to go home, get a bite to eat, get some sleep and then start over again the next day. I loved these weekends so much and also it was a lot to take in, and so when I would start the drive home which was a little over an hour I would play a game with myself, and that game was for the first 30 minutes of my drive I was not allowed to listen to any music or make any phone calls. I was going to sit in silence with myself and just be present, and this sounds pretty easy to do, but actually sitting in silence with yourself for 30 minutes is a real effort. It's a devotional practice, it requires a commitment on your part and I can tell you that I would forget about the silence and I would feel my hand reaching for the radio dial to turn on some music, and then I'd have to tell myself, like hand, mid air finger about to press the dial Nope, not yet. And then some more time would pass and I would work on my mindfulness skills and then I would think of some person that I wanted to call and connect with, or this thing that I wanted to share with somebody, and I would have to tell myself not yet. Or I might look at the clock and say, oh my gosh, how much time has passed, how much longer is my silent part going to be.

Speaker 1:

And I want to acknowledge that it's not just me in that moment that struggles with carving out room for quiet space and low stimulation time. I bet that you might struggle with this too, because every woman that is inside of my Nourished Woman community, the ones that I get to interact with and have real conversations with they tell me the same kind of things, like I've heard over and over again how challenging it is to meditate and to focus during meditation, and I want you to know, if that's you, that you're totally not alone whatsoever, and that even Ram Dass, which is an influence for me and so many across the world, said, if you can hold your attention on something, like he said, basically that it's impossible to hold your attention on something. Like he said, basically that it's impossible to hold your attention on something for 10 seconds, like your mind will take you somewhere else during that 10 seconds. And I love the humility of that because it's it's real. And I want to put this in the frame of the world that you are operating in honey, because we live in a world where you can hardly put gas in your car without some kind of advertisement playing on a video and talking out loud to you, and we drive down the interstate and we see the billboards on the side of the road and we try to get on social media to connect with somebody and then we're bombarded with ads. It feels like we live in a time where our attention is being pulled in so many different directions all day long and a lot of that we can't actually control. Like I would prefer if gas pumps did not have a video on them speaking out loud, but I need to put gas in my car and unfortunately some of the gas pumps just have that right. It's unavoidable. We live in a time where the sacred resource of your attention is constantly being pulled on by somebody else. Pulled on by somebody else and then also true if we're being real with each other.

Speaker 1:

Many of us maybe you, me sometimes there is this urge to fill every single moment of your time with something. If you're taking a drive, you're listening to some music, or you're putting on a podcast, or you're calling that friend with your hands-free car system. If you are going to the bathroom, you're taking a book, you're taking your phone, if you have any free space at all for quiet, you will often find something to fill that space with. I feel like we have lost the art as a society, as women moving through the world, for easy moments of inner quiet and for that to be a natural rhythm of our day. And if that is you. I am not here like. I'm not throwing shade on you, I'm not trying to judge you in any way. I'm trying to bring your attention to this because you having moments of inner quiet is really actually where the magic happens on so many levels.

Speaker 1:

Making that space for inner quiet is often where you'll find that your intuitive downloads come in. It's in that inner quiet when you give yourself room to actually acknowledge what you're feeling and thinking. It's in that inner quiet when you find more clarity or you get those answers or the ease comes in. And perhaps most importantly, it's in those quiet moments that you come home to yourself. Like that, you come fully back online within yourself and you have that deeper connection to your body and to your mind and to your spirit and to your inner knowing, like that witness inside of you that I call the spiritual self or the highest self. If you're not giving yourself intentional inner quiet time, then it makes it damn near impossible to listen to your intuition and to have that clarity and to get those answers from within. And to have that clarity and to get those answers from within and to have that deeper connection with yourself. And I want to acknowledge that this is not something that comes easy.

