How You Sit When You Meditate Matters - Here's Why
Sitting in meditation with proper Zen posture. Photo credit: Shundo David Haye
by WITHIN Meditation teacher Shundo David Haye
Many people are motivated to start meditation as they hope to become a calmer person. The good news is that it can happen, though it might not happen quite the way we expect.
It's not a question of stilling or emptying the mind, as many people assume, but working with our body and our breath.
The traditional physical posture of meditation is beautifully designed to help the body and the nervous system relax.
For many centuries, people have understood that to sit upright and balanced, with a stable base in the lower half of the body, promotes stillness and concentration. It isn't necessary to arrange yourself in a full-lotus position, with both legs crossed over each other, but there is a benefit from the alignment that it provides.
I have attended meditation trainings where the instructor suggests that you can curl up on your couch to meditate, but I think this misses some important elements of the practice; in the zen school I trained in, there is much emphasis placed on posture, though it took me a few years to really understand how it all worked.
When you are sitting cross-legged, or in a kneeling position on a cushion or a bench, or sitting on a chair, the two main principles are that your lower body should feel stable and comfortable, and that your hips are higher than your knees.
When the hips are higher than the knees, the pelvis is tilted forward, and when that happens, the spine becomes naturally aligned, with its four curves manifesting without stress.
There are two results from this alignment of the spine:
You don't need to engage abdominal or core muscles to hold yourself upright, as the spine is doing the work for you; and,
This disengagement of the muscles allows for a freer and fuller flow of breath through the torso (if you are lying down in meditation, keeping the knees up and the feet on the ground should give you these same benefits).
When we are stressed, we take short and shallow breaths from the top part of the lungs only. This is very effective in allowing us to respond quickly to a stressful situation; the sympathetic nervous system engages in the flight-or-fight response, which is great when we are confronted with danger.
Unfortunately we tend to engage this response in all kinds of situations during the day - a sharp retort from a family member, an email that triggers us.
When we adopt the traditional meditation posture as described above, we can naturally start to breathe more slowly and deeply - which sitting still will lead us towards anyway - and allow the breath to move the diaphragm, causing the stomach to expand and contract easily with every breath.
The nervous system is analyzing what happens with each breathful of air in the lungs, and when this deeper breathing begins, it will respond by sending out messages, largely through the vagus nerve, that instruct most of the body that it is okay to move into the rest-and-response of the parasympathetic nervous system.
This is why many guided meditations instruct us to focus on the breath: it is always happening in the present moment, which is where we want to keep our attention, and we have a certain amount of control over it, so we can guide ourselves to breathing more deeply. But we don't even have to be doing a breath-focused meditation to be doing this; so much of this is happening just from taking this physical posture.
We can never guarantee that we will relax every time we sit in meditation; our nervous system may be a little too keyed up to want to respond this time, or our brain may feel overwhelmed with everything we have on our plate, but we are giving ourselves that invitation, and it may be that the body does get the message, either gradually or suddenly, and we can feel ourselves letting go and finding that sense of relaxation.
I also firmly believe that there is a deeper level of relaxation that one can arrive at through meditation: beyond the physiological benefits, when we can meet whatever is happening in our life with less resistance, we can become calmer.
We often expend a lot of mental energy rejecting the circumstances we find ourselves in, struggling to accept situations and people, wishing things were different.
When I say this, I do not mean that we meet everything in our life meekly and passively; we maintain - and even cultivate in our meditation - a sense of what is right, or fair, or acceptable to us, and when we notice that something does not align with the values we aspire to, we do our best to change the situation.
But we do this without adding layers of stress, resentment or anger that consume so much energy.
Our practice can often reveal to us how our preferences shape our response to what is happening.
We can't always get rid of our picking and choosing, indeed we have evolved to stay alive through knowing the difference between what is beneficial to us and what is dangerous. Our brains, though, take that capability and apply it to just about everything.
To take a trivial example, if I go to the store, and my favorite breakfast cereal is out of stock, how do I react? I can notice a sense of disappointment, perhaps choose a different brand, and try to make the best of it. Or I can stew in a feeling of anguish, of everything being stacked against me.
We probably do this many times a day over situations that are, if we can take a step back, way more trivial than we make them out to be in the moment.
As I type this, I am just about to sit down for a meditation session, while some construction work is taking place next door. Listening to power tools is never relaxing, but I am going to do my best not to stress over this, and to stay relaxed as I lead the session.
Shundo teaches weekly in our online meditation studio. Join him for a class this Wednesday at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT!