Can you offer some background on why you decided to attend? How much experience with mindfulness did you have beforehand?
I started experimenting with meditation after listening to Howard Stern talk about transcendental mediation around seven years ago. At the time, I was struggling a lot with anxiety and bouts of depression. When I discovered Mindfulness and Acceptance Therapy, I started to move away from mantra meditation(TM) and towards mindfulness meditation. Over the years, I became more and more interested, not only in meditation, but in Eastern philosophy, and studied everything from Vedanta to Zen to Yoga to Tibetan Buddhism.
I meditated anywhere from 20-40 minutes a day, but I was never very consistent. Sometimes I would skip a day, and sometimes a week, but I always came back to it. The anxiety and depression eventually went away, but I still was a very unhappy person, and I didn't understand why.
Enter psychedelics. After a psilocybin trip last spring, I wrote about 40 pages worth of advice to myself. It was all very practical, very pragmatic, almost fatherly. Part of that advice was something along the lines of, "If you really want to figure out what's going on, you need to study your mind, study your thoughts." I signed up for the first available course.
Another point that hasn't been mentioned is that these courses are funded entirely by donations. This is why they want you to work hard and take your time there seriously. This is also why they really discourage people from leaving early. There are typically long wait lists for these courses and they don't want to "waste" spots on people that are going to leave early or not take it seriously.