Therapy homework: the meditation half nobody helps with

I went to therapy without knowing what I was going there for.

That sounds like a joke and it is not. I did not arrive with a topic. I arrived open to the idea that I am not perfect and that I probably had things worth looking at, and I wanted to find out what they were. So the sessions were exploratory. We would talk for a while, and then we would do something closer to a meditation than a conversation. I would close my eyes, he would read a script, and the script would produce images in my head. Afterwards we would talk about what had shown up and what it might be circling.

Early on, the settling part of that script asked me to let parts of my body get heavy, and other parts get warm. Ordinary enough. It worked. I could feel the heaviness arrive where it was asked for, and I could feel the warmth arrive where it was asked for.

Except in my legs and my feet.

The part of the exercise that never worked

I want to be accurate about how unremarkable this seemed. It was not dramatic. Nothing hurt. It was a settling exercise at the front of a session, the part you do before the part that matters, and it half worked in a way I assumed was just me being bad at it.

It kept happening. Session after session, the same pattern: heaviness where I asked for it, warmth through most of me, and nothing below the knees. I did not raise it, because raising it would have meant interrupting the actual work to report that a warm up exercise was slightly off.

Eventually I mentioned it in passing. Not as a topic. As an aside, on the way to something else.

What I was actually doing with my life

Here is where I was at the time, because it matters to what happened next.

I was living abroad as an expat. I had been with my girlfriend for several years and we were not married and not engaged. I did not own a property in the country I was living in. I liked being there. But a lot of my friends had been leaving, over months, and I did not want to move back to my home country either.

I was coasting. Not unhappy, not in crisis, just moving through it without having decided anything.

The remark I nearly did not make

He picked up the aside. We explored it. And what it turned out to be about was roots: that I had not committed to anywhere, or figured out where I actually wanted to settle.

That became a long thread in my therapy. That thread is the reason I proposed to my now wife. We have a home and two kids, with a third on the way, and I credit a lot of that to a technique I nearly did not mention because it seemed too small to bring up.

The practice was the easy half. The noticing was the half with nowhere to live.

I have thought about that a lot since. Not the visualisation itself, which did its job. The near miss. If I had never mentioned the feet, we would have carried on working on whatever I had come in with that day, and the whole thread would simply not have existed.

Therapy homework runs in two directions

He also gave me things to do between sessions. Scripts I could practise on my own, and specific things to try, and then to tell him what I experienced.

That last part is the bit I want to talk about, because it is where I fell down, and because almost nothing is written about it.

Think about what actually has to travel. An instruction has to get from the room to your Tuesday evening. And then whatever happened on Tuesday evening has to get back to the room. Two legs, and only one of them is paved.

The research covers the outbound leg reasonably well. A 2025 co-design study of an ACT companion app puts it plainly: roughly 20% to 50% of clients do not engage in any between-session practice, and the reasons it lists are “low motivation, not remembering the details of the exercises, not fully understanding them, or not having access to the exercises when needed.”

Read that list again. One of those four reasons is about motivation. The other three are about information. You cannot do the thing because you cannot remember it, cannot follow it, or cannot find it.

Nobody is writing the equivalent list for the return leg. But my version of it was simple: by the time I sat back down, some of what I had wanted to raise was gone. Not all of it. Some of it, every time.

The gap in that lower path is where my warm feet lived for several weeks.

The half that goes missing

What is easy to assume is that people skip the practice. In my experience the practice is the easy part. You were told to do a thing, the thing takes a few minutes, you do it.

What goes is the observation. And it goes for reasons that are not about discipline at all.

Some of it is that you feel different by the time you get back. Read any thread where people in therapy talk about this and the same thing comes up: they feel better on the day of the session than they did on the Wednesday they actually needed it, so the Wednesday stops feeling worth mentioning. One person described knowing exactly what they wanted to raise right up until they sat down, and then going completely blank.

Some of it is that the small things do not feel like they qualify. Mine certainly did not. A warm up exercise that half worked is not a topic. It is a shrug.

And some of it is that even when people do write things down, the note does not do what they hoped. A recurring complaint is that reading back your own entry feels strange, like someone else wrote it, because the state you wrote it in is not available any more. The facts survive. The texture does not.

None of which is an argument against keeping a record. It is an argument about what the record is for, which is pattern recognition rather than record keeping.

Five things that would have helped me

None of this is advice about what to practise or how often. That is between you and your therapist, and it is genuinely their call, not mine and not an app’s. This is only about the return leg: holding on to what happened so it is still there when you sit back down.

The window is about ten minutes wide. After that you have the summary rather than the thing itself.

• Capture it in the first few minutes, not later that evening. The gap between “that was odd” and “I think something felt a bit off” is about ten minutes wide. I used to leave the session or the practice and get on with the day, and by the evening I had the summary instead of the thing. The minutes straight after a practice are the step most people skip, and they are the ones doing the work.
• Say it out loud rather than typing it. This is the one I would push hardest. A typed line preserves the fact and loses the tone, which is exactly the complaint people have about their own notes. Speaking it keeps the hesitation and the “I don’t know, it’s probably nothing” in the recording, and that hedge is often the most useful part. It is why voice notes during a practice tend to survive the week better than written ones, and the reason the voice journal exists at all.
• You do not need to know what it means. “Could not get my feet warm” is a complete note on its own. If an interpretation arrives with it, write that down too, but not having one is never a reason to leave the observation out. Working out what it points at is the thing you are going in to do together.
• Keep the ones that seem too small. My whole example is a thing I nearly binned for being trivial. You are not a good judge of which of your observations matters, and neither am I. The filter you apply on Wednesday is not the filter that would have been applied in the room.
• Look for repeats rather than events. One odd thing is noise. The same odd thing three times is a pattern, and it is the pattern that is worth carrying in. I only noticed my feet because it happened over and over, and I noticed it slowly. Anything that lets you see what keeps coming back across entries collapses that from several weeks to a couple.

That last point is really the whole argument for keeping any record at all, and it is the argument the meditation journaling guide makes at more length: the value is not in any single entry, it is in what turns out to be recurring.

One honest caveat, because it is not universal. Some people find that bringing notes into a session gets between them and the conversation, and at least one person I read had a therapist actively ask them to come in without any. If a notebook turns into something you hide behind, that is worth knowing about yourself, and it is worth saying out loud to the person you are paying to notice things like that.

What this is not

Using meditation between therapy sessions is not a substitute for therapy, and it is not a thing to put between you and your therapist.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. People in therapy are, reasonably, alert to anything that feels like software creeping into the relationship, and they are right to be.

A practice tool belongs on your side of the relationship. It holds what you noticed so that you can carry it in yourself.

It does not interpret, it does not sit in the session, and what you record is yours. Therapists, for what it is worth, have their own version of this problem pointing the other way.

Which is also why I care about the encryption on this specifically. What you write after a therapy practice is close to the most sensitive thing a person will ever put into an app, and people say so plainly, usually while describing the unlocked notes file on their phone. Your prompts are encrypted before they leave your device, and what you keep sits in a private meditation journal rather than a feed.

If you are struggling, or anything in a practice brings up more than you can hold on your own, tell your therapist, and contact your local crisis line or emergency services if you need support now.

Frequently asked questions

What should I do between therapy sessions?

Whatever your therapist has asked you to do. That part is genuinely theirs to decide. What is worth adding on your own initiative is a way of holding on to what you noticed while doing it, because that is the part most likely to go missing before your next session.

Is it normal to forget what you wanted to say in therapy?

It is extremely common. Two things drive it. You often feel better on the day of a session than you did during the week, so the difficult moment stops feeling worth raising. And a difficult week is hard to reconstruct from memory once it has passed. Neither is a failure of effort.

Should I take notes into my therapy sessions?

Most people who try it find it helps, and some find the opposite, that notes become something to hide behind. Both are real. If you are not sure which you are, say so to your therapist and let them watch what happens.

Can I use a meditation app alongside therapy?

Alongside, yes, as a way of practising and capturing what you noticed. It should not replace therapy, sit inside the therapeutic relationship, or be treated as a source of clinical guidance. If your therapist has given you a specific practice, their version is the one to follow.

What if I did not do the practice my therapist suggested?

Say so, and say what got in the way. The obstacle is usually more useful material than the practice would have been, and the research on between-session work suggests most of the barriers are practical rather than motivational: not remembering the details, not fully understanding them, or not being able to reach them when you needed them.