Whenever you aren’t manipulating your experience, you’re meditating. As soon as you meditate because you think you should, you’re controlling your experience again, and you’ve squeezed all the value out of your meditation.
In the Buddha's life story we see the three stages of practice: Morality comes first, then concentrated meditation, and then wisdom. And we see that the path takes time.
Meditation, you know, comes by a process imagination. You go through all these processes purification of the elements - making the one melt the other, that into the next higher, that into mind, that into spirit, and then you are spirit.
Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind.
What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart.It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable.
What would happen if you were to allow everything to be exactly as it is? If you gave up the need for control, and instead embraced the whole of your experience in each moment that arose?
Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here.