If you're serious you won't try to learn from web postings or even books or gurus. You'll find an organization that has been teaching meditation for decades or

If you're serious you won't try to learn from web postings or even books or gurus. You'll find an organization that has been teaching meditation for decades or longer with good results, and commit to their introductory training. Only such a group has the integrity and intelligence to help you untie your specific knots at specific moments in your journey. If you need justification or a mental model, think of it this way: the mind presents itself as a series of often-mutually reinforcing emotions and concepts, based in limbic and associational networks of the brain. Meditation is training that decouples associations and valuations, to avoid vicious feedback cycles driving most thinking and feeling. It is hard, hard, work to reprogram yourself, but it's also natural: if you just don't feed the feedback or practice the reaction, then the reinforcement decays, and you discover you can experience sensations instead of emotional reactions and assessments. That can seem relatively (though briefly) liberating. You will find yourself more capable of changing your mind, and more interested in having a true sense of the world than in promoting your personal perspective/agenda/emotional-crisis. Meditation will not make you more likable or marketable or powerful. If you want something out of it, you will get nowhere. It may destabilize your personality and your relationships, to the extent they depend on mutual "interests" that decay with meditation. If you want to be alive, do it. Practice until you can at least go to a 10-day retreat. Daily/hourly meditation may be calming, but you won't experience the depths of your mind until it's all you do, every day, for more days than you can count. To live is more important than success, work, education, or marriage (but perhaps not kids).