Meditation isn't about being free from thoughts. You can't stop your thoughts, you can't stop thinking. Mindfulness brings awareness to your compulsive, obsessive mind and the non-stop thinking. When you become aware, you can create space and learn not to identify and become attached to the thoughts. This will greatly reduce anxiety and stress. If you are looking for a good free resource, "like" this Facebook page - they post a lot about mindfulness and meditation, but don't necessarily refer to it as such. They also sell a book that has a good meditation program in it. http://www.facebook.com/whatistad
After many years of practice, I still meditate, twice daily, 30-60 minutes each time... love it, keeps me young!
you'd be surprised how hard it is, once you quit and get into a routine that doesn't include it. Now for me, it is almost impossible to do nothing for 30 minutes. Every minute of my days is spoken for, and usually by mindless unproductive activities. And I know first hand how beneficial medidation can be. It's the one thing that if you do it consistently, I guarantee will change your life for the better. So why don't I start doing it again? I don't know, because it is really hard.
I know meditation is hard. The best thing I have found is to listen to nice chanting (sometimes called kirtans as well. ) Some Gospel music serves the same purpose. Music helps you to calm down easily and sink into peace and quite .
I'm a musician. The whole purpose originally of meditation was to get the music out of my head. Music is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing on the way up and a horrible curse on the way down. Very easy when you get burned out to use one set of drugs to help you get back on the way up, and another set of drugs to protect you from the insanity of the way down.
There several schools of meditation. Some of them teach a forceful approach, where you attempt to make your mind concentrate on some item or your breath or even stay blank. Others follow the opposite path whereby your mind is enticed to stay with a particular sound, and other dominant thoughts fall off automatically. I practice the latter and it works very easy for me - the last thing I would call it is "hard". Think of yourself like a dog owner and you want the dog (your rambling mind) to stay in its little house for a while: you can try to order it back or chase it all around to catch it (good luck with that) -- or you can put some goodies in its bowl and the dog comes quickly back and stays there. That's the second approach that I'm talking about. The Christian "heart prayer" or "Jesus prayer" is similar to that second meditation type as well.
I've studied every sort of meditation there is. As far as I'm concerned they are all crackpots. All you have to do is just sit quietly for some time, and everything else will take care of itself. Almost nobody can even imagine doing that. That's why, even to just get started they need some kind of instruction to "Do something" because the concept of doing nothing is so foreign they wouldn't even know where to start.
Are you saying that the idea of meditation is a result of the invention of TV and "gurus?" You do know that meditation is a practice that's been going on for thousands of years, right? Mainly in the eastern part of the world.