Speaker 1:

I shared with you earlier that a lot of women have told me they struggle with meditation, and and that's okay Like just because it can be hard to carve out times of inner quiet doesn't mean that we don't do it Right. Something can be hard and it can become a practice for us, because it takes a real commitment to make this space in your life and it is a devotional practice and even a discipline, like me telling myself on those drive home trips from yoga therapy school that I was not going to turn on the radio because enough time had not passed. I had not fully made that room for 30 minutes of quiet yet. So it can be something that you really have to decide. You want to make space for and then hold that sacred space around it and not allow yourself don't give yourself a pass to not do your meditation, for example, or to not do the restorative or restful yoga practices or the breath work, just because it's hard for you to pay attention, because it's hard for you to pay attention because you live in a world that's constantly demanding your attention and that's not even talking, like I haven't even named with you the kind of people that you might live with that want your attention, right, right, like I'm a mama of three babies, those babies are constantly wanting my attention every second of the day.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's not true, not every second of the day, but it feels like it. It feels like every second of the day that someone in my house is wanting my attention, and if you've got kids, you might feel that too. So you live in this system, honey, that is pulling your attention outside of you. Also, you might have some habits baked in where you follow that urge to fill all of your time with some sort of input, and that means that you setting up the time for you to meditate or do breath work, or do your gentle or restorative yoga practice, or just sit in the silence with yourself, takes an effort and that that effort is so worth it, because that effort makes the space, that effort makes the space, it makes the space inside of you for your own inner knowing to emerge, it makes the room for you to connect with yourself on a much deeper level and that creates a sturdier sense of self.

Speaker 1:

I cannot highlight enough for you how important and powerful this work is of managing your attention and then practicing putting your attention on having a quiet space for yourself, and by quiet I mean like you're focusing on something in particular and then you're not going to let anything interrupt that. So let's talk about meditation a little bit, because meditation is literally paying attention on purpose, right, just like mindfulness, like we pay attention on purpose to this thing that we're focused on during our practice, and so meditation is something that I have practiced for a very long time and many of my clients and you are interested in or dabbling in or practicing with regularly. So I want to bust a little bit of the myths around meditation, because I believe that it is one of the most powerful practices for this sort of inner quiet that I'm talking about. Whenever you meditate, there is this concept called the monkey mind, and the monkey mind is kind of what Ram Dass was talking about. Like if we try to pay attention to something for 10 seconds, our monkey mind is going to pull our attention somewhere else, and that this actually is not a problem.

Speaker 1:

The goal of meditation, or any of these contemplative practices that I'm discussing with you, is not to keep your attention held on something without interruption. You can expect the interruption, like me in the car reaching to grab my phone and make those phone calls during my 30 minutes of quiet. My attention was going to go somewhere and that's okay. But my devotion, my discipline of saying I'm not going to indulge that desire right now, because I am committed to having this quiet space with myself. So when you're meditating, expect for it to be challenging sometimes and expect for your attention to go somewhere else and then for you to have the discipline and the commitment to the practice to just keep refocusing again. Because if you think that you're supposed to be able to hold your attention the whole time and your monkey mind is doing monkey mind things, you're going to feel unsuccessful at meditation and your meditation is not measured by the quality of your attention. Your meditation practice is measured in your ability to keep coming back and choosing to meditate again.

Speaker 1:

That said, we oftentimes kind of flit around and practice different meditations. Like you might practice this meditation one day and that meditation the next day, and in yogic practice there was much more sturdiness around that, so there was much less random practicing of all these different techniques. Historically it was more like lasering in on a specific technique and then practicing that over and over again in a committed way. And so you may find that, if you struggle with your inner quiet and contemplative practices and meditation, that picking a specific meditation and then doing it over and over again allows you to go deeper into that meditation practice and get more out of it.

Speaker 1:

This world of creating inner quiet with yourself, moments of doing less, of meditating, of breathing, of sitting in silence, doing your yoga, whatever it is, is actually a place where power from within can really come online. And if you're longing for that, if you're wanting to feel more sturdy within yourself, if you're wanting to feel more connected to your intuition, if you're wanting to feel more peace inside of you, if you're wanting to feel more peace inside of you, if you're wanting to have more clarity or more ease, then I really want to encourage you to play in this arena and I do use the word play on purpose, because this work is serious and it does require commitment, but we can also have fun with it. So have a sense of humor with yourself, make a little joke, even like oh my gosh, there I go again, trying to turn on the radio or trying to see how much longer I have on this meditation practice. That's okay, here I am, I choose, choose again. I humbly choose again to keep doing this work. This work is worth it.

Speaker 1:

This work makes a difference. It ripples out on so many different levels and into so many different areas of your life. It helps you to feel more nourished inside and out. If this podcast episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Instagram at the Nourished Woman, or through my website, kerrymarinocom, and if you're looking for a space for deeper support, mentorship or simply a space to feel held, I'd love to have you join us inside the nourished woman sanctuary. The beautiful music you're hearing is from Sean Johnson and the wild Lotus band and you can find them on all streaming platforms.