Can you guys enlighten me about meditation?

[ber5897]

First of all, what exactly is meditation? What is it used for? What are the benefits of meditation? At the moment I am not looking to use meditation directly for lucid dreaming. I was actually wondering if meditation could be used to simply help me fall asleep faster. It can sometimes take me hours to fall asleep, and that lack of sleep has really affected me. Can meditation help me with this problem in any way? What about good sources for meditation? Is there a good forum like Dream Views for meditation? Thank you for your help!

[JoannaB]

I am hoping somebody else will come along who knows more than I do. Basically one way to start meditation is to first find a position that is comfortable, focus on one's breathing, and if one has thoughts, notice that they happen but refocus again on one's breathing. Whenever I have tried this so far I realized that no position is comfortable and my thoughts tend to wander a lot - that Is called "monkey mind." Another technique I heard about is to focus on the current moment and think to oneself "I wonder what my next thought will be", and await it without any preconception, and if you are lucky there will be a gap when there is no thought. The idea is to aim for those gaps in thought, to achieve a more peaceful mind. However, as I said, I hope someone else comes along because my experience thus far is limited to the aforementioned figuring out that no position is comfortable and my thoughts stray too much, which is actually considered a good beginning realizing that, but the idea is that one is supposed to go beyond that to the peaceful mind stage, and I have not succeeded in that yet.