Meditation does not mean thougtless
First, just to clarify. Meditation does not mean suppressing your thoughts. Like what my guru said, if you want to stop your thoughts during meditation, that means you also have to stop your heart, your livers, your blood from flowing, etc. Since you cannot stop your heart from beating; you cannot stop your mind from thinking.
The purpose of meditation is to keep a distance from your thoughts without being emotionally involved in them. You acknowledge their existence without giving any reactions.
Whenever you catch yourself having emotional reaction to your thoughts, you bring yourself back to the inaction. With repetition like this, you become detached from your thoughts or the observer of your thoughts.
To describe it, image that your mind ‘sees’ each thought as a cloud floating by. Your mind does not react to your thought, pass judgment or react to your thoughts. Your thoughts are just like clouds passing by. You are looking at them. With time, you might actually get some amusement from your thoughts.
Meditation creates space in your mind so that self-awareness surfaced
For example, say that you are in a traffic on the way to an appointment after work, if you are emotionally involved in the traffic, you would get agitated or tensed. However, now lets say that you are looking at traffic from the window of a high riser at night; all of sudden, that traffic becomes beautiful, because you are not physically in one.
This is what meditation is. You are above your thoughts.
Without giving your thoughts any powers from your attention, with time the clouds become fewer and fewer since thoughts cannot get a grip of your mind.
With fewer thoughts, clarity arises from within and you would become “light headed”.
Meditation Empties Space in Your Mind
By not paying attention to your thoughts, with time, they start to loose grip of your mind and the space in your mind clears up and self awareness arises.=.