The Nourished Woman with Keri Marino

Why Meditation Feels So Hard — and How to Finally Find a Practice You Love

• Keri Marino • Episode 14

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If you’ve ever sat down to meditate and instantly felt restless, distracted, or frustrated — you’re not doing it wrong.

Your brain hasn’t failed you… your meditation method just hasn’t caught up with your life.

In this episode, Somatic Yoga Therapist and Mentor Keri Marino shares why old-school silent meditation often feels punishing to our modern, phone-trained brains — and how to create a practice that actually feels good in your body and works for your nervous system.

You’ll learn a kinder, sensory-rich approach that’s realistic, repeatable, and deeply regulating — even if you’ve “never been good” at meditation.

We’ll talk about:

  • Why mediation feels hard
  • How to fall in love with meditation 
  •  Practical tips to meditation more comfortable and enjoyable


Whether you’re brand new to meditation or ready to fall back in love with it, this episode gives you a simple plan to start — and actually stick with it.

Try one of the guided practices mentioned, repeat it this week, and notice what shifts.

If this episode resonates, message me on Instagram @the_nourished_woman — I love hearing how your practice evolves. 💜

If this resonated, I'd love to give you a free trial so you can taste what meditation practice is like with me inside The Nourished Woman Sanctuary. It's made for women just like you, who want to go from verthinking to reconnecting with your body so you can feel lighter, freer and more at home in yourself.

SPEAKER_00:

