Its okay and normal to have thoughts popping up. It’s counterproductive to try to force the thoughts away. Meditation is like gardening in that way, in that you can’t force a flower to bloom before its time by forcing the bulb open. Instead, just like in gardening, you make the conditions for growth and let “nature” go from there. Do the little work everyday, and with time something will come.

And “nature” here just means that there is a process, it takes time, and forcing thoughts away won’t speed things up and it will introduce this idea that you are “failing”. It may just make you angry and associate bad thoughts with meditation.

Buddhism (if doing a Buddhist style meditation) and Dialectical Materialism, too to some extent, are all about conditionality. You create the conditions for later insight through meditation. You can’t force the results, you can just lay the groundwork.

Meditation is like gardening, but it is also like practicing an instrument or exercising. It is building up a “muscle” (the mindfulness muscle) and so it’s best to treat like you would any other exercise or practice routine.

It’s best to do a little everyday, slowly build up that muscle. Accept you will make mistakes for a long time at first as you get started. Forgive yourself and move on. Don’t make a big fuss about “not doing it right” as that creates a bad feedback loop. And it’s an unrealistic expectation anyway. As long you have a good intention of a.) recognizing (or being mindful) of thoughts as they come, and then b.) letting them pass by not intentionally feeding them, chasing them, or letting them snowball into other thoughts, then you will be good.

Notice that “stopping thoughts” is not on your to do list. Instead, it’s noticing them as they come up and trying to let them pass by, like a cloud, without chasing them or getting lost in them.

You will have roaming thoughts. It is normal, your mindfulness muscle is not fully developed, and if you push too hard then you’ll burn out. So keep the Meditation short enough at the start. If you practice for 10 minutes but only had a brief moment of focus where you recognized thoight and didnt chase it - good! You succeeded! Now next day try again, maybe you can make thay brief moment of attention a little longer next time. Maybe you can’t - progress isnt linear.

Its a marathon, not a sprint. You can’t stop thoughts, so instead try to be more mindful of them as they come, and build up the muscles to notice that those thoughts will also go away on their own if not fed.

It sounds like you have a hard time with letting thoughts go. I know, it’s hard. And youll find sometimes your mind can be in a particulalry “noisy” state or a particularly calm one (again there are conditions which caused that). But also remember, any muscle you haven’t exercised will be weak at first. So I think the trick at this point is to accept that the process will work, it may take a long time. So you cant get worked up right now about any expectations of how hard or easy or fast or slow it should be.

If you can only let thoughts pass for 0.01% of the time of your meditation, and the rest of the time you are lost in thought, then guess what - you still succeeded. As long as you’re earnest but relaxed during meditation, then the garden will grow on its own time. It’s said that the only bad meditation is the one you didn’t do. But I would also add to make sure you aren’t getting mad or frustrated at yourself during meditation.

Just treat it as observation time. Like you are a third party examining what goes on in your brain. Maybe at this moment the goal is to more deeply feel the observation of: “gee, I really do think all the time - imagine how lost in thought I get when I’m not trying to meditate!”

You have all your life to practice.