As written in another post: I started one month ago and then I was frequently meditating with Headspace (which is awesome btw).
While meditation helped me to go through hard times it never solved the underlying problem. It's like taking painkillers without addressing the real cause. I solved the real underlying problem few days ago and I feel like god again.
If I started programming one month ago and I couldn't yet get a high paying job or have a brand new app that is surging on the App Store, would that be a failure? I have been practicing meditation for 25 years and, even though I was earnest, it took me more than 7 years to achieve a state of perfect tranquility. I still have anxious moments in day-to-day life but I mitigate those with meditation. It's like washing your body to keep it clean.
When you're little, your parents tell you not to touch the stove, that it will hurt, and the words go in your ears and you understand what they mean, sort of. You understand it conceptually. But of course you touch the stove and get burned. After that, having connected the action with suffering through direct experience, you have very little desire to touch the stove again. Those thoughts just don't arise, or don't have much pull.
Buddhists say we're still touching stoves every day because we haven't connected cause and effect through experience. That's the point of this kind of meditation, to gain insight into important facts about reality that we might already conceptually accept, but have not yet experienced. When you experience these things, you are redoing the plumbing in the basement of your mind.
So the point really is to attack the roots of the problem. It's not to relax, it's to understand what is going on.
As written in another post: I started one month ago and then I was frequently meditating with Headspace (which is awesome btw).
While meditation helped me to go through hard times it never solved the underlying problem. It's like taking painkillers without addressing the real cause. I solved the real underlying problem few days ago and I feel like god again.