I can't meditate...
I have often heard people say: "I can't meditate, I can't sit still or empty my mind." Sometimes new students say that It seems as if, before they can meditate, they need certain things. A certain kind of environment or a certain state of mind to be able to meditate. A quiet environment, slow moving. Life is too noisy and busy, and how can we meditate successfully or effectively if we live a busy life in a hectic, noisy, nine-to-five world?
The answer to that is, yes, you definitely need something. But it’s good to check up on what it is you think you really need - this is useful for meditation as well as for life, generally. Our needs come from within us, not from without. Still, often we say, “I need this, I need that,” and throughout our lives we respond to this "need" - like scratching an itch - and we accumulate stuff. Lots of it. But when we really check up the why and the how of our needs, we usually find that we need almost nothing; we can do with very little.
What we probably need to be able to meditate is somebody to teach us how. How to sit, how to concentrate, how to focus our energy in the right way. What do I mean by that? What I mean is to focus your energy on observing your mind. That's really what meditation is all about. And once you learn to do that, you will find many of the answers from within yourselves. How? When we learn to sit still and be silent, learn to relax, sit back and observe the mind, most of the time you will notice the answer is already here but we’re looking for it over there, in completely the wrong place.
Sitting in silence in this way is not a Buddhist idea specifically. All the major spiritual disciplines in the world have some kind of idea about silence and finding your inner voice or your God consciousness or your taqwa. It's one of the fundamentals of inner alchemy.
