I don't know about you, but I hear about meditation often. People talk about how they meditate every day and how it brings them peace of mind. As I considered trying this practice out, I thought it might be helpful to have a dedicated space, but what should it look like?
The closest thing to meditation I know of is prayer, so I looked upon places of worship. Where I come from the influence is overwhelmingly catholic with some protestantism and I know some practicing christians so I gave that some thought, but all I could feel was embarassement. These traditional religions were so discredited in my eyes that it would be embarassing to put up their religious items in my meditative space. That is how low these religions have fallen in our eyes. When people talk about why they don't believe in these religions they usually ridicule beliefs about a benevolent father in the sky or joke about the pedophilic practices of catholic priests. The popular image is of an enfantilizing religion that has lost its legitimacy.
Being a bit of a japanophile myself I even thought about using a japanese household shrine, but I felt that it would be unadapted to my needs. Yet I didn't feel embarassed about it. I would feel better borrowing beliefs from another culture than using my own's. What happened to cause this shift? People usually discriminate favorably towards their own culture's output. In most parts of the world, this still includes religious beliefs, so why not in the west? The religious instinct is still there. If you cannot use your culture's religious traditions, then this instinct is targeted at other things. Medidation can be one part of it, one of the expressions of this instinct, but it is usually not the only one. I'm sure you can think of people who feel too strongly about certain topics like politics, environmentalism, veganism or any other cause du jour to a near religious degree. Like a sailor lost in a storm grabbing onto whatever flotsam he can find.
This scramble for belief could be seen in the hippy movement of the 60s (and similar events in the later half of the 20th century), where beliefs were imported en masse from exotic parts of the world like India, East Asia and the Middle East. It can also be seen today in the emphasis on anything out of the ordinary: promoting other cultures, diversity, defying taboos, etc. And so today I find myself looking elsewhere for meditative inspiration, because by undermining our traditional religions we have forgotten to replace it with anything tangible, and are left to chose between importing from abroad, or trying to make do with the debris of what was once a great ship.
I don't see any way to fix this.