Meditating has two traditional pathways in the East, as I understand it. One, the easier for me, is to keep my attention on something still and small and more or less unimportant, such as a corner of a picture frame. The other is to calmly watch what comes to mind, just to see what comes up. The latter is harder since topics that come to mind may often include matters that matter to me and I can get pulled into thinking and figuring about them instead of keeping my distance and observing.
Meditating can develop my mindfulness, my awareness of what subject, what topic, what focus my mind turns to. But there is more to me than my thinking. That is the subject of the book "Incognito". That book is quite good at showing that much of my body and overall brain is busy with maintaining me and my life. As Prof. Lisa Feldman Barrett says in her book "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain", in her first chapter, "Your brain is not for thinking." Of course, it is for thinking but it does much more, like keeping breathing and heart going. One of those "much more" things is feelings, emotions, moods. Parts of our brains deal with emotions but our awareness of and reaction to what we experience with others, directly or indirectly, creates reactions in us steadily.
I found the books "The Female Brain" and "The Male Brain", both by Louann Brezendine, MD, helpful. They gave me some knowledge of the role of hormones in our lives, impulses and desires.
