The email has a confession in it. Somebody wants to come, and a sentence later they tell me they’ve never meditated, or that they tried and couldn’t keep their attention on anything, and they want to know whether they’ll be doing it wrong.
The short answer is on the FAQ page: if you’ve never meditated, that changes nothing about how you arrive. The longer answer is about what I ask of you on the night, because I think people picture a different evening than the one I run.
What the guidance is #
I open the night and I close it. In between there are seventy-five minutes of live instruments over music I composed for the evening, and a nudge from me here and there when it seems like the moment for one. That’s the whole of the guidance. You lie down under blankets in low light, and you rest.
When people tell me they can’t meditate, what they describe is a technique they kept losing hold of. There’s nothing to follow and nothing to get right.
What people do on the floor #
Some people follow the guidance closely, some drift, and some sleep, and each of those is a fine way to spend the hour. I wrote a whole post about the third one.
The person who wrote to me is worried about the second one. They picture seventy-five minutes of trying to empty their head and failing at it. By drifting I mean your thoughts come and go while you lie there, and you don’t have to do anything about them. Nobody in the space is watching what you do on the floor, and that includes me.
If you have meditated #
I don’t run the night any differently for someone who has sat for years, and I think that surprises a few of them. Everyone in the space gets the same instruction, which is to lie down, and the first-timer and the person on their tenth session do that the same way. If you’ve practiced, you might settle a little sooner in the first few minutes. After that you’re on a mat, under a blanket, hearing the same sound as the person beside you.
What I do ask #
Your phone stays in your bag. Some nights I offer one invitation, like a moment of meeting another person’s eyes; you hear about it beforehand, never as a surprise, and every invitation is optional. If you’d rather stay on the floor, that’s what the floor is for.
That is the whole of it. You don’t need a practice to arrive with. You lie down under a blanket, I open the night, and you’re on the same floor as the person beside you for seventy-five minutes.