When I was at university I had a saying for it: when the meditation goes well, everything goes well.
I had noticed a pattern and the saying was my way of filing it away. In the stretches when I sat every day, without negotiating with myself about it first, things went well. Not one thing in particular. Everything, more or less at once, in the vague and total way that a good month is good. It felt like a magic formula and I half believed that it was one. Then the practice would slip, and within a couple of weeks the old difficulties were back in their usual places, my grades among them.
Which raised a question I could not answer at the time. What is the real connection between a handful of minutes on a cushion and the rest of a life? Was something outside responding to the effort, keeping some sort of account?
What the connection actually is
I still cannot answer that with certainty. But I am fairly sure there is nothing outside involved at all, and that the whole of it comes down to us: what we do, and how we meet what happens to us. Because a meditation that goes well is not doing the work. It is telling you the work is already done. A mind that will rest on the breath for handful of minutes is a mind that is gathered, and a gathered mind does not switch itself off when you stand up and put the cushion away.
It is easy enough to account for once you look at it in that direction. In those periods I was carrying far less harmful emotional weight, so there was much less of it competing with whatever I actually had to do. Willpower was not the problem it usually is. I could do a thing at the hour it needed doing, for the plain reason that I was not simultaneously fighting the insidious little pull to leave it until later. And when that pull did arrive, as it always does, I had somewhere to stand while it went past. You can watch procrastination the same way you watch anything else in the practice, and a thing you are watching is a great deal easier to get around than a thing you are inside of.
When it will not settle
The reverse reads just as plainly, and it is the more useful half. A practice that will not settle is not a failed practice. It is information. Something specific has knocked the mind off balance, or one of the five hindrances has got the run of the place: sensory desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness, doubt. The tradition calls them the nīvaraṇa and it is worth learning them by name, because naming one while it is happening is most of the work of getting free of it. They are not moral failures and nothing whatever is gained by treating them as though they were. What matters is that they do not stay on the cushion. Whatever is disturbing your handful of minutes is disturbing the eight hours after it, usually without being noticed there at all.
So the saying was not absurd, and it was not superstition, and I have stopped apologising for it. There is a real relation and it runs outward from the inside, which is the opposite of the direction we normally look for it. Most of what we file under bad luck is ours. And where the outcome genuinely is not ours — and a great deal of life is like that — what remains is the option of accepting it inwardly. That is not resignation and it is not pretending the thing does not hurt. It is the difference between carrying something and being dragged along behind it, and it is much the more dependable of the two roads to being happy, if by happy we mean less conditioned.
Start with the practice
So if your practice has gone off and there are other things worrying you at the same time, start with the practice. It is the smaller and more tractable of the two problems, and it is the one that moves the other. Break the inertia. Set the wheel of the Dhamma turning again. Put the inside in order by applying right effort, sammā-vāyāma, and when you manage it the things that were weighing on you start coming apart on their own, in a way that will look frankly inexplicable from where you are standing at the moment.
Try it and see.