I still sort of feel like I'm hunting for a really practical "cashing out" of the benefits I guess.

My turn to list some benefits:

• A sense that more is possible: a greater appreciation of mindspace, and better knowing what it's like to not have all of your thoughts and emotions bent by needless affective judgment.
• Being more the person I want to be. (Especially for the 30 minutes after meditating, but also in life generally; though I've been leveling up pretty fast lately so it's hard to attribute my better general dispositions to meditation per se.)
• As a cause and effect of both points above, wanting to be more the person I want to be: trying harder to be awesome. No, not trying: just being awesome. Actually thinking hard for hours at a time instead of just having my thoughts lazily drift around hypothetical scenarios or transient environmental factors. Actually striking up conversations with cute girls when I go out. Creating a framework for reasoning about the effective acquisition of meta-level dispositions for acquiring new and awesome skills and dipositions. Establishing goals and targets, creating a path for myself so that I can keep my growth going, hopefully in recursive fashion. Fluidly and reliably going meta and then connecting my meta-optimizations to my actual next action. (I think telling people to 'just fucking do it' as a general rule is damaging: a lot of effort is wasted on suboptimal work. Meta-optimization is always a better call if you can do it right.)
• Not flinching away from thoughts or ideas. Internalizing the Litany of Tarski. (Not entirely; I think that's an Enlightenment thing. But still, I've improved.)
• Gaining an appreciation of the cognitively low-level existence of confirmation bias.
• Gaining an appreciation of the constance and strength of affective bias.