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, mind, and spirit. I'm your host, Carrie Marino, somatic yoga therapist, mentor, and mama of three. Let's dive in, love. I truly believe that women sitting in quiet spaces with themselves and doing contemplative practices like a slower-paced yoga practice or restorative or meditation or breath work is essential. And I know that many of you listening already have a meditation practice. It's something that is really important to you. You know that it makes a very big difference for you. I might even go as far to say that some of you are just truly in love with meditation. And then I also know that there are so many listeners of this podcast that think meditation would be good for you, but you really don't have the momentum to do it regularly. Or maybe you don't feel successful at meditation, so you don't practice it very often, or you haven't experienced that bloom with meditation where it really starts to feel great for you. And so I want to talk to all of you the lovers, the devotees of meditation, and also the woman who's like, yeah, I know it'd be good for me, but also it doesn't feel great. It just feels hard and I don't really know how to get into it. I want to talk to all of you because I think that so many of you, so many of us, right, as women, we want to feel more in touch with our intuition. We want to trust ourselves, we want to feel at home in ourselves, we want to make a decision and feel like it's really easy to pick the decisions that we make and then we don't second guess ourselves the whole freaking time or like agonize over decisions, right? And I think that part of how you get there, love, is by doing these quiet contemplative practices, like what I'm offering you here inside of the Nourished Woman world is these practices that bring you into yourself and bring you home to yourself. And I believe that meditation is something that any person can love. It's just how do we find the right kind of meditation for you so that it feels so juicy and wonderful and delightful. So I want to give you a little bit of context because I have been meditating for around 20 years, and I've been teaching people to meditate, predominantly women to meditate for 16 years. And so this has been a part of my life for a very long time. It's actually how I began my yoga journey was with a meditation and a chanting CD. And it's also been something that I have been guiding women to do for a very long time. So I've had, gosh, I don't even know, like thousands and thousands of conversations with women about meditation. And so here's something I want you to know. Your brain has changed because when I first started practicing meditation and teaching meditation, we didn't have smartphones yet. And now we do. And depending upon your age, you probably remember a time before your brain was constantly exposed to a smartphone. And social media was not the thing that it was today. Like Facebook used to be something it was MySpace, right? Like you had to log in on a computer in order to get on social media. And your brain has changed. We live in a very, very different time now where you have a small computer in your pocket and you get, I don't know, 85 to 200 notifications a day, and your attention is so sought after. I saw a book recently, and I can't remember the name of it, but I'll try to put the name of it in the show notes. And it was literally talking about how our attention is like the most important commodity at this point in time, and how there are so many things competing for our attention all day, every single day. And so your brain has changed. And so, if your model of what a meditation practice is supposed to look like, is I'm supposed to be able to sit on a cushion and it'd be completely silent and me only focus on one thing for 15 minutes. If that's your model of what meditation is supposed to be like, like the old mindfulness meditation alone, it's going to suck. You are not, you are not gonna like it if you are a beginner or intermediate meditator. That is an advanced meditation practice for you to sit in complete silence without any guide and expect to be able to focus your mind the whole time. So I want to encourage you to remember that you have a brain that is constantly being stimulated, and your attention is literally being sought after by any person who wants to sell you anything in this capitalist world. And obviously, I want to encourage you to do as much as you can to manage how much your phone gets to pull your attention to it. Like personally, I have an app on my phone, it's called Minimalist Phone. I have timers all over my phone, like digital well-being timers of when I'm allowed to access certain apps, how long I'm allowed to manage those apps. There's even apps that you can use that make you wait a certain amount of time before an app will open. I think that's just the modern, that's the modern reality. We have to manage how much time our phones get to pull from us and how much they get to pull our attention. And I think you'll be much better off in your meditation and quieter contemplative practices if you actually use tools that are designed for your modern brain and your modern nervous system. Whenever the yogic texts were written, like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali thousands and thousands of years ago, there were guidelines for how we were supposed to meditate. And I think that those core teachings still maintain, like they hold, they are durable and they stand the test of time. But the way that you meditate needs to be updated. And so if you're a woman who feels a pull towards meditation and you know that it would offer you a lot of benefits, but you haven't fallen in love with it yet, then want to talk to you a little bit about what kind of meditation practice I think you might enjoy. And of course, please don't just take my word for it. Better than any advice you could ever hear on a podcast is you getting in there, like pressing play on some guided meditations and figuring out the ones that are best for you. And so what I want you to know is that you're gonna need a meditation that's a little more stimulating, particularly the kind of meditations that I lead women through or lead you through inside of my the nourished woman sanctuary are meditations that have different things going on. You're not encouraged to just focus on one thing the entire time. You're being taken, taken on a journey through a meditation experience where your attention is directed into different things. I like to think of the meditations that I share as truly being that guided experience. We start here and then we pay attention to that, and we we move into this, and then we go over there, and then it's this like medicine of meditation that you're being taken through for a very specific purpose. And you might need some music, right? Like when I was pregnant with my third child, I really loved this meditation that had the sound of a heartbeat in the background. You might want to listen to some meditation with some really soothing nature sounds or just some sort of music to really speak to your nervous system while you're at it. But I want to encourage you to pick a meditation that is more of a guided journey rather than just, hey, we're gonna pay attention to my specific kind of breathing for 10 to 12 to 15 minutes, right? I wouldn't expect you to feel very successful at that given the modern state of our brains and the way that we are wired these days. So look for practices that offer you a variety of different things to focus on and lead you on a journey and give you stimulation along the way. And as you continue to practice, I want you to know that it gets better with time. So the first time that you meditate, the first 20 times that you meditate, it might be really challenging for you to focus your mind, or it might be really hard for you to stay awake. Let's be honest, like you might fall asleep. And that's okay. I want to normalize the fact that this is not something that you will instantly feel successful at, and that it is gonna rub up against the part of you that just wants to feel good at everything right away. Like that's the way an adult human brain works, right? Like we're in our grooves, we're doing our thing, we're used to doing things that we feel good at or good enough at. Meditation is something that will challenge you, and it's my belief, and maybe yours, I don't know, that it's really been it's so beneficial that it's worth it, right? Like it's worth going through some of the vulnerable discomfort in order to achieve the benefit, right? Because just like how I started this podcast off, like if you are looking for more of a soulful connection with yourself or the divine, if you are looking to feel a deeply rooted sense of self, not like a flaky, unstable, constantly knocked off your base kind of connection with yourself. If you want to access your intuition and your inner knowing, if you want to feel like you can confidently and easily make decisions, if you want to sleep better, if you want to feel just more at peace within yourself as a mother or in your work or anything, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, meditation for sure. Let's talk about some other things that might really help you in the meditation category. And one is to pick specific meditations that you are gonna repeat over and over and over again. And this it seems counterintuitive, right? Because we live in a world where we have programs like mine where you can have, I think I have like 12 different meditations inside of the Nourished Woman Sanctuary right now at the time that I'm recording this. But there's also things like Insight Timer, where there's literally thousands and thousands of different meditations and different teachers. And there's YouTube, right? There's just like a million different places where you can get meditation that's guided for you to listen to. By the way, if you've not tried Insight Timer, it's an awesome resource. I was just talking with one of my clients this morning about how she actually will log in Insight Timer and turn on the timer and then use meditations from the sanctuary, my sanctuary, so that she gets credit in the Insight Timer. Because part of what it does is it actually tracks your progress, like how many days in a row have you meditated? How long have you meditated? It's got a lot of like serotonin hits inside of it for you to encourage you to keep meditating regularly. Given that you have so many different meditations at your fingertips, it would be very easy to just pick a new one each day. And I can tell you that's probably not the best way for you to fall in love with meditation. Instead, I want to encourage you to pick a specific meditation, like one, or maybe one or two or three, something like that, and then to repeat those meditations over and over and over again. Because every part of you, your mind and your body and your nervous system and your spirit will all learn that this is a practice that you sink into deeply. And this is how you're gonna experience some of those more potent and powerful benefits of meditation when your body, your neural patterning in your body and your programming in your body and nervous system and brain know that when I do this specific meditation led by this person, I go into these deep spaces, these inner quiet spaces inside of myself. So pick a specific meditation or a small number of specific meditations and then do them over and over and over and over again. And I cannot wait to hear from you when you put that single piece into practice, the difference it makes from you. And I really do mean that. I I want this podcast not just to be something you listen to, but if you want to, a conversation that you can have with me. I'd love to hear about your experiences. I love to cheer you on as you put these things into practice. So reach out and let me know via Instagram. And then the last piece that I want to leave you with is that you have permission to meditate comfortably in a way that actually really works for you. So if you would benefit from sitting in a chair, then sit in a chair. If you would benefit from laying down, if that's what you need, then do it. Give yourself audacious permission to meditate in a way that really and truly works for you, and then watch, watch the benefits play out in your life. 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, carry marino.com. And if you're looking for a space for deeper support, mentorship, or simply a space to feel helped, 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.