Meditation Techniques - Week 3

About This Course

Learning to meditate is a gradual process. Each week, this course has tweeted new techniques and facilitated new insights. The techniques either address particular problems that may arise when you meditate, or provide progressively more advanced methods which deepen your experience. It is recommended that you start by going back to week one's techniques and begin your weekly course at that time. The earlier exercises are not mere preliminaries. They are central methods in their own right to which you will return repeatedly - no matter how advanced your practice becomes.

Posture: How To Sit Like A Human

A common misconception is that you must sit on the floor in a special, difficult position to meditate. This is not the case for the techniques of this course. (The difficulty of a posture does not necessarily make it more ‘advanced’.)
Only four things matter: you must be still, comfortable, relaxed, and alert. You must be still because movements distract you from meditation. You must be comfortable because pain distracts. You must be relaxed because bodily tension produces mental tension. You must be alert because maintaining attention is central to meditation. Any position that allows all four factors is ideal.

Generally, sitting is the best position for meditation. It is difficult to maintain sufficient alertness whilst lying down. Standing still becomes uncomfortable after a few minutes. There are valuable methods for meditating whilst walking – but the method you are learning now requires physical stillness.

You may suppose that you already know how to sit – but much of this week’s email, and the next few, will explain how to sit still, comfortably, relaxedly, and alertly. That is not so easy. You may already have discovered that—after a few minutes—you get a back ache or a powerful urge to squirm. If not yet, such discomforts will arise as your meditation sessions increase in length.
Sitting is completely natural. Your body already knows how to sit perfectly – but this innate knowledge is obscured by social conditioning. In the West it is generally believed that it is most comfortable and relaxed to slump and slouch. We all learn this habit of sitting but it rapidly leads to aches and restlessness. We learn, wrongly, that it is only possible to ‘sit up straight’ by using muscular tension. These problems are reinforced by the wretched design of Western chairs, which make it virtually impossible to sit naturally.

The spine is the key to sitting. There are two factors.

1. Putting the spine in a vertical position automatically makes you alert. Slouching backward, or slumping forward, tends to make you drowsy.

2. Allowing the spine to elongate makes sitting comfortable and relaxed. Compressing the spine with muscular tension results in back, neck, or shoulder pain.

Both factors are addressed by balancing the spine within the pelvis. When the top of the spine—at the back of your neck—is directly above the tailbone, it is vertical. When it is balanced, no muscular tension is required – the spine simply assumes a vertical position. When it is out of balance, you need to contract the muscles in your front to pull it forward – or the muscles in your back to pull it back. (See figures 1-3 on this week’s picture page.) Either contraction shortens the spine and results in tension and eventually pain.

To balance the spine within the pelvis, the pelvis must be higher than the knees. This is the critical defect of most chairs. The seat of a chair designed for human beings must slope downward from back to front. Many chairs slope upward. Even seats that appear level generally squash down in the centre when you sit on them, so that your pelvis sinks below your knees.

Sometimes I suspect that six-legged reptiles from Planet X have infiltrated the chair design industry so they will have plenty of comfortable places to sit when they take over our planet.

It is possible to sit still, comfortable, relaxed, and alert in an armchair. The key is to ensure that your spine is supported evenly along its length and is brought reasonably close to vertical. You may need one or more firm cushions behind your back. Stretch your legs straight out in front. However, it may be difficult to remain alert in an armchair.

Generally it is better to sit on an armless dining-table or office chair, with your back unsupported. A common description of an interested audience is of their being ‘on the edge of their seats’. When you are listening raptly to a concert or lecture, you automatically take up the natural sitting position—tall and vertical—and automatically find that sitting forward in the chair makes that possible. This effortless alertness is what we cultivate in meditation. A bored audience slumps and slouches.

With your back unconstrained by the chair, you can make tiny adjustments to find the balance point. There you can release all tension and allow your spine to elongate. At this point your head may feel as though it is floating upward. Since chairs are so badly designed, some modification is usually required. The angle of the seat can be corrected by putting a telephone directory under the back legs. A concave or too-low seat can be fixed by putting a firm cushion on top. A folded blanket or a stack of folded towels can also work. If you are tall, chairs are too low, so that your knees are forced above your pelvis regardless of the seat angle. You may need a telephone directory on the seat and then cushioning on top of that. A narrow foam wedge—which you will find in stores on the web—can provide both a downward slant and some added height. If the chair is too high for you, put a telephone directory under your feet.

This Week's Meditation Technique

Use the breath-counting method just as last week. Once every minute or two, however, take a moment to check your posture. You will often find that it has deteriorated while you were counting.
Wherever unnecessary tension has crept in – relax it. If you find you have slumped forward – sit up again. If you are slouched back – come forward. If your spine is compressed downward – release your head upward.

Follow-up

In your notebook, record anything you observe about your posture.
Learning how you habitually use—and misuse—your body is a process of life-long discovery. When you re-read your notes in a few months, it will be useful to remind yourself of things you may have discovered and forgotten. During periods of stress, we tend to revert to bad habits and forget new ones. It may be striking to discover how much progress you have made by reviewing your starting point.

Obstacles & Antidotes

If you consistently find yourself slumping, or slouching, you have uncovered a habit. In meditation, you can unlearn a habit by disengaging from it whenever you notice it. In this week’s practice, you have many opportunities to recognise habits and undo them. Over days and weeks, your posture will improve.
You may also find yourself noticing your posture when you are not meditating – and release unnecessary tension then as well. Eventually your whole way of being will become more comfortable. In choosing to un-learn this physical habit – you are learning to disengage from habits in general. Later in this course, you will un-learn habits that are close to the core of your being – and that will profoundly change the way you experience the world.

On a less elevated note, slumping is also caused by a seat that is too low or that does not slope downward. If you find yourself consistently slumping, try raising or tilting your seat.

Similarly, if you find that you have to contract muscles in your lower back to pull yourself up—so that your back is bowed—your seat may be too high or too downwardly sloped. Do not be surprised if you find it tiring and awkward to sit upright. Because your body has adapted over a lifetime to slumping and slouching, some muscles are weak or tight that will need to strengthen and lengthen. You need to learn a new physical skill. Sitting upright is not an extreme sport – but like any other physical activity—horse riding or cycling, for example—it can leave you tired and aching at first. Then your body adapts and it becomes much easier.

Preview

Next week, I will continue the posture discussion by explaining how to sit comfortably on the floor – as this has some advantages over sitting in a chair.
The main topic next week, however, will be ‘thinking’. You will probably have discovered that—however sincerely you intend to meditate—you spend most of your time lost in thought. Throughout this course we will be looking in greater and greater depth at our relationship with thought and what that implies for life.

Recommended Resources

On our web site, there is a page summarizing the various meditation resources Aro offers.

Our Members programme provides an expert meditation mentor with whom you can correspond by email.
Support our charitable work—bringing the benefits of meditation to others—by becoming a Friend of Aro.


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