I've read maybe a dozen books on vipassana meditation (the type usually posted to HN), zen, and mindfulness. The two best practical books on meditation I've read are:

1. The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh

2. Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana. This one is free online, though the paid copy is a bit more edited for clarity.

My primary guide is 1. It's concise and provides just the right amount of breathing exercises to help me focus while I "sit." 2 is more comprehensive but I've found it a bit too scattered, with too many tools to help with breathing that I go in circles attempting different ones. Most people I think employ a couple and ignore the rest. 1 is much better written and just a more cohesive book than 2 IMO, but they're both great books and either one alone works well as a guide to meditating.

The later is available for free online:

http://www.urbandharma.org/pdf/mindfulness_in_plain_english....

I highly recommend the book Passage Meditation by Eknath Easwaran.

Reading it now. (ot: His commentary on the Gita is also quite lovely.)

I know it's not what you want to hear, but doing the 10 day Goenka vipassana course really makes a huge difference in getting established in the technique. I tried a few things, but didn't really click until doing it. To me sacrificing a 10 day vacation ended up being a lot more practical than slogging away by myself for years. Now I can miss practicing for a while but still get back to it in short order.

Different people lear different ways of course, but for me what worked really well was reading about it, a lot, on the internet and trying out various things. At the same time I went to a local zen center that does mindful meditation. They have a short course on various techniques, and people who have been practicing for a long time - this is always good for me, I like to ask questions. The other nice thing about the zen center is that 2 days a week they had sitting meditation time. So you show up, and meditate in a big room with other people. Again, just personal preference, but being there, where the meditation was the focus, helped me not succumb to distraction (also, because I didn't want to be rude and be fidgety, noisy,or otherwise distracting to other poeple).

As for sincere effort, it isn't full time job style, but, it isn't "just" keeping a routine. It is keeping a routine, and actively trying to improve your meditation technique. Much like going golfing every week isn't the same as intentionally practicing your swing or putting with a coach every week.

Brute force:

Allocate a certain room and time religiously where you will sit down every day. Reduce distractions to nil zealously.

Sit on the floor, cross your legs and close your eyes.

Now focus on taking deep slow breaths. Every time a thought comes, and you get focused on it, relax and let it go. Refocus on your breath.

Its more practice than technique.

The aim is pretty simple - be able to witness your thoughts and let them go. Finally you reach no thought.

You cannot stop your thoughts, it's like trying to capture the wind by opening your jacket. The point of meditation that most miss is that it is an experiment rather than a quiet place you're trying to reach. You discover what your emotions are, what you think about, etc. There is no goal other than observation of your mind and to consistently bring your attention back to your breath. The reason you sit and don't move is only to start at the most basic thing you can do, but the point is not the sitting and becoming still, it is to learn how to carry your awareness with you where ever you go and no matter what you do. When you can do this, things change.

To get started I recommend finding a group and going a few times at first to understand good posture and breathing techniques. There is no right way to meditate so which group you join probably doesn't matter. I personally like the methods of Zen or Shambhala.

I have actually managed to meditate for 20-30 minutes first thing every morning for the last 26 days in a row, although over the years I've been practicing on and off. The trick I've found to do it everyday for nearly a month now has been to use some findings in behavioral economics.

The idea is this: come up with a challenge for a month and a small but immediate punishment for yourself if you don't meet it. For example, donating $50 to an organization you hate if you don't meditate when you knew you should've (obviously any real crises are exempt from any skipping). It is amazing how well this works. Suddenly I have 20 minutes at home to just sit down so the Westboro Church doesn't get any of my money.

But to more correctly answer your question, just keeping a routine is enough. We cannot all become monks, but if you can ever get to a place where 20-40 minutes is a daily routine, it will change your life. Feel free to message me if you have any specific questions on books to start with, etc.

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You donated to the westboro church?

He says he uses that as motivation to keep his routine alive.

On what to do physically, my recommendation is to use mediation beads (aka mala beads). 6-count breathing (6 on each inhale and exhale) and move one bead each breath. With the standard 108-beads, you start at the mala and it takes about 20 minutes to reach the end (you feel your fingers reach the mala again).

For the mental aspect, a good starting point is the audio session Alan Watts Teaches Mediation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tYENNBA0cA

Beads, eh? I wrote an Emacs command to notify me when my meditation period has ended.

Oh yeah! Good ol' C-x M-c M-beads...

(... http://xkcd.com/378/ )

I suppose that would work. Press a key on each breath, and use a script to alert after 108 keystrokes.

I don't go in for doing the same thing over and over like some Buddhists like to do.

It's just a timer, which I set for 3 to 5 minutes. When the timer reaches 0, (part of) a particular song plays. (And a record is made of the start and end times of the meditation session.)

In the rare case that I am doing something other than meditating when that song plays, I know I got so distracted that I did not even notice I got distracted -- which I take as a sign that I have an unusually pressing need for meditation that day.

Do you find that 3-5 minutes is enough? I just tried meditating for the first time, and set a 5 minute timer. When it went off, it felt like only 2 minutes had passed and I could have (and wanted to) go on longer.

The effect I am going for is to reduce my body's production of stress hormones. Consulting a clinical psychologist and Googling around on the phrase "mindfulness-based stress reduction" lead me to believe that 4 minutes a day suffices to get that effect.

Also, those 3-5 minutes sometimes cause subjective experiences of increased calmness that tend to last the rest of the day.

It probably takes longer durations to achieve some of the other effects commonly ascribed to meditation (e.g., becoming more contented). I have tried longer durations, but I judge that in my particular case they are more likely to be harmful than helpful.

Specifically, I have a bit of a chronic health problem which necessitates that my immune system remain always strong and active. Getting too much sun and not getting enough sleep are 2 things that personal experiences lead me to believe are bad for me -- and according to immunology researchers, those 2 things suppress the immune system. The suppression tends to last only a few hours or a day, but that is long enough for me to notice bad effects. Meditating for hours at a time produced subjective effects in me similar to the effects of those 2 other things that suppress my immune system.

So, that is one reason I avoid long meditation sessions and tend to advise other people with chronic health issues similar to mine to do the same.

Sometimes (particularly, in the rare situation described in grandparent in which the first meditation session of the day ends with me looking at a web browser, looking at some file on my computer or doing something else other than meditating) I do 2 to 4 sessions (of 3 to 5 minutes each) a day, and I have not experienced the adverse health effect mentioned above on such days.

By the way, a large part of time I am meditating I am resisting urges (the theme of the OP) rather than doing what most meditators describe, namely, resisting attachment to or involvement in sensations or resisting dwelling on regrets about the past or worries about the future. Specifically, urges to execute a sequence of motor actions (e.g., get out of my chair and move something that needs moving) or to plan out how to achieve some goal.

If you felt like you could have gone longer, then I'm sure you could have gone longer. Two things worth noting, however:

First, it's good to have a minimum amount of time in mind for a meditation session, and stick to it. You can always stay seated after your timer goes off. Without a firm minimum, it's very easy to stop as soon as you get fidgety. Speaking from my own experience, sitting through fidgetiness has been the immediate precursor to some of my most meaningful progress in meditation.

Second, consistency is more important than intensity. My (personal, inexpert) recommendation is to choose a time that you can manage every day, and stick with it. Don't over-commit, or you may get burned out. For me, 20 minutes is about right. YMMV.

Stick with it! It's very rewarding.

As part of my DYI, I would drop the guilt of not being able to go the traditional route. Being mindful, staying in here-now, is not easy either and it may not work for you well, but it is something one can try quiet easily at any given moment. When you walk, observe. When you eat, observe and only eat. Taste the food and only eat. So on and so forth. I believe this is the best DIY of meditation, though not everyone agrees that being mindfulness is meditation, but I tend to think that it IS meditation and not necessarily mindfulness, because the goal of being in here-now is to eliminate the distraction of past/future and not really to concentrate. However, on the other hand, the typical meditation techniques (of mantra or other types) would want you to concentrate on something.

Thanks for the question. I started with DIY meditation. I got a couple of books, mainly the techniques were repeating some phrase, focusing on the breath etc. This was okay for me to start. But I have been working with a teacher for about 12 years, which really helped. There are lots of different types of meditation, some with religious or spiritual undertones and others that are completely outside all that. Find a style that you vibe with based on what you think/believe and run with that.

By "years of sincere effort" I mean practicing daily. 20-30 mins is probably enough to start. I would compare it to playing an instrument. Daily practice is pretty essential.

I took a meditation class at a Buddhist temple. There wasn't any Buddhism taught in the class, only meditation techniques. The advantage in my case was that going to a class where I had to sit for an hour prevented me from procrastinating about practising meditation. That alone was worth it. After a few weeks I went from no meditation experience to being able to sit for 45 minutes at a time, and found many of the proclaimed benefits of meditation come right away.

Ive been working with a personal coach recently and at the start of each session we start with a guided 2-3 minutes of mediation practice. One way to do on your own is with mp3's and doing on your own. Really from my personal experience thats not expert driven at all, even doing 5 minutes a day before you day starts is a great way to start for weeks or months on end. Just those 5 minutes of calm and awareness can do a lot, it has for me.

Meditation is best done in community. Just because you will have many questions while travelling in this new space. Goenka offers a free 10 day experience and a community of meditators. Absolutely not a cult. Give it a try.

Do this and you will no longer have doubts about meditation. You will like it or hate it but you will know what it is.

Here's one interesting short guide: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5jj/meditation_insight_and_rationali...

After reading this I don't why would anyone ever want to meditate, there are no benefits mentioned at all and getting it wrong means life long misery.

What I got from it that you get problems if you advance far enough and then don't keep going. The benefit claimed in the first part of the series is having a permanently clearer sense of your thinking process, whatever that means exactly.

I really prefer the 'this may mess you up if done wrong' meditation instruction to the usual sanitized new agey pap, purely on aesthetic level. It makes meditation sound like something that can actually be effective. Like a scalpel instead of a homeopathic solution.

Another fun article: http://blog.muflax.com/propaganda/why-you-dont-want-vipassan...

Mindfulness to Go: How to Meditate While You're On the Move is practical and written with Western reader in mind.