The Most Overlooked Meditation Advice
How To Sit Correctly For Meditation - 4 Positions & 1 Secret
Most people start with observing the breath when they learn to meditate, but only few get told to fix their meditation posture first.
A restless body produces a restless mind.
It turns out that it's pretty hard to be mindful of your breath, or anything else if you don't sit correctly. Either you will endure back pain or you will keep fighting the urge to slack off and fall asleep.
Learning how to sit correctly is essential for meditation. Probably more than you think.
If you prefer the visual experience, please scroll down until the end of the post.
The Biggest Challange
The key to good meditation posture is balance. The biggest challenge is ignorance.
You might have heard of ignorance or avija in terms of Buddhism, but this is not necessarily what I mean. I refer to a much more benign form of innocent ignorance.
We naturally assume that we know how to sit. Yet, if we are honest - especially the office workers amongst us - we don't.
Neck and back pain are daily companions for most of us, so one might argue we first need to learn how to sit correctly, which is humbling ... I had to relearn how to sit properly after 35 years of life and five years of meditation practice.
And that's good! Modesty is not only an admirable personality trait, but it's also a healthy and helpful mindset to learn and improve your meditation practice.
Modesty, we might argue, is the opposite of Ego.
So before we approach beginners mind, let's get back to the basics.
Basic Principles & 3 Alternative Positions
The key to good meditation posture is balance.
... so what does that mean?
The most common sources of struggle are these 4 things:
Sitting too uptight, too straight
Sitting too lax, like a slouch
Hip Flexibility
Stubbornness
Points 1. & 2. are very often the result of 3. and 4.
Beginners and long(er) term meditators are often too proud, stubborn, or sometimes simply unaware that they have other options than crosslegged sitting.
Because of that and a lack of hip flexibility, they end up in a balancing act. Either arching forth to prevent them from rolling over backward or collapsing forward, rounding their back like they've been doom-scrolling for far too long.
Both balancing strategies lead to back pain, and none of them are sustainable for longer meditation periods.
The alternatives are:
Sitting on your knees (sometimes referred to as Seiza, Thunderbold, or Dimond Pose - Vajrasana)
Lying on your back (Shavasana, common pose for Yoga Nidra Meditation)
Sitting in a chair (common position among older practitioners)
All of those might bring their own challenges with them. In Seiza your legs might fall asleep. In Shavasana, it's really easy to dose off and fall asleep, and you might not always have a chair around - but:
The most important takeaway should be that there are alternatives, and you are free to experiment and find your preferred sitting position.
One Secret Hack To Master Crossleged Sitting
I get it, though. We've all grown up to see meditators sitting crosslegged and therefore that's how we want to sit, too.
At least that's how I felt when I restarted my meditation journey.
So how do we learn to sit correctly and how do we increase hip flexibility... daily stretching? Yoga? A three-month-long meditation retreat as a "quasi-sitting-boot-camp"?
Not needed.
Instead, just get a cushion. That's what I did.
When I first entered the meditation room in a vipassana retreat in India I was surprised to see it full of meditation cushions. I was expecting everybody to sit perfectly in full lotus on the bare ground, but that's not the reality of it. Wherever you go for meditation practice, usually you will get the option to sit on a cushion or at least on a yoga block.
For your own practice, you can get a meditation cushion, that comes in various sizes and forms (depending on your hip flexibility and sitting preferences) or you can start by grabbing one or two small pillows and folding them in half to sit on top of them.
Sitting up higher helps you to sit naturally straight and it also helps your tights and knees to sink to the ground, providing you with a solid foundation to remain balanced through your practice.
Sitting on a cushion, will not only improve your posture and practice, but with time it will also increase your hip flexibility so you can sit more comfortably and balance even without a pillow beneath your bum.
Does This Really Matter?
Because so little attention is given to this detail, you might rightfully assume that it may not be important.
But after fixing my posture eventually, I realized that it takes a certain degree of mindfulness to even notice that your sitting position keeps you from meditating properly.
There is so much talk of enduring the pain or pain being only any appearance ... which is not wrong but also not helpful when you are starting to learn meditation.
Learning to sit correctly is part of the practice. By training your body, you are also training your mind. And by learning how to sit correctly, you pave the way for your mind to explore itself.
In mindfulness, Buddhism, and meditation, there is very often an emphasis on being free from suffering, and even though there are many stages to pass through, there definitely is no need to suffer through back pain.
So let's leave that issue finally behind and grand our attention to the actual practice.