There's a lot of authoritative claims about what meditation is in this thread, so there's also a good chance that what I do is considered "not real meditation" but it's what I learned at a meditation center, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you what got me over it when I had a hard time starting:
Just allow yourself to be bad at it and repeatedly apply the rule that when observe that your attention has wandered, you just consciously bring it back to what you're supposed to be focusing on. You haven't "failed at meditation", you're learning it. Don't beat yourself up for your mind wandering, just acknowledge that the repeated application of the redirection is what it takes and it's all part of the practice. At first it's non-stop, and eventually you get better at it. Sometimes it's excruciatingly boring and tedious and sometimes it's immensely relaxing, and occasionally you get weird hallucinatory stuff out of nowhere (although that to me feels like just going into a dream state, which I've always interpreted as "I'm so relaxed I fell asleep and dreamt").
That's really all it is for me. A way to relax and slow down.
Just allow yourself to be bad at it and repeatedly apply the rule that when observe that your attention has wandered, you just consciously bring it back to what you're supposed to be focusing on. You haven't "failed at meditation", you're learning it. Don't beat yourself up for your mind wandering, just acknowledge that the repeated application of the redirection is what it takes and it's all part of the practice. At first it's non-stop, and eventually you get better at it. Sometimes it's excruciatingly boring and tedious and sometimes it's immensely relaxing, and occasionally you get weird hallucinatory stuff out of nowhere (although that to me feels like just going into a dream state, which I've always interpreted as "I'm so relaxed I fell asleep and dreamt").
That's really all it is for me. A way to relax and slow down.