It took me several years to pluck up the courage to go on a meditation week. Meditation practice has always held the promise of change and the prospect of real change in oneself can be very frightening. It was with some trepidation that I found my room, on the first day. It was near the end of an upstairs corridor and, it seemed, that I would be incarcerated there for the next week.
I had expected peace and tranquillity but, by the end of my third sitting practice, I was experiencing immense pain in my knees and back. How could I survive a week of this? However, I continued to sit, bolstered by my meetings with the rest of the group at mealtimes and for group practice in the evening. I got the opportunity to talk to a teacher once a day but he seemed remarkably unsympathetic to my plight, telling me to persevere – what confidence he must have instilled in me! – as I did.
Early on the second morning, the JCB began work in the garden just outside my window. External noise now competed with the internal turmoil that was constantly plaguing me. This was hell! I’m still not sure how I managed to find the inner resources to continue but I did and, later in the week, I was advised to relax and practise in a comfortable posture. This was the key to releasing great energy and joy. The relief and release I experienced coincided with one of the administrators of the centre, who had a room at the end of the corridor, discovering a record which he played over and over again on a windup gramophone (i.e. one with no volume control). It was a copy of ‘The Laughing Policeman’. From then on, many of my sitting practices simply dissolved as I collapsed in fits of hysterical laughter.
It surprises me that I ever went on another meditation week but clearly useful work was done and I signed up for another one the following year. However, none has ever been quite like the first!