Why Practice Feels Inconsistent
What if inconsistency isn't failure, but information
After the last few notes - on attention, dharana, and sahaj, a question tends to arise naturally.
If all of this is true, why does practice still feel inconsistent? Why does it work some days and fall apart on others?
Most people assume inconsistency is a discipline problem. The inner narrative becomes: I need to be more committed. I need to try harder. But that’s rarely the full picture.
What I’ve noticed, both personally and in the people I work with, is that inconsistency usually comes from something more basic. The conditions for practice are not stable.
You may sit down to practice, but the body is restless. Or the breath is uneven. Or the mind has been moving continuously since morning without a single real pause. In that state, practice becomes effortful. And effort, repeated without support, eventually drops.
This is where the earlier ideas connect directly.
Dharana is not something you force.
Sahaj - and this is worth saying carefully - is something you can orient toward. In some meditation traditions it is held as a sankalpa, a conscious intention seeded at the start of practice. Not a demand, but a direction. The difference matters. You are not grasping at effortlessness. You are simply making it the quality you are moving toward, and allowing practice to reveal it gradually.
As a sankalpa, sahaj functions differently than a goal. A goal is something you either reach or fail to reach. A sankalpa is something you return to - a remembering rather than an achieving. Over time, what began as an intention becomes recognisable as an emergent quality. You start to notice it arriving - briefly, unexpectedly - before you’ve done anything to produce it. That noticing is itself part of the deepening.
What both dharana and sahaj depend on, though, is the capacity of the system to settle. And here is where abhyas - consistent, devoted practice - becomes the real subject.
Patanjali is clear on this. Practice becomes firmly grounded through long, uninterrupted, sincere engagement.
Sa tu dirgha kala nairantarya satkara asevitah dridhabhumih - I.14.
He says nothing about the conditions needing to be perfect. Abhyas is not contingent on having the right environment, the right time of day, the right state of body and mind. It is the practice itself, returned to with sincerity, that creates the ground.
So the question of inconsistency is not really about whether the conditions are right. It is about what you are bringing to practice when you show up - regardless of conditions.
That said, there is a practical intelligence in noticing what makes showing up harder than it needs to be. Not as a precondition for practice, but as svadhyaya - self-observation applied to your own patterns. If you are consistently sitting at a time of day when the body is exhausted, or attempting formal practice in the middle of continuous stimulation, it is worth asking whether that is devotion or unconscious resistance dressed as discipline.
The tradition doesn’t prescribe. But it does invite honesty.
So instead of asking why am I inconsistent, it can be more useful to ask: what am I actually bringing to practice when I arrive?
Is there sincerity? Is there a willingness to stay, even when it feels unremarkable? Is there a sankalpa - however quietly held - that orients the sitting toward something?
These questions tend to be more useful than restructuring the external conditions, though both have their place.
Over time, something shifts.
Practice becomes less of a negotiation. More of a return. Not because you’ve forced consistency, but because the practice itself has begun to create the ground it needs.
Abhyas and sahaj are not opposites - devoted effort and natural ease are not in conflict. One, sustained over time, becomes the other.
This is also where ishvarapranidhana re-enters. The willingness to practice without demanding a particular result - to show up sincerely and release the rest - is not separate from consistency. It is what makes consistency sustainable.
If your own practice has been uneven, you don’t need to fix everything at once.
Just look honestly at what you’re bringing when you arrive. And begin there.
This is something I work with closely - understanding where practice is breaking down, and how to support it more appropriately. If that feels relevant, you can find more at unlockascend.com.