People meditate because they want something from it. Most serious meditators I know, the people who made real progress, were miserable. The two main benefits from meditation might be classified as “capacity” or “exercise” and “insight.”
When I was younger, I could run 10 miles in 50 minutes and not be exhausted afterwards. I can’t do that now because I don’t run regularly.
Some benefits from meditation are like this. Concentration meditation, where you hold your attention on something like your breath or a mantra, or the spot between your brows or a candle is “mind exercise.” The more you do it, with proper technique, the better you get. If you stop doing it you lose the benefits: being more relaxed, more able to focus on anything and more able to ignore stuff like pain and anxiety.
The other main set of benefits are like learning to ride a bicycle. At first it’s impossible, then you get the knack for it, and from then on you have the benefit. Most of these are insight benefits: if you truly realize that you aren’t the body, say, then you let go of it and suffering is permanently reduced. If you see thru conditioning and realize you don’t have to obey it, you become free of it (often this goes in steps, by types of conditioning.)
Some other similar benefits are skill based. If you practice bringing up emotions on demand after a while they become “on tap” and you can just experience them at will.
Now meditation methods tend to work in concert. The reason Shamatha (concentration/mental exercise) is often done alongside Vipassana (insight) is that if you want to see the mechanics of how sense objects like emotions and thoughts work, being able to concentrate: having a focused mind make it a lot easier.
Of course there’s some overlap: I know how to run properly. I know how to get in shape. If I were to take up running again, those would make it easier for me and even when I’m in bad shape I run better than people who have never learned proper running technique (plus I’m used to the suffering of pushing myself.) Same is true of concentration: I’m out of practice, but I know how it’s done and I’m better than someone who’s never done a lot of concentration meditation. But I’m nowhere as good as someone who’s kept up a practice of an hour or two a day. (Two hours is about the minimum to be able to get reliably into certain states.)
Whatever it is you want from meditation, and there are lots of different possible achievements, you need to know what you need to do to get them, and how to keep them. But no matter what you want, meditation is either like exercise (for capacity) or like learning a skill.
Know what you want and find out how to get it.
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