I did seated meditation (zazen) at the Fernwood Zendo last night. The zendo is a living room with cushions and space for about ten people in the home of Peter Renner, my meditation teacher. Before my son was born I used to sit in a group with Peter - or his occasional stand-in (sit-in?) Rita - at least a couple of times a month. In the last two years, not so much. I miss it, it is a very positive experience for me, and each time I go I resolve to go more often.

I had my own ideas about meditation before I started at the zendo around three years ago. I knew it had something to do with unlocking the secrets of the mind in a solemn and wise fashion. I thought that becoming a meditator meant progressing through deeper and deeper levels of enlightenment, reciting chants as a stern-faced monk waved incense, and possibly earning badges or certificates along the way.

Of course, it isn't anything like that - at least not the way we do it. In case you have never meditated, or you do some other kind of contemplative practice and you are curious, I will try and explain how Zen-style sitting goes for me, using last night as an example.

Preparation for a sit begins at home, sometimes hours before I actually go. I try to shower because we sit close together and when you are sitting, your senses are heightened and you can really smell people around you. I eat enough that my stomach won't rumble, but not so much that I will be lethargic. I drive to the zendo slowly, without music, and try to put loud thoughts out of my mind. I arrive at 6.40pm. The sitting starts at seven, but I like to try and spend some time speaking with Peter and anyone else who is attending before we start.

The door is usually ajar, so I walk straight in. I hug Peter, we catch up, he gets my name wrong but quickly corrects himself. A dog (either a small standard or a large miniature schnauzer, I'm not sure) jumps on me as I take off my shoes. I bow briefly before I enter the wooden-floored zendo. The bow is a habit I picked up by observing others, which is practically the only way I have learned anything at all about the practices and rituals of zazen. What little reading-up I did on the subject of zen seemed to suggest that reading-up was a fairly un-zen thing to do, and I have duly not so much as glanced at a wikipedia page about it since week one.

I choose whichever of the rectangular mats arranged around the perimeter of the room has the beefiest cushion. I can't do the cross-legged thing - too inflexible. Instead I kneel with the cushion under my arse. I sink into it, my ankles bend uncomfortably, but the pain doesn't last. I try to sit squarely over my pelvis so a straight line can be drawn through my spine and up to the top of my head (which must be held, as Peter once told me, as though suspended from the ceiling by a thread). I never know what to do with my hands. My cushion has bunched up in front of me, so I let them lie there.

There is one other person in the room; I have met her before. Nicole is already seated and breathing long breaths. The schnauzer shuffles past and lies remarkably silent on its own cushion. Someone else arrives and sits next to me, but I am already set in position and I don't turn to see who it is. It must be nearing seven because Peter goes outside and begins chiming a bell or a gong in the garden. Two people is a low number; usually there are five or six, and one time there were so many that someone sat on the stairs. Sometimes, a couple of older people sit on chairs instead of the floor.

Peter returns, sits, and rings once on a meditation bell to signal the start of the first of two twenty-five minute periods of sitting. The bell resonates thickly in the still room, swelling and oozing between my ears before slithering away into silence. I know that that sound is the last concrete external stimuli that my attention is allowed to attach itself to, so I experience it greedily, and mourn its passing.

What I am supposed to do now, I am not completely clear about. The whole point of the type of zen meditation we do - as far as I can tell- is a kind of letting go, or a letting be. When I first started sitting, I had the idea that I was to empty my mind entirely, and I spent many miserable moments swatting at thoughts like flies before giving up and daydreaming. I have come to see my consciousness as a desperate poltergeist, anxious about being ignored or forgotten. It reacts to quietude - according to what I have read - how many prisoners react to solitary confinement: becoming noisy and agitated and somewhat self-destructive. It throws things around in my head. It gets tricky. Peter taught me not to try to extinguish those forceful thoughts, but to allow them to come, to gently acknowledge them, and then to bring focus back to simple bodily sensations: the breath, the settling of bones, the coursing of blood. This has helped a lot, but I still spend a lot of time in baffling negotiation with myself.

