I went from having an experience of life, of reality - that was very self-centered, lonely and nihilistic - to basically a "life worth living". I wish I had met with meditation - through genuine teachers when I was much younger.
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It sounds like you are “failing” because you have a mistaken idea and application of meditation.
Meditation means “getting used to”
Get used to what? Well, that depends on what you are already used to and not.
Some examples:
* Are you used to thinking that you are your thoughts?
- If you feel that you "are your thoughts", and they represent "you" - then “who” or “what” is the thing that are observing the thoughts as they happen? Are these two things one and the same?
* Are you used to thinking that the reality you experience is something separate from the experience of “you”? That there is an object (world and the things in it) and the subject (you, the observer)
- Well, even in materialistic terms - where there is an outside materialistic word, and an internal representation - all that “you” ever experience is your own personal internal representation? So “you” are only ever experiencing “you” - not matter if there is ever an actual “other” outer representation, you are only ever experiencing the personal “you” reflection/filter of that.
Examples like these may be obvious when pointed out, but having a lived - continued experience of knowing and integrating such things fully, requires “getting used to”
And getting “used to” and integrating such knowing of how your reality actually works is in many spiritual traditions considered “awakening”
But even if you are completely allergic to even the word “spiritual”. It never ceases to amaze me, that we all - materialistically speaking - are carrying extreme mental supercomputers - but we never take a second sit down to figure out how these work. You are carrying the one central equipment that determines every aspect of your quality of life, but you’ve never for a moment tried to understand how experience unfolds?
Ok, so how to begin “getting used o” and “figuring out”?
First of all, to do anything worthwhile at all, you need to be able to place and maintain your attention over time - concentrating. This is obvious to you. If you want to get a good education, a good job, be a great sportsman - than that requires effort and concentration. Intelligence can of course offset some of that, but intelligence without diligence is equally as useless as not being intelligent.
To practice concentration and diligence, you should learn meditation with an anchor. What is an anchor? Anything you choose to place your attention on, and return to if the attention has wandered elsewhere.
What is attention? Your bandwidth of experience is limited. If a bee stings you, the pain of that will overpower your experience of hunger. All your ideas about grabbing a burger go straight out the window.
If your experience is neutral, you can willfully shift your attention between your senses.
Let’s try it now.
Now you are just experiencing the sounds you are hearing.
Now you are feeling the sensation of the weight of your body pressing against the surface it is in contact with.
Now you are imagining and experiencing the sensation of tasting a very sour lemon, or strawberry.
Now you are imagining and experiencing the visual playback in your mind of Einstein peeling a banana.
You really can use any anchor (object of attention), but it is usually recommended to begin with placing the attention on the breath - like the physical sensation of air entering and exiting the nostrils, and counting one cycle of in-out as “one”, and then counting to 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how many repetitions of 10 or 21 you will do.
The concentration aspect of the exercise is maintaining the anchoring of attention on the physical sensation. The “mindfulness” aspect of the exercise is remembering or rather - not forgetting - your anchor.
The moment you realize you have stopped remembering, and your attention has moved to a different sense (ear hearing sounds, eye looking at something, mind having a thought) - this is the exact moment to rejoice, because you are learning - and your are remembering, and you are being mindful. So the moment you remember what you were supposed to do, congratulate yourself and re-place your attention on the chosen anchor.
In the beginning, do this for no more than a minute. But do it often- 5 times a day. Once you start getting used to that, and that becomes easy, then increase.
It’s important to know, that meditation like this does not cause you to become unfocused or unconcentrated or distracted - it simply shows you through direct experience how unfocused, unconcentrated and distracted you already are.
And it’s even more important to know that this exercise - this method of getting used to - does not immediately reduce or remove that, but it will naturally do that over time.
How much time? Well, that depends on the mind and mindset you start with. Some people say 3-6 months of daily practice.
And if that sounds like a lot- try to put a value on a life where you are mindfully choosing your actions vs a life where you are simply being a passenger of actions - causes and conditions - being chosen for you.
This is the diligence aspect. If you want to experience the fruit of being able to willfully place your attention wherever you chose- to achieve whichever goal you set yourself - then you have to use your intelligence and recognize the need to train it. If you are unwilling to practice this key instruction that holds to access to everything else, then everything else will - logically - probably not be accessible to you.
When you begin to train in this extremely simple thing, you will experience right away how unwilling and unable you are to do it. Logically you understand that this is perfectly sensible. But still, you may be unable to do this for years. And that knowing, combined with the apparent inability to practice consistently- diligently, is one facet of the suffering of existence we all experience, but can’t put into clear words.
I hope you do not ever dismiss meditation ever again as “not working”, or even “woo-woo” or mystical - but recognize that your inability to appreciate its function, or to train it it - is the actual thing that “isn’t working” and what is causing the suffering and discomfort.
I recommend the book "Attention revolution" by B. Alan Wallace