If you have meditated in the past and want to get back into the practice of daily meditation, or occasional meditation, then treat yourself as a beginner. Most likely the reason you stopped meditating was not lack of discipline - it was that you changed somehow. You may have fulfilled the intention of the meditation you were doing, or something in your body or your life changed - and so the meditation you had been doing was no longer appropriate.
I know lots of people who have never missed a day of meditation – they kept going, no matter what, decade after decade – and in general, I am not impressed with the results. If you meditated in the past and quit, there was a good reason, and for the vast majority of people, there was something in the technique you were doing that did not match your individuality, so it is good that you stopped.
Meditation is a built-in human ability, and your desire to meditate may be your inner wisdom urging you to let it help you in your life right now. From time to time, even if you have been meditating for years, your inner wisdom may prompt you to develop a new approach to your practice. A completely different style, or a slight adjustment, or an opposite but complementary technique.
No matter who you are, you have probably already meditated, in your own way, spontaneously. You may have been listening to music, watching a sunset, making love, gazing at the horizon, but almost everyone has meditated beautifully at some point in their lives. It is most likely the memory of that meditation that is calling you now, urging you on. Human beings are infinitely individual, so your way into meditation may feel and look different from anyone else's.
You don't need to know much before you begin – you can just start by meditating for a couple of minutes. playing with meditation, resting with meditation, exploring. Do the exercises for a few minutes here and there and do not use any effort at all. If you use any effort, it means you are trying to force yourself to do something unnatural.
Don't believe anyone who says that meditation is hard or unnatural. I have been teaching meditation for 50 years, and I will admit that the belief "meditation is hard" is nearly universal. Everyone seems to have it tattooed on their hands. Being alive is often painful, and in meditation, you feel everything. You feel your aliveness intensely. This is joyous, restful, exciting, rejuvenating and painful. But the word "difficult" is not apt. Many of the skills of meditation involve learning to pay attention in such a way that what was a "difficulty" is now a dynamic flow of energies that you are noticing.
