Why Buddhism Is True

Concentration meditation: focus on your breath.

Mindfulness meditation: start with concentration meditation, then shift your focus to your emotions, sensations, sounds, etc.

The key to [successful meditation] was to separate the act of observation from the act of evaluation. I still experienced the anxiety, but I no longer experienced it as either good or bad. ... The Buddha believed that the less you judge things – including the contents of your mind – the more clearly you'll see them, and the less deluded you'll be.

The basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn't mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don't try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you'd apply to other bothersome feelings – anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you've exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they're no longer a part of you. There's an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling. ... Then you Investigate the feeling. ... Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since not being attached to things was the Buddha's all-purpose prescription for what ails us.

Also see: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.