Meditation is one of the most powerful tools available for the language-learning journey, and could be considered at the very foundation of a proper method for acquiring a foreign language. But it's a deep endeavor in and of itself, and needs to be practiced with a bit of dedication before the effects become clear.
First of all, I should describe what the act of meditation entails. Essentially you find a comfortable position, lock your gaze on a single point, and then attempt to think nothing, anywhere from several seconds to an entire hour. Not thinking means experiencing only the direct sensations comprising the external world. Most obviously this means not letting one's mind display models of the past or future; no memories should appear in the mind's eye and no future plans should be considered. But less intuitively it also means not 'interpreting' any sensations: If you hear the sound of footsteps behind you, you should seek to hear only the 'raw shape' of the sound, and not start visualizing a person walking. Not only shall the past and future be banished, but any aspect of the present which involves visualizing or otherwise experiencing within the mind's eye is to be done away with. All sensory input must be left in its most raw uninterpreted form. Meditation is the act of observing the 1s and 0s of one's subjective experience, without doing anything with the sensory data.
Now, it might sound simple to just not think. But it's much harder than it may seem at first glance. Most people constantly think without noticing that they're thinking, let alone having any sort of deep meta-awareness of what the exact form of their thoughts is. This makes one a slave to the autopilot cognition that one formed in the past, and produces ruts in one's action. In order to avoid thinking, one must notice when one is thinking; and here lies the power of meditation. If one accidentally thinks a thought during the act, one must note it as such; and after a few sessions one should start to gain deeper awareness than ever before of what one's mind is doing at any given time. Stripping away everything but the purest of uninterpreted present sensations involves gaining meta-awareness of how one's mind transforms present sensation into the various actions of the mind's eye, and thus involves gaining a deep understanding of the phenomenological workings of one's cognition. Building the skill of choosing to not think requires building an understanding of what exactly a thought is.
When one does meditation, one should try not only to notice when one accidentally thinks something before then removing it from view; one should also attempt to note the exact subjective presentation of the thought. Rather than thinking a second thought, such as a verbal phrase like "I just thought of something my friend said last night", one should aim to note precisely what actually happened in one's mind, such as by replaying the precise angle from which the friend's face was imagined, the exact facial expression he was making, etc. Thus the process of meditation is the training of one's ability to step back and act as an observer of one's own mind. Meditation is a fundamental method for increasing one's introspective power.
Now, this is important for language learning because it essentially increases the elasticity of one's mind. It's a major step toward being able to truly acquire a language like a native speaker--a way to manually build into one's mind the intense openness present in a young child's perception of their surroundings. As a simple example, pitch accent doesn't exist in the English language, and as a result the brain of a monolingual English speaker learns in childhood to ignore that aspect of sensory experience. If as a monolingual English speaker you're trying to learn a language like Japanese (as Japanese has pitch accent), you'll likely have a lot of difficulty picking up pitch accent, for it will be constantly thrown away as noise in the auditory data. However, if you're skilled at meditation you can turn off the 'interpretation' that your brain normally do, and suddenly experience the sounds in a way unaffected by the English-language software that you run. In that moment you have the chance to 're-draw the lines' of your auditory perception, thus allowing for natural acquisition of pitch accent. Meditation shall demonstrate that thinking nothing is deeper than ever before imagined; a flood of things that were never even dreamed of as thoughts will be revealed as such. One will realize just how much interpretation is involved in perception, and in doing so will learn how to see with fresh eyes. Children see with fresh eyes automatically; adults must do it manually.
Most people who learn a foreign language end up building their foreign language on top of their native language. They associate the foreign words not only with native words but also with native concepts. Generally people also have trouble re-delineating the ranges of sound that constitute phonemes and other aspects of the sound system of the language, causing them to forever not experience the language the way a native does. The process of maturing from a child into an adult is in many ways the process of learning what sensory input is relevant what isn't; the problem is that what's safe to place onto auto-ignore is different between different languages. Meditation allows one to re-gain the sensory plasticity associated with childhood, and therefore is one of the keys to achieving native-like acquisition in adulthood.
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