A lot of it is belief. If you believe it will work, it placebo's yourself into it working.

And thus I fail. I don't believe. In much of anything. Hoodoo-voodoo mumbo-jumbo has never worked on me. And it turns out, that your #5 is my problem.

I have overfunction of my ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex. That is an interesting part of the brain as it's where new information basically gets sorted to be filed or rejected. People with underfunction or severe damage there gravitate towards extremes of belief. Thus most of your die-hard sociopathic fundamentalists have underfunction, and outright dysfunction has been found as the biological determining factor for genuine psychopathy such as that found in domestic terrorists and serial killers.

My overfunction has the opposite effect, in that I'm ... immune to concepts like faith and religion. Placebo's don't work on me, nor do simple magic tricks like that performed by "metnalists". Basically I have an overactive bullshit alarm. You talk about trust, I have very little to spare when it comes to playing pretend..

And that's why "meditation" does nothing for me. It's one of the many bits of wishful thinking my mind flat out rejects. Just like the halfwit fairy tales about genocidal sky wizards who "love us".