Meditation is not a single practice. It's a host of mental exercises. Currently en vogue, mindfulness meditation, or vipassana, aims to improve your understanding of yourself by letting your mind settle and simply observing the present moment in its full extent. This is significantly harder than it sounds, but it has a profound effect on everything else in your life. It presents a mental pattern, acquired through deliberate practice, that applies easily to any situation you can face. Think of meditation like the gym for your mind. You lift weights, your muscles get stronger. You meditate, your mind gets stronger.

When I meditate, I find myself having better focus, more patience, and better mood. I even sleep better. My mind feels like a calm lake, with a clear and smooth surface. When I do not meditate, it feels like a sea in storm. I have a much shorter fuse, I ruminate a lot, and have a very hard time concentrating on anything.

Many consider Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, to be the best book ever written on the subject for beginners. It does away with the nonsense and explains in very practical terms how to meditate and why.

As a sidenote, concepts such as "chakra" come from an age where people did not have the science and logic we have today, but wanted to explain things they felt and saw in their body, in particular during practices such as meditation and yoga. They make a whole lot more sense if you view things like "chakra-alignment" through that lens. Thinking in terms of chakra is a self-manipulation technique aimed at manipulating your subconscious through specific mental imagery. Of course, some people will like and identify with the pseudo-mystic nature of it, and it that helps them, then that's okay.