Day 1-7: I was very bad at this. My mind refused to stay anywhere. I lasted four minutes before checking the timer. I thought about what to eat, what I had said in a meeting three years ago, and whether the ceiling had always had that mark.
Day 8-21: Marginally better. I stopped fighting the thoughts and started noticing them instead, which is apparently the actual point. Nobody told me this clearly enough at the beginning.
Day 22-45: I started to notice something. Not during meditation — after it. A slightly longer gap between something happening and my reaction to it. A fraction of a second more space.
Day 46-75: This is where I stopped expecting it to feel like anything and it started to just be a thing I did, like brushing my teeth.
Day 76-90: I missed three days in a row due to travel. I noticed I was more reactive on those days. That was the evidence I needed.
What I got: not peace, not clarity, not enlightenment. Just a marginally shorter fuse between stimulus and response. Which, it turns out, is exactly what I needed.
It is not magic. It is a very boring, very useful practice. Start with five minutes. Stop expecting to feel something.