Perhaps reacting to the stark auditory absence left by the bell, the first thing my reeling attention grasps at are any remaining traces of sound. I spend the first moments of every meditation tuning into the refrigerator. Even the quietest fridge has a whole cycle of wheezes and rumbling hums, if you listen closely enough. For me, the fridge is a fine way to settle in, so I hold it in my mind until familiarity erases it. This is one thing I have learned through meditation: although your senses are heightened when you are silent and still, when you come to know a sound, a smell, a visual object, with real familiarity, your mind stops taking readings from it altogether, replacing its presence with an imaginary analogue, returning to the object itself only if it detects some change. After a while, the fridge sound is just not there.

Most people close their eyes; I do only half the time. As with the fridge sound, I find it useful to gaze half-lidded at something: the intersection of floorboards, an imperfection in the paintwork, a static shadow. Staring at an object, I notice the periphery of my vision going first, taken over by a kind of dark cloud, starry vapour creeping inward until my eyes are open, yet almost completely unseeing. The motion of candle flicker or light from a passing car will bring the room back now and then, but otherwise I don't really see much at all.

At this point, my awareness goes internal. I am thinking about the breath, going through a slow checklist of body parts, feeling sensations, the now. But again, like the sounds and sights, the conscious part of myself following the good zen advice also becomes clouded. Somewhere, a part of me is still dutifully sensing fingers and toes, but a thought has sat down right in front of it without my even noticing. I realize, some time after it has started - how long I can't say, perhaps thirty seconds - that I am also thinking about a chess set I once had, or about a recipe I could cook, or I am playing out a narrative of some event from my past and imagining how I might have done things differently. The good zen part of me wrenches this away indignantly - what the fuck am I doing? How did I sneak off to these thoughts? Get back in the body! What's wrong with you Dan?

Breathe. In and out. In nose and out mouth. I think that's how it is supposed to be done, but I cannot remember why. Fix my eyes on the tip of a prayer sheet poking out from beneath the empty cushion opposite me. I try some deeper breaths. That's a good way to focus, surely. The added oxygen does something, and I feel a little giddy. I then think about the oxygen doing something, imagine the squashed little blood platelets like the illustrations in my daughter's human body book, with their indented donut shape. Do they plump up all fat when you breathe more deeply? Or just haul oxygen quicker? How does that delivery mechanism work? I remember the movie Inner Space when the guy is swimming through blood vessels in a tiny ship, and all the time there is this dull yellow glow from the outside world as blood cells float past his cockpit. Does the light really get inside your body like that? Human skin is translucent, I have seen it in documentaries about surgery, so some light must get in. Skin looks like thin sheets of tripe. They can grow it now, in petri dishes, like mould cultures, and peel it out with tweezers and stick it onto burn victims...

What the fuck? That was even worse than last time.

Breathe! Breathe. Slower this time. Ten breaths pass uninterrupted. Twenty. Counting can help. It is not cheating to count. Thirty breaths. At some point, I had closed my eyes. I wonder dimly if I am still sitting upright: you lose sense of where your body is when you sit for a while. You start to imagine that you are pitched forward, about to topple, and uneasy eddies of adrenaline begin to stir. Forty breaths. The person sitting next to me is breathing in unison with me. Did I do that or did they? Who is that sitting next to me? I don't even know if it is a male or a female. They are sitting properly though, I can see their upturned toes. I should really do some stretches so that I can sit properly. Maybe yoga. Zen and yoga? Is that what I am now? But maybe it doesn't matter how I sit. It seems not-very-zen to care about how you are sitting. Vain, almost. But everyone sits the same way. It must be for a reason. Is it a biological reason or a metaphysical one? I know if I lay down I would go to sleep: no question. Sitting cross-legged is probably just a matter of ritual and discipline. There seems to be a lot of that theme in the chants we sometimes recite. But if that's true, then qualitatively speaking, meditation could take place no matter what you are doing, so long as it is an arbitrary practice that you just stick at...

Fuck!

