I've read a bunch of different meditation guides and as a result, I've ended up with a sort of a hybrid form of practice that uses various bits from here and there. Still, if I had to point to a single guide, the meditation that I do on most days is closest to tranquility meditation. I've found that drinking a cup of strong green tea about half an hour before practice makes it easier.

I do timed sits, setting a timer to anywhere between 15 and 60 minutes, and try to practice tranquility meditation until the timer goes off. Sometimes it's easy and effortless, sometimes it's a struggle not to quit after the first five minutes. But regardless of how I feel, I do try to get at least 15 minutes of practice in each day - I figure that even if I can't seem to get any benefit out of it at the moment, it'll still improve my concentration skills and make the next time a little easier. Don't be discouraged if you can't meditate this long in the beginning - when I started doing meditation practice last summer, even 5 minutes was a challenge, and 15 pretty much plain impossible. But with enough 5-minute sits, longer periods eventually became possible. If you're using your breath as a focus, it can help to count the breaths in your mind, resetting the count back to zero whenever you realize that your attention has wandered off. At least for me, the act of resetting the count seems to act as an additional feedback signal for my brain, making it easier to focus.

A little counter-intuitively, meditation seems easier if I have some mild discomfort, like an itchy skin, feeling slightly ill from having strong tea on an empty stomach, or an excess awareness of saliva secreting in my mouth. My attention keeps getting automatically drawn to these discomforts, so I can use them as an extra meditation focus in addition to my breath. Over time (several sits) it may become harder to use them as foci, though, as they stop feeling uncomfortable.

This relates to what I find to be absolutely the most valuable skill taught by meditation: the ability to take any uncomfortable feeling, neutrally observe it, and eventually have it stop feeling uncomfortable. Note that in order for this to work, you shouldn't try to make it stop feeling uncomfortable - rather, you should really just observe it neutrally, letting go of all desires relating to it, including a desire for it to stop feeling bad. It's a little difficult to explain, but you should get it with enough practice.

What a lot of guides don't seem to mention is that while sits are very valuable and helpful, to get the most benefits out of it you should be practicing mindfulness whenever you get the chance! For instance, you can practice mindfulness:

• While walking somewhere: focus your attention and your thoughts to the way your body feels, the way your various muscles feel, any possible tensions you feel. Breathe deeply and enjoy the pleasant feeling that comes from just feeling your body and your breath.
• While cleaning, brushing your teeth, making food, or performing any other activity that doesn't require thought. Instead of your thoughts drifting off, use whatever it is that you're doing as your meditation focus, trying to concentrate on just that and not thinking about something else.
• Whenever you're waiting for something and feeling impatient. Instead of digging up your phone or looking for some other distraction, take the opportunity to practice meditation (with your eyes open, if need be) and neutrally observe the impatience until it goes away. Public transit is great for this - I get a lot of meditation practice done while waiting for or riding a bus.
• Whenever you feel any negative sensation at all! If you for any reason feel bad, you have the option of turning that negative feeling into a meditation focus and watching and studying it until it stops feeling bad. (Possibly the hardest part is in remembering that this option exists.) I have used mindfulness practice to attack feelings of irritation or impatience when talking with people, urges to keep checking my Facebook/e-mail/IRC/Google+ every five minutes, and a reluctance to do something that I should be doing. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it can make you feel a lot better and be a great akrasia-killer. A week back I managed to conquer my nervousness and ask a total stranger in a café on a date, and I have a strong suspicion that I wouldn't have been able to do that without mindfulness practice. (She was already taken, but very flattered that I asked.)

I'm still a beginner when it comes to meditation, having only done regular practice for about two months, and sporadic and irregular practice for a year. On a lot of days, my attention keeps wandering during my sit, and for the rest of the day I feel just as emotional and easily distracted as always. But on there are also times (like today) when the whole day feels like one long extended session of mindfulness practice. Whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't require thought, I focus on my breath and on my body, and start to feel increasingly good as a consequence. Whenever I am doing something that does require thought, I use mindfulness as a way to keep my thoughts on that topic and not perform worse because I keep thinking about something else. Each feeling of discomfort becomes something to be celebrated, because it gives me a chance to practice my skills further - aha, I don't feel like doing X! Now I can do X and focus on that feeling of not wanting to do it, and see if it goes away! Bummer, now it did go away, I'll have to find something else useful that I wouldn't want to be doing after I finish with X! It becomes difficult for anything to make me feel bad, when sensations of something feeling unpleasant turn into something that I actively hunt after and am glad to find - and when I do find them, they rapidly stop feeling unpleasant.

Like I said, most days don't feel like this. Like anything that involves learning and internalizing new ways of thinking, it's a two-steps-forward, one-step-back, four-steps-forward, seven-steps-back, three-steps-forward, half-a-step-back kind of process. But I think those kinds of days are slowly becoming more common, and when I do have one of those days, it's awesome.

(I've posted about some theories of how/why meditation works here and here.)

I've been doing this for a while now and reached the end that the author calls partial enlightenment. I dislike the term however. It sounds so new agey.

The only thing that has happened is that I now see myself as an inseparable part of the physical universe both on the level of belief and alief. This insight makes life's problems seem less acute as they cannot target a permanent self on the alief-level. I still get sad, feel pain and pleasure but I see them more as fantastic stories about reality made up by my brain than the actual reality of (physical) cause & effect. I can also trust my instincts and subconscious mind more as I no longer fear losing myself when I surrender to pure feelings and motions beyond verbal thought.

This insight is only about a week old and I'm still making sense out of it so I'll end up with a more detailed description of what happened:

I progressed through the first two stages using other meditations but I quit smack in the middle of stage three. Back then I had no idea that feeling awful was a normal part of progress and I spent the next two years depressed in a Dark Night. Please don't do this to yourself! It sucks big time.

