The silent room I built

There is a small room at the back of our flat that used to be a storage room. It is two metres by two and a half. The window is small and faces a brick wall. The previous tenants used it as a wardrobe. We used it, for the first two years we lived here, as a place to keep the suitcases and the winter coats.

Three years ago I converted it into a meditation room. The conversion took a weekend and cost about a hundred euros. The room has, since then, been the most-used room in the flat by hours-per-square-metre.

What I did

Emptied it. Repainted the walls in a chalky white. Put down a thin natural-fibre rug from the small floor up to the walls. Hung a single piece of fabric — a length of undyed linen, about a metre and a half by two — on the wall opposite the window. Placed a small low wooden stool against one wall and a thick cotton cushion in the corner. Nothing else. No shelves. No art. No clock. No charger sockets visible.

What I left out

Music. Books. The small altars or icons that some meditation rooms have. The diffuser. The candles. I had thought all of these would be useful and discovered, over the first few months, that all of them were small distractions that pulled the mind away from the practice rather than supporting it.

The light

The window is small and the light is grey. This had seemed, when we moved in, like a problem with the room. It turned out to be the room's best feature. The light is even, constant, undramatic. There are no patches of sun moving across the floor. There is no shifting through the day. The room is the same room at any hour, which is exactly what a meditation room should be.

What the room does

It removes the small frictions that the rest of the flat has. The rest of the flat is full of cues — the laptop, the phone, the unread books, the half-folded laundry, the small list of things to do. None of these are in the room. The room contains nothing to do except sit, and the sitting starts more easily because there is nothing else available.