I'm very interested in it, I've done it quite a bit, and I've been to several retreats... and I also get tired of the way people go around recommending it willy

I'm very interested in it, I've done it quite a bit, and I've been to several retreats... and I also get tired of the way people go around recommending it willy-nilly. I don't recommend stuff like that to people, because in most cases it's presumptuous. I don't know what your mind is like, I don't know what's going to happen when you use any particular method, I don't have a wide experience with teaching meditation, I'm just some guy living my own life the best I can manage it... There's a lot of the same effect as with people who recently started running, or recently started some particular diet, or whatever it may be... for some reason that thing fit into their ideas and lifestyle, and it coincided with a hockey stick point in their satisfaction, or something, and they feel the urge to recommend—for benevolent reasons, since they just want other people to get that satisfaction, too. There's a difference because meditation, in the most taught forms, is very intimate, as you describe. Its "subject matter" is basically the entire life of the mind, emotions, thoughts, memories, everything, so unless your psyche is squeaky clean like Mr Flanders (who in that one episode of course turned out to have some heavily repressed traumas), meditation is not going to be a nice walk in the park. Almost everybody who starts doing it finds that they for some reason can't do it as often or as much as they'd like to... it's often unclear why... but could it have to do with the fact that you're sitting down in utter silence and facing like everything at once? And it's kind of intense, and sometimes very painful? Then there's also the whole "happiness" aspect of the hype & marketing, where everybody imagines that the ideal to aspire for is a happy, smiling, Thich Nhat Hanh type, or something, and all the rhetoric becomes infused with this naive optimism, everybody knows this caricature. So then if you sit down and you find that you actually feel very lonely, or very confused, or very anxious, very angry, very horny, or very whatever... then what? "Just breathe, let it all go..." Ugh! Sorry, I'm just ranting. For me it's one of these situations when you're very interested in something but the way other people advocate it makes you just cringe.