FAQ, including: What is meditation and why is it beneficial? How can I get started?

Meditation is doing a careful intense thing with your awareness.

It comes in 2 forms.

1. Concentration meditation. You focus your awareness on a thing as perfectly as you can for a while. This is basically plain old concentration, but highly refined.
2. Watch the stream of sensations. All these sights, sounds, thoughts, smells, feelings etc that you're experiencing. Watch them come and go. While refraining from moving your awareness in reaction to all that.

The Buddhists call them "Samatha" and "Vipassana".

I like to call them "Shrink" and "Grow".