How To Sit? | The Importance Of Posture In Meditation

Hi,

My name is Keith Parker with Field Dynamics and this is a talk about posture.

How to sit is posture important for meditation.

So we're going to cover the different types of postures you might take when sitting,

When meditating.

I'm going to talk about the pros and the cons and give you a good understanding of why this topic is relevant for many people.

So what's happening in meditation and how might our posture support that?

It's a key question.

Obviously in meditation we're looking to still the mind and our posture of course is going to support or become antagonistic towards that process.

And to take a big picture,

What is posture anyway?

Posture is how you hold your body,

How you've developed a certain kind of frame within the possible ways to hold your body that's reflective of your life experience.

So you know if a person shrugs their shoulders or if they slump their back or if they turn their legs very far outward or inward or if they crane their neck,

These kinds of things are indicative of how the body is being held.

And more deeply we might start to investigate what are the thought patterns and the emotional patterns and the memories associated with these ways of holding the body.

So that's a whole thing in and of itself but we're going to look at how we can apply the understanding of posture to meditation.

So there are a few main options when you're sitting.

The first is the most obvious one and that is classical upright unsupported.

So you'll know this is sitting like in lotus position,

Half lotus,

Cross-legged,

On your shins,

Maybe even on a supported bench with your feet on the ground.

Even a chair in some ways fits into this because all of these are wherein you are sitting,

Your back is not touching anything,

And you are working with gravity.

That's really really key that your spine is aligned with gravity.

So we're going to come back to this.

So that's number one upright unsupported.

Number two is in between.

This is where your back is supported on a wall or a chair.

Number three is lying down.

Okay simply put lying down.

We all know what that means.

So let's first touch into sitting upright being unsupported.

So I'm going to make the case that this is the primary most useful way for you to be sitting upright without any support.

And we're going to discuss the others but there's good reason why this is important.

So it doesn't matter,

You know,

Half lotus,

Lotus,

Legs crossed,

All these different things.

It doesn't matter what kind of posture you take when you're sitting upright unsupported.

I know there's going to be certain traditions,

Certain preferences.

The main thing is find what the comfort is with you.

Often people will gravitate towards a certain kind of posture.

All of them however are common in that a number of things are the same and that is that your pelvis becomes stable and when the base is stable,

When your foundation is stable,

You can relax and that's key.

The other aspect is that all of these are where the spine is aligned upright in relation to gravity.

So alignment can be really key.

There are certain traditions like Zazen in the Zen Buddhist tradition.

They really focus on posture quite a lot.

Why is the spine so important?

Well think of the spine as a kind of biological fiber optic cable distributing information around the body.

So the most connectivity you can get with the most ease of information flow comes in the spine is aligned and straight and that's what we want in meditation.

We want everything in our body and the mind-body connection to go as smoothly as possible.

To be able to drop into the present moment more,

To be able to let go,

But also to be able to become more clear.

Is it helpful to straighten your posture and sit without support?

In general I would say yes.

Sitting upright provides the best bio-psychological functioning in general and that is what I would say is the go-to.

What I would focus on the most is a primary way of sitting.

Now what inhibits people from doing that?

Why do people shy away from sitting this way?

Well obviously pain.

A lot of people find that when they sit upright,

Legs crossed,

Any kind of lotus position,

Doesn't really matter,

Something starts to hurt after a while.

Commonly it would be things like the hips,

The knees,

The lower back,

Maybe certain injuries you had start to come to the surface in terms of feeling in the body.

That's fine.

It's really normal.

It's really common.

So what you have to do is meet those sensations in the body and make them in a sense an object of the meditation that you can be with that discomfort.

Now there's extremes of discomfort where you're not going to be able to really meditate in a successful fashion if you will,

But generally speaking most people will have periods of adjustment needing to have their body start to conform to these new shapes where their tissue isn't yet set up.

Know that that's common.

I certainly dealt with that for years,

Particularly in my knees,

And I just kept iterating,

Kept practicing,

And kept also varying the ways that I sat to accommodate how it is that I could sit for longer periods of time,

More comfortably,

And now it's not an issue many years on.

Of course there are many spiritual traditions that make use of movement or stretching techniques to both extend the meditation into movement but also to prepare the body for deeper meditation.

So certainly if you're having issues with pain in the body when meditating consider taking on some kind of stretching or movement practice that will support your tissue opening up so that it is less uncomfortable.

So as a quick overview,

Upright is really really the best way to go in general because it has all these benefits of aligning the spine,

Of being able to have a stable base,

And it really increases the alertness.

When your spine is erecting up your physiology and your mental alertness can really deepen more so than when you let go into something behind or below you.

You can use support and this can be something like if you sit in a chair for meditation with your legs on the ground you might lean your back into the chair or you might use a wall and lean into a wall.

Now this can be very helpful for people and it's kind of the intermediary option between lying down and sitting up.

So using support can be effective for some people and sometimes it's going to be their primary option but what happens is you can get lazy,

You can get fuzzy.

The thing that often differentiates a person who is developing in meditation is going to be one person might find that meditation keeps having them feel more and more relaxed but moving more and more into like a dream state where their attention,

Almost the concentration or the focus of attention becomes fuzzier or more dreamlike versus somebody who's meditating and what's happening is they're actually becoming more engaged with the present moment in a clear and vivid manner.

That is the direction of meditation long-term classical advanced meditation.

That's the way that the experience goes.

It's not fuzzy and dreamlike necessarily because you're so relaxed.

It's towards this idea of vividness,

Focus,

Clarity,

Present moment sharpness and if your meditation is going towards the dream type that I'm describing consider taking on different practices that will sharpen the mind,

Not dull it.

Back supports can sometimes support this getting more dreamy and you have to be careful of that.

Now the other one is lying down.

Lying down is something a lot of people like to do certainly with healing work versus meditation if it's purely about receiving.

I notice a lot of people in the work I do a lot of people like to lie down no problem.

However a lot of people also meditate lying down.

One of the things that needs to happen with meditation is letting go and that means both in the mind and in the body.

So we need to find a deep state of relaxation as well as that sharpness of mind.

So lying down is very attractive to many people because they feel as though they can simply let go easier.

However it's going to do exactly what I just described to you.

Very often people will become more induced into like a dream-like state and because our body knows what to do when we lay down right we know that sleeping is what happens when we lay down.

So you have to be really wary.

It is okay of course to lay down and meditate but I would make sure to balance this with a sitting up meditation practice having that be your primary and then laying down and developing the same qualities of mind laying down.

It is a great adjunct to upright meditation and some people find that it really lets them let go easily.

The important thing is that you actually meditate.

That you actually invest and spend time going inward clarifying your mind settling yourself relaxing and becoming more clear more engaged with the present moment and hopefully the information this talk will help you to do so.

Thanks so much.

Good to spend time with you.