Tips for not getting interrupted during your meditation time

Making time for regular meditation is hard enough without being interrupted in the middle of it.

Interruptions when you’re in a meditative state hurt. Not just in the sense that you might feel actual pain in being pulled back to reality before you’re ready, but in that it can prevent you from developing a steady sitting meditation practice.

But life is full of interruptions. Life is, after all, what happens when you’re making other plans.

My husband and I both have home offices and, when I’m not seeing clients, I spend a good deal of time at home. He works from home, all day, every week day. After 4 pm and on weekends, at least 2 of our 4 kids are home. It’s a busy, full house. There aren’t any quiet, private nooks I can hide in to meditate.

So I mostly use my bedroom. It’s a room I’m comfortable in and which gives me the most privacy and seclusion from the rest of the family.

Most of the time. When someone isn’t walking through it to use the bathroom.

I’ve learned to largely ignore these interrupts to my meditations. Keeping your eyes closed and completely ignoring the person who’s walked in to the room works well. They usually stay quiet and leave. But it still interrupts your meditation.

How can you avoid the interruption to begin with?

Predictability

If you have a regular meditation schedule, you can let the people in your life know when that is. If they know that every day at 9 am you’re busy and unavailable, then they’re more likely to remember this and less likely to bother you during this time.

A regular time also helps you. As you get into the good habit of meditating at that time each day, your body and mind will actually start preparing itself for your meditation, which will help you slip into that peaceful groove more easily.

However, not everyone has a predictable schedule. I meditate most days around 10 am. But not on Mondays and Fridays when I go to the gym first thing. Then I meditate around 11 am. Weekends? That’s anyone’s guess. Usually it’s after breakfast, but sometimes things come up (I have 4 kids, remember?) and it’s not until early afternoon that I’m able to make space and time for myself.

This doesn’t lend itself to anyone knowing what my meditation schedule is. So I have to use other methods.

Signage

As I meditate almost exclusively in my bedroom, putting a sign up on my bedroom door is usually an effective way to let people know not to bother me.

I’ve come up with 2 signs. One is simply a heart-shaped sticky note that says, “Meditating” which I stick on the closed bedroom door, around eye level.

The other is a whiteboard, hanging right outside my door, a bit like college dorm room doors. I can write what I’m doing and the time I’m not available, and whoever desperately needs to talk to me can write their own message, then go away and wait for me to be available.

I added the whiteboard this past summer while kids were off school and I was attempting to have uninterrupted work time.

Even those things don’t always work for my family. One day recently, my husband completely ignored the bright pink sticky note. He claims he didn’t see it.

So he came up with another idea: placing a large plastic goose in front of the bedroom door. The goose is something we had on the landing already (I don’t have a great explanation for why we have a goose in our house, other than it was my Mum’s and, when she died, one of the kids wanted to keep it for reasons unknown to me, but it seems to have become something we can never get rid of).

Now, when I’m meditating, the goose guards my door. It’s much harder to ignore.

If meditating is important to you, come up with your own ridiculous way of letting the people in your life know that’s what you’re doing and they need to leave you alone for a bit.

Stop the distractions you can control

Because you can’t actually control the people in your life, you can’t guarantee they won’t interrupt you, even if you’ve told them not to, put up signs, or done all the things you can think of.

However, there are some distractions you can control.

Put your phone on silent.

If you’re like me, you use your phone to help you meditate, either by playing music or using an app like Insight Timer, Headspace or Calm. So you can’t turn off your phone or put it in another room.

You can, however, make it stop interrupting you with notifications. (Turning off as many notifications as possible is actually good for your sanity in general and I highly recommend it. You don’t need to know when someone liked your last Facebook post.)

Put your phone on silent. Turn off all notifications.

Stop the notifications on your watch.

Many of us, myself included, wear smartwatches. I love my fitbit watch and it can be a helpful tool in my life, ensuring I keep active. And being able to quickly glance at new emails and texts or send phone calls tovoicemail without picking up my phone is handy.

But you don’t need those notifications when you’re meditating. So either take your watch off (it doesn’t need to be tracking your steps when you’re sitting still) and put it on its charger, or turn thenotifications off while you’re meditating.

Otherwise, whenever it vibrates, you’ll be tempted to take a quick peek to see if something “urgent” has come through. With rare exceptions, the world can do without you for 10 to 20 minutes each day while you practice some important, nourishing self-care for your mind.

Accept the experience as part of the meditation

Acceptance is big part of meditation. Accepting that your mind wanders, that thoughts and feeling arise. And accepting that sometimes, despite your best efforts, you’re going to get interrupted.

As I was teaching an online class on meditation recently, I realized that I’d forgotten to let my kids know that I’d still be teaching when they got home from school. So, 4 o’clock rolled around and, as I was in the middle of leading a peaceful meditation, I heard my kids come home.

One of them started yelling through the house for me.

I heard Ben’s footsteps come up the stairs.

The goose was guarding my door. But it didn’t cause them to pause at all.

“Mothor!” Ben called through the door. (Yes, this is what my kids call me. They told me once it’s short for “Lord Mother.”)

So they managed to interrupt not just my meditation, but my students’ as well. Lovely.

And that’s part of this wonderful, messy life we live. Meditations get interrupted. And that’s ultimately OK.

Because meditation isn’t even really about focusing your mind. It’s about refocusing it. Every time you get distracted – by your own thoughts or your hungry 11-year-old – and come back to your breath, back to your center, that’s when the magic happens.

Each time you do that, you rewire your brain and lay down new tracks in your neural pathways that go on to have long-lasting, positive effects on how your brain works and you respond to life.

So all those interruptions, they can also be blessings.

Learn more about meditation

If you’d like to learn more about meditation and how it can help you in your personal growth and spiritual development, consider taking my course: Meditation for Spiritual Development. It’s an on-demand course, available anytime, anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Or, you can click here for a playlist of all my free YouTube videos about meditation.