Not everyone should meditate

There's a lot of scientific evidence for the benefits of mediation. You can ignore all of the noise about higher states of consciousness and suchlike and still receive documented benefits:

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-in-depth

> It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology

This is not something that meditation should ever be about. Meditation is about exploring the inner workings of your experience, in a way that ultimately aims towards equanimity. It requires some deep (and continuing!) experience in practical ethics (turns out if you really learn to care about other sentient beings around you, it's a lot easier to care about yourself too!), as well as a kind of intellectual knowledge or wisdom that's perhaps best associated today with the Stoic tradition, albeit surely not exclusive to it (even a cursory understanding of the Buddhist literature on vipassana should familiarize you with the same concepts, albeit of course phrased differently).

The idea of meditation as "fighting" with oneself should definitely raise many alarm bells, the practice is surely challenging enough on its own! (The "Dark Night of the Soul" is legitimately scary, especially if you're not told in advance that it might occur and that there's ways past it.)

Anyone else getting a 404? Seems like the article was taken down, judging further from what's listed on the homepage

This is an underappreciated point. I’m an Anglican priest, and I always thought I was just really bad at prayer. (Ironic, I know.) But then I got diagnosed a couple of years ago, and I realized that my brain was working against me.

Some day I have a mind to write a book on spiritual disciplines for those with ADHD and how we talk about prayer and the spiritual life is often not useful for those with the disorder. But, you know, I have ADHD, so I doubt that will ever get written. ;)

There's a lot of authoritative claims about what meditation is in this thread, so there's also a good chance that what I do is considered "not real meditation" but it's what I learned at a meditation center, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you what got me over it when I had a hard time starting:

Just allow yourself to be bad at it and repeatedly apply the rule that when observe that your attention has wandered, you just consciously bring it back to what you're supposed to be focusing on. You haven't "failed at meditation", you're learning it. Don't beat yourself up for your mind wandering, just acknowledge that the repeated application of the redirection is what it takes and it's all part of the practice. At first it's non-stop, and eventually you get better at it. Sometimes it's excruciatingly boring and tedious and sometimes it's immensely relaxing, and occasionally you get weird hallucinatory stuff out of nowhere (although that to me feels like just going into a dream state, which I've always interpreted as "I'm so relaxed I fell asleep and dreamt").

That's really all it is for me. A way to relax and slow down.