Question: I have tried to sit and go quiet to practice self-observation, but my thoughts scream at me that I should give up this worthless, unproductive practice!

Answer: Pay no attention to what your own thoughts and feelings are trying to tell you the whole time you’re sitting. Learn to watch and drop these dark inner voices. They don’t want you to succeed and there’s a good reason why. They can’t dwell in that silent world you wish to enter and that wishes to enter you.

So persist! You will prevail. For even as you struggle to stay aware of yourself in the present moment, that moment itself changes. And as it does, so do you.

Slowly, subtly at first, but eventually even beyond your mind’s protests, the distinction between your sense of self and your awareness of the present moment melts away. And as it does, a new, deeper sense of silence floods into you; filling your awareness with itself and, at the same time, with yet another awareness that the source of this supreme stillness is arising out of your own being. It washes everything out of its way. And so arrives a quiet mind.