Well, I have never meditated. Maybe someone would call the stuff I did/do meditation, but I dunno, never has been intended as such and I don't really know what people classify as meditation or as a meditative state anyways. I just chill and do stuff.
I can kinda see where your friend's coming with you having to clear your mind before you can hear a tupper. At least in my case, I'm usually always having a monologue about something in my head, pretty loudly too. And I tend to keep my thoughts well under control, so it's an environment where a tupper can easily get lost or even be forced to stay quiet. There were some guides that talked about clearing your mind and stuff to be able to hear the tupper, but unfortunately those never made much sense to me until I actually knew what they were talking about. It's like, you need to let go of controlling your thoughts, which also means you don't want to force everything quiet. You'd want to let things just come and go, that's one of those better things to do to hear a developing tupper, in my eyes. Necessary? Who knows. Some tuppers have seemingly made their way through even the most stubborn host.
You could still do stuff with the tupper and ask them to do things, see if stuff really does end up happening. And if you just want to practice seeing stuff, you could even visualize non-tupper things or use pretty much any other visualization focus shit before you introduce a tupper to it.
PS. normal people don't have fetishes, you sicko...
