Whenever you step out of the noise of thinking, that is meditation, and a different state of consciousness arises.
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds. Listening to the silence immediately creates stillness inside you.
To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer the universe.
The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.
Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable.