There is a trap associated with thinking of spiritual practice as a “journey”. When you take a journey, it’s often because you’d rather be somewhere else. You imagine a destination that’s quite different from —and probably better than —where you are. That puts you in a frame of mind where you constantly measure progress and compare where you are to where you want to be.
But the spiritual “journey” doesn’t work that way. In fact, that’s kind of the opposite of the way the spiritual journey works. In this journey, what matters is where you are, not where you’re going. Here, I have to say something that sounds all mystical and enigmatic, but it really isn’t: The journey is the destination. In the spiritual journey, you are constantly arriving. Every moment is it. There’s nowhere to go from here.
Sometimes, “here” is a sleepy place. If you imagine that the destination must be someplace where sleepiness doesn’t happen, then this sleepy “here” looks like someplace you have to get through to get where you’d rather be. You get discouraged because you feel far from the destination. When the sleepiness goes away, you think “Ah, I’m closer to the goal now!”, but that won’t last, and you’ll end up feeling all the more discouraged when the sleepiness comes back. It will feel like you’ve regressed.
You could say that the only way you “regress” on the spiritual journey is when you reject here as something you have to get through on your way to a better place. This is it. Sleepy or not, distracted or not, this is it. There’s nowhere else to be. That’s the journey.