Do you need to think only about breathing to meditate? Or can I think of other things too?

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The Buddhists call this the “object.” It’s the thing you keep in mind when you’re doing concentration meditation.

I have never actually built up my ability to keep one thing in mind. I’ve studied the literature and people’s descriptions and I now realize that the object simply has to remain in mind, it doesn’t have to be the only thing in mind while you meditate.

Keeping one object in mind is important in Buddhism because you’re expected to keep a close eye on what that object does. From what I’ve gathered, the object has to go away sometime around the third or fourth jhana because otherwise formless realm exploration would be all but impossible. But none of the available materials that I’ve read are sufficiently explicit enough about exactly what happens to the object for my taste. As a result I’m hesitant to really dive into that particular style of meditation.

The object can be your breath, or it can be something else. A common one is a candle flame. It’s good to incorporate other things with it to make the meditation deeper. For example you can have the flame get bigger and smaller with your breath.

Above all, your meditation needs to be pleasant. You do not want to be fighting your mind. This is mostly why my concentration practice is shit, it’s just far more pleasant for me to let my attention wander while I sink into trance. Luckily the Buddhist way isn’t the only way.

One thing I’ve done is to watch really closely what my mind chooses to pay attention to. The primary enemy here is that you lose mindfulness. This is when your mind wanders and you lose awareness of the wandering. This is indistinguishable from just laying down and doing nothing and won’t get you anywhere. When I was first starting out I’d keep a particular object in mind as strongly as I could in order to build visualization skills.

One object I used was eating an apple. I’d conjure up an apple, reach out with my hand, grab it, and start eating it. This sort of thing works best when you’re guided. Hearing someone else’s voice tell you to “feel the juices of the apple run down your chin” is just a lot more powerful than trying to just do it yourself. So one thing you might want to do is look up guided meditations online.

That said, once you’ve been guided once or twice, it’s not too difficult to do self-practice.

Another one I’ve done is the tree meditation, where you progressively make all of your body parts heavier and heavier in turn until you’re so heavy you can’t move. You then picture a root growing deep into the earth from your tailbone. Once it’s sufficiently deep, you pull up water and nutrients from the Earth. You use those nutrients to grow a trunk from the crown of your head and sprout branches and leaves. That one’s really nice.

I’ve done meditations to open the chakras, climbed hundreds of steps to get to heaven, anything that sounded interesting to me that I found out about online or read in a book, I’d try.