Nearly everyone arrives with a picture in their head. It’s usually been assembled from a film, a documentary, something a friend said, and a few things they found online at eleven at night and didn’t quite want to read properly.
The picture is almost never accurate, and the inaccuracy causes real problems — people don’t book because they’re braced for something that was never going to happen, or they do book and spend the first session waiting for an experience that isn’t coming.
So here’s the gap, laid out honestly.
Expected: something dramatic
What happens: boredom.
The first few sessions are frequently quite dull. You breathe, you sit, your mind wanders off to an email you forgot to send. Twenty minutes feels like fifty. At some point you wonder whether you’re doing it wrong.
You aren’t. Restlessness is the correct first result — it’s what a nervous system accustomed to constant input does when the input stops. The dullness is the sound of the backlog arriving.
Worth knowing too: the sessions that turn out to matter are almost never the ones that felt significant at the time. People routinely report that the session they nearly cancelled was the one something shifted in.
Expected: intense, exposing, awkward
What happens: mostly mundane.
There’s a conversation first — a long one, typically. Then breathing. Often lying still for stretches. Frequently more talking. The proportion of any session spent doing something that would look unusual to an observer is far smaller than people imagine.
Awkwardness does show up, and it peaks early. Most people feel self-conscious for the first ten minutes and then forget to. The anticipation is reliably worse than the thing.
Expected: everyone else will be flexible, spiritual and calm
What happens: the room is full of ordinary, fairly tense people.
Accountants. Nurses. People who came because they haven’t slept properly in two years. A decent proportion arrive openly sceptical and say so.
And the more useful point: there’s nothing here to be good at. This isn’t a skill with visible competence, so there’s no standard you could be falling short of. Nobody can tell how well your attention is going, including you.
Expected: I’ll relax
What happens: often the opposite, at first.
Motion hides things. Stop moving and the hidden things surface — tiredness you’d been overriding, a mental to-do list arriving at volume, sometimes emotion with no obvious cause attached.
This catches people badly, because they came to feel better and the first result is feeling more. But it isn’t the practice making things worse. It’s the practice making visible what was already running underneath the busyness. Nothing new arrived; you simply stopped drowning it out.
Expected: the hard part will be feeling bad things
What happens: the hard part is receiving good ones.
Almost everyone braces for grief, fear, or whatever they’ve been avoiding. Sometimes that does come. But the capacity that turns out to be more damaged, in more people, is the ability to let something pleasant land and stay.
Watch what you do with a genuine compliment or a long hug — the joke, the deflection, the small manoeuvre to cut it short. That reflex shows up here too, and it’s usually more confronting than the difficult material.
Expected: I’ll be pushed into something
What happens: you’ll be asked, repeatedly, whether you want to continue.
This is the one that surprises people most, and a number of them find it harder than being told what to do. Being asked puts the decision in your hands, which means you have to know what you actually want — and a lot of adults have very little practice at consulting themselves in real time.
If you’ve been doing what’s expected of you for thirty years, someone genuinely waiting for your answer is unfamiliar territory.
Expected: progress will feel like progress
What happens: change shows up as absence.
The evidence is almost entirely made of non-events. An argument you didn’t escalate. An evening you didn’t spend braced. A night you fell asleep without the usual hour of turning over.
Non-events are invisible. You can’t notice something that didn’t happen, which is why other people usually spot the change first and why so many people conclude nothing’s working when quite a lot is.
Expected: I’ll float out blissful
What happens: frequently tired.
Deep parasympathetic states are physically demanding in their own way. People often want to sleep afterwards, or feel oddly flat, or find that something surfaces the following day rather than during the session.
That’s ordinary. The integration matters more than the session, and it doesn’t happen in the room.
What genuinely does surprise people
Two things, consistently.
How fast the body responds compared to how slowly the sense of change arrives. Breathing shifts within minutes. The feeling that anything has changed takes weeks. Those two timelines being so far apart is disorienting.
And how much of it is just talking. People expect an experience and find a conversation, and the conversation frequently turns out to be where the work happened.
Before your first session, do this
Write down, in three lines, what you expect to happen. Be specific and be honest — including the version you’d be slightly embarrassed to admit to.
Fold it up. Read it afterwards.
Most people find they were wrong in both directions at once: it was far less dramatic than they feared and far more ordinary than they hoped, and something moved anyway. Having the original in writing is the only way to see that clearly, because memory quietly edits expectations to match whatever happened.
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