A guided meditation can be used in any way that works for you.  This is just a “suggestion,” or a “skeleton” which you can develop in your own practice and life.  The way I constructed it is due to my own way of working, which might work for you or might need adjustments.

The purpose of this meditation is to work with letting go of thoughts, seeing how little we really need when we are “connected” (or are in the “here and now”).  It is meant to give us a way to be aware of our thoughts and decide whether to latch on to them or not.  I offered 6 stages in this exercise:

1. Recognizing thoughts – I make the commitment to sitting meditation and then I find that my mind has X thought.  Here there are two main variations of X: I can be aware that X is in my mind but is mostly in the background, while I am still mostly engaged in, say, awareness of breath.  X can also take over and I drift off.  This also has many variations, as I can consciously decide to go with X, or I could just drift and day dream.  At some point I recognize “whoops, I went off with X.”  When that happens, I touch my forehead and come back to sitting. You do not have to touch your forehead, but this is a way of clearly breaking the “falling into the thought.”
   (One can also mark “there is a thought” anytime a thought comes, but this is a somewhat different meditation.  Here I suggest making a clear note only for the thoughts that I start engaging in, not all thoughts that come through the mind’s landscape)

2. Applying a “cutting criteria” to the thoughts.  After spending some time just acknowledging “there is thought, there is engagement in thought,” I move to the second exercise.  Here I ask myself “is this thought directly related to my sitting?  Is this thought related to some past thing?  Is this thought about some future?”  I am not passing judgment, but simply being aware “I just had a thought and it was about the future” (or the past).  At the same time, because I am classifying the thoughts as past, present, or future, there is a greater willingness/capacity to let go of thoughts which are not about the present.

3. There is little (perhaps nothing?) about the Now.  After I “dissect” my thoughts as past, present, or future, I will come to naturally stages 3 and 4, or I can decide to bring on these stages, which are very closely intertwined.  Here I note that most of my thoughts (all?) are not about the Now, but about the past and future, I recognize (struck perhaps?) that there is very little about the now.

4. There is nothing to latch onto.  Seeing that there is little (or nothing) in the present, I see that the mind has nothing to latch onto that is about Now.  “Nothing is happening.”  This is a realization that can be an opening, and create in us a feeling of awe, curiosity, joy, suspense, fear, boredom, etc.  (of course, we like the awe, joy, etc., but it might not be what happens)  While exercises 3 and 4 are basically the same, and likely to happen simultaneously, the point of this exercise is to basically dwell in the feeling/mental state that is produced by realizing “there is nothing to latch onto, there is nothing to really think.”  This is like “investigating” this weird space, but “investigating” connotes analysis, and what we want to do is inquire without analysis, which means to just dwell, to just be with that sense of “oh, no thoughts are necessary” (or perhaps it is “shit, no thoughts are necessary?”).  It is a bit like taking that moment, opening, and staying in it, elongating it.

5. All Arises in the Mind.  Having seen that my thoughts are basically produced without a direct necessity/relationship to what is happening n the Now (I am sitting in the now, I am not playing football, I am not having breakfast, I am not balancing my chequebook, I am not settling emotional scores…), I can ask myself (so this is like a Koan) what is my experience with the famous phrase “all phenomenon arises in the mind” –  am I experiencing that my thoughts are creating a reality for me to engage in, that all thoughts are just movements of the mind (and hence all my “understanding” of reality is just movement of the mind).

6. Resting in the Nature of Alaya.  Having looked at all that happens in the mind and saw that no thought is 100% related to “reality,”  I see all thoughts are merely movements (electrical impulses some might say), and I can let go of giving preference to any one thought.  I can dwell in the myriad of potential thoughts without latching on to any.  The Alaya Vijnaya is the term used to describe the “store consciousness” – the storehouse of all seeds.  All thoughts reside in the Alaya Vijnaya (as seeds) – it is when they manifest and are latched on by the mind that they become “thoughts” (then perhaps actions).  Dwelling in the Alaya, means letting go of preferences, of needs, of attachments, and recognizing that anything can move in any direction at any given moment: all potentials are there.

Note – there is an argument to be made that any thought that arises is in the present.  If the mind produced that thought, it is in the Now.  There are exercises where one opts to engage with those thoughts, to see how they came about.  For example, if I am upset at something and it comes up in sitting meditation, I can consciously choose to engage with that thought, not be swept by it, but to observe it, see its origins, what feeds it, what misperceptions I might have, etc.  This is a different meditation all together.  Here, I am not trying to “solve problems,” but to create a space that is free of needs…  So if a very pressing issue insists on “occupying my mind,” it may make more sense to shed light on that issue in meditation because the mind may not be willing to do anything else…