Last summer I ran into DavidM's article and started practicing. I worked through the pains of the Dark Night and finally broke out of stage three. However the boredom of early stage four sucked the motivation out of the practice and I took a break until I realized I was slipping back into depression.

So with the support of some friends and strong green tea I started meditating and hunting for the vibrations that permeate all experiences. I finally reached the end of stage four and could see the observer clearly. Like plucking out a flower I picked up the experience of the vibrating observer and realized that it was simply an automatic label the mind puts on thoughts and actions that it finds really important. Having now gained control of the label I could put it anywhere and immediately become it. So I became the universe and the mind was filled with joy.

The habitual mind (that is feeling like my usual self) eventually returned but it now has a dreamlike character and with a little meditation I can attach the feeling of self to basically anything and feel that I become that thing. I can also not attach the self to anything and just let the mind rest in a non-dual awareness.

I grew up a practicing Quaker. While some Friends "pray" during Meeting (what we call church), others practice mindful meditation. So while I regularly practice what I believe qualifies as mindful meditation, I haven't been formerly trained. And also, what has worked for me in helping me learn how to focus, might not work for you; it has, however, worked for some of my friends, so it could at least help someone who reads this. In addition to daily meditation attempts, which are important even they are only for 5 minutes, it might be easier if you try some other ways to learn how gain focus.

So, lets say someone you dislike does something that annoys/angers you (jerk coworker, rude driver) or your are upset by a situation (quitting smoking). Most people, when angered, spend a good deal of mental energy dreaming up the perfect witty comeback, how horrible the other person is, or how they could "punish" the offender. They will do this for many hours throughout the day/week/month without even realizing they are doing it. They have a hard time stopping because they don't think about their thinking. So for this drill, make a conscious decision that whenever your thoughts start to stray in that direction of thinking about that offending person/situation, you are going to stop those thoughts, acknowledge that you broke your promise to yourself by thinking them, and move on to a different, unrelated thought.

The first, uh, 50 times you do this, you will realize that you had been thinking about the triggering person or event for a few minutes--possibly more--before you noticed you were doing it. You will keep doing this. And then one time, it will click after only a minute or so. And then 40 seconds. And so on. Until you realize as you start the thought that you are breaking your personal promise. You have begun to think about thinking it while you are thinking it.

That drill will help you understand what it feels like to notice, acknowledge, and redirect your thoughts during meditation. It's the same skill, except meditation tends to be a bit harder because it's not just one kind of thought you are blocking, it's all but one. So if you successfully meditating for 5 minutes, you wouldn't have had to notice, acknowledge, or redirect your thoughts about anything--you would have just held on to that original thought for the 5 minutes. But its going to be really hard to notice if this is happening or not if you don't know what it feels like to interrupt those unwanted thoughts. Because if you haven't learned how to interrupt unwanted thoughts, you really haven't learned how to identify that you are having unwanted thoughts.

Another drill which I have told people--which may or may not help as I use it mainly for falling asleep, not meditating, but it still focuses the mind--is to attempt to think random" images instead of thoughts. Obviously this is not possible, but that is the best I can do at putting words on the process. When you think of an object, it is easy to quickly move from that object into some sort of story surrounding the object.

Ex. I think of my dad, and then I think of the phone call we had today, and then i think how my dad mentioned this one thing, which I forgot to do, but that's ok I'll do it during my lunch break tomorrow, and oh, wouldn't a PBJ be delicious for lunch tomorrow...and on and on.

Instead, try NOT connecting the story. Think of a thought, make that thought an image, and the second you think of something slightly else, make that thought an image but don't think about the connection between the two. Just try to force yourself to make the thought jump without a connector. It makes it easier if you try to visualize an image of the word. If you think "gorilla," you need to mentally see that gorilla. If you think of a word that has no direct image, like "happy," just see the word written out in your mind.

So instead of the above mental conversation, you will visualize "dad...gorilla...banana..stem...seaweed..rainbow... telephone..cord...hair..dance..peculiar...baseball.." and on and on. The words must have a correlation somewhere in my mind or I wouldn't have thought them in that order, but I refused to let my mind try to draw the connection while I thought them. I just accept them as random (even if this is incorrect) and force myself to make the thought jump to the next image. The second your mind starts to stray and think "oh a telephone uses a cord," (which I realized as I type this, not while I was thinking it) and you notice yourself straying (like in the first example), correct yourself and try to start making "random" image jumps again. Try to jump from image to image as fast as possible; if you stay too long on one image, it's easy for your mind to form related thoughts.

This drill also makes it easy for you to notice when your thought process strays, and self-correct. Honestly, I don't think it matters if your thoughts during mindful meditation are on one object (saying "ohmmm," staring at the flame of a candle, and so on) or on many objects like this mental images drill, as long you don't actually give thoughts to those many objects.

I was in the same spot as you until I read this post by Sam Harris. It's a pretty good intro to mindful meditation. It also links to some useful resources, such as guided audio tracks.

I think there's a risk of losing your rationality by practicing mediation.

I figured that skill in mindfulness meditation would help with sleep onset insomnia. Instead of getting frustrated at taking an hour or more to get sleep, you could just treat the time lying down as an extra meditation session. Hasn't really worked out with the sort of undisciplined and infrequent practice I've been doing yet. I still tend to get frustrated and go into a funk of discomfort after lying awake past forty or so minutes.

I wonder if the idea is worth pursuing anyway. Focusing seems more difficult when lying down, and might be bad enough that there just isn't much skill progress to be developed that way, but on the other hand there is twenty to ninety or more minutes of utterly unoccupied uninterrupted time there for every night when going to bed early.