This goes on for much of the first twenty-five minutes. I try to remember to be gentle when I notice thoughts taking over. Occasionally it strikes me as hilarious - I am not one consciousness at all! Part of me is thinking one thing, then another part of me that is thinking something completely different takes the stage. So what am I really? The audience of my thoughts? I'm not really doing those thoughts at all. I'm an editor. An overworked editor. But is the editor even a constant? Are those unobserved thoughts taking place even though I am not focusing on them? Is this happening all the time but I just don't notice it? The common sense notion of consciousness seems to be badly botched to me…

I hear Peter shifting on his mat, and anticipate him ringing the bell to signal the end of the first half, which he does. We are invited to stretch, and if we want, to do some mindful walking. I have sciatica and I fear standing up, so I stretch and stay put. I notice it is a man next to me, familiar, but I am not sure I have met him. Peter and Nicole walk around the room in the slow, purposive method: one foot raises and plants, a pause, weight shifts forward, next foot raises and plants, a pause… I click my neck and wait for the second half. When Peter finally rings the bell, I grimly note that the five minutes spent waiting were the quietest my mind has had all night.

The second period is always much more pleasant than the first. The same routine occurs, of fixing and settling, suddenly withdrawing into some other thought, catching myself, guiding myself back. But it is gentler and easier now. Many times, I will catch myself starting to fall asleep at this point. But not tonight. I feel kinder toward myself now, and with that kindness comes a slowing down of the agitation. The mind plays different tricks in this second half: it brings me gifts instead of tricks, clever ideas for things to do and write. Many of them will not survive the night, but I manage to resist the urge to focus on them at that point. They sit there mostly unattended, though I do check on them from time to time.

My body is there, rising and falling with breaths that I notice without feeling. I get the vague sense of regarding myself as I would regard the schnauzer - a weighty, shifting thing that is nearby, connected to me by space and circumstance, but not really my responsibility. I resist a small excitement at the fact that things are working now, I am doing this right. This part of the night always brings me a sensation I remember very clearly from my youth. My family would drive to my grandparents house or to some other place far away, and the car would be on the motorway for a long time, fast, blurred, a monotonous din of engines and tires over rain over road, headlights of passing cars painting the seat in front of me with shadows, over and over. At some point we would turn off the motorway, and I would feel the engine of the car wind down, textures of sound slowly emerging from the white noise whine, successive gears sighing into the new slowness, the weight of my body registering against the deceleration, the white suburban streetlights fading in over the dull orange sodium-illuminated motorway. All of these changes and transitions melded together into an absorbing, satisfying, lulling, yet at the same time only vaguely perceptible experience.

That is how it is on the mat, before the final unanticipated bell rings. Whatever sort of vessel I am, the edges are softened, doors and windows swing open, and the inhabitants regard one another politely. The dull clang on a cup-sized bell is explosively loud and jolly.

Zazen ends with tea and a small treat. There is a pouring ritual, we bow to one another, everyone takes their time. After sitting for an hour, a cup of tea is an incredibly rich and complex thing. Beer and wine connoisseurs would do well to incorporate zazen as part of their tasting processes, I think. I plan to test it out for myself as I eat a ridiculously delicious ginger biscuit. I start to move my unresponsive ankles, otherwise I won't be able to get up. I press ginger crumbs onto my tongue, feeling the oil between my fingers. Cup placed upside down on saucer means all done.

After we clear up, Peter will deliver whatever small lesson he has planned for the evening. This can be as simple as asking us to sit for one minute longer, or to think of someone we know who is in pain or in need. Other times, we will go round and everyone will offer an observation or just a single word related to their meditative experiences. At least once, Peter asked that we all leave in silence, without speaking to one another. Tonight, we recite a prayer and the four buddha vows.

I talk with Peter about some ideas I have. He is warm and enthusiastic about them all, and we vow to get in touch. My sciatica rips up into my hip as I pull on my shoes, but the pain is just a physical thing: it hurts, but it doesn't anger me like it does in the morning or when I get up from the toilet seat.

I walk out into the street and head to the car. Walking seems ridiculous, look at my big feet, clomping around. The door of my car opens with a comically authoritative series of clicks and creaks. I sit for a minute before starting it up and taking the back roads all the way home. An appreciative, patient, calm, distant feeling stays with me for the rest of the night, and if I am lucky, it will stick around for breakfast.