Postures for Meditation

By Ines Freedman

There are many positions we can meditate in: sitting, standing, walking and lying down. These

instructions focus on the sitting position, the most common position for formal practice, as it’s conducive to staying alert and relaxed. For those unable to sit, you may use the alternate option of lying down.

The aim of the sitting posture is to balance being upright and alert, with being relaxed. When exploring a sitting posture, we want to choose a method that is relatively easy. Choosing a method that looks good, but is a significant struggle defeats the purpose of meditation. What is most important is what you do with your mind, not what you do with your feet or legs.

Sitting Positions

Sitting on the floor is recommended because it is very stable. A very effective postures has been the pyramid structure of the seated Buddha. We can use a zafu (a small pillow) to raise the buttocks just a little, so that the knees can touch the ground. With your bottom on the pillow and two knees touching the ground, you form a stable tripod base. If you are on a hard floor, placing your cushion on a zabuton (a square padded mat) or blankets is recommended. (See Hand Positions below.)

Burmese style:

• The legs are crossed and the tops/sides of both feet rest on the floor.

• The knees should ideally also rest on the floor. Depending on your flexibility, it may take a bit of practice for the muscles to stretch and the knees to begin to drop. A cushion under the knee(s) can help.

• Sit on the front third of the zafu (if round), which helps keep your back upright.

• Imagine the top of your head being pulled upward towards the ceiling, which straightens your spine, then just let the muscles go soft and relax.

• There should be a slight curve in the lower region of the back. In this position, it takes very little effort to keep the body upright.

• If you sit more than 30 minutes a day, I recommend that you alternate which leg goes in front.

What Loving Kindness Is

By John Welwood

Meditation cultivates unconditional friendliness through teaching you how to just be—without doing anything, without holding onto anything, and without trying to think good thoughts, get rid of bad thoughts, or achieve a pure state of mind. This is a radical practice. There is nothing else like it. Normally we do everything we can to avoid just being. When left alone with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we become nervous. We start judging ourselves or thinking about what we should be doing or feeling.

We start putting conditions on ourselves, trying to arrange our experience so that it measures up to our inner standards. Since this inner struggle is so painful, we are always looking for something to distract us from being with ourselves.

In meditation practice, you work directly with your confused mind-states, without waging crusades against any aspect of your experience. You let all your tendencies arise, without trying to screen anything out, manipulate experience in any way, or measure up to any ideal standard. Allowing yourself the space to be as you are—letting whatever arises arise, without fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence—this is perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your experience.

As you simplify in this way, you start to feel your very presence as wholesome in and of itself. You don’t have to prove that you are good. You discover a self-existing sanity that lies deeper than all thought or feeling. You appreciate the beauty of just being awake, responsive, and open to life. Appreciating this basic, underlying sense of goodness is the birth of lovingkindness — unconditional friendliness toward yourself.

Reflect, Without Thinking

On learning how to enjoy our little human dