It is easy to misunderstand meditation. In fact, as I am a beginner, I probably misunderstand it myself. But when I ask friends about their experience, they say they can't sit down and not think. This is definitely missing the point.
What is meditation? I'd say something like
Meditation is the habitual practice of clarifying conscious experience.
- habitual practice: Meditation is about practice, not theory. No discussion can help you if you don't try it yourself.
- clarifying: If you find meditation difficult or uncomfortable, that is part of the process. Knowing that it is difficult, better yet what is difficult, is the clarification.
- conscious experience: The idea is to notice what happens as you try to stabilize your attention, not to sit down with an immediately empty mind.
There is a strange nature to this practice that is best understood through experience. But it can still be understood intellectually. Consider the following extremes: either we have no control of our conscious experience, or we have full control over it. If we have no control – which seems plausible because we don't choose what we perceive, plus it's not clear where our thoughts come from – then meditation would be like watching a movie or having a dream. Conscious experience simply flows, and you observe passively. If we had full control, which we think we ought to have, then meditation would not reveal anything. But because our control lies in between, meditation shows how wonderfully odd it is to have a mind, to be able to shape and control our thoughts but only to an extent.
In the former, we might say something like meditation was practiced or perceptions were experienced. In the latter, we would say I practiced meditation or I experienced perception. The grammatical distinction is one of active or passive voice, based on whether the subject is the performer or recipient of the action, respectively. In truth, the sentences aren't satisfactory because they don't capture the nature of meditation.
Some languages, like classical Greek, have a middle voice, one where the subject is both the performer and the recipient of action. It is the middle voice we wish to use here because meditating requires us to be passive observers in one sense and active participants in another. We allow our thoughts to come and go, but we do it intently and diligently.
English doesn't have a middle voice, but you can see glimpses of it in sentences like the cake bakes in the oven or the ball rolled. If you can, imagine then that the sentence I am meditating is in middle voice, that the subject and object are wrapped up together inextricably. This might give you a better sense for what meditation is about.
When you've understood this fully, drop the I am. There is no subject or object. Just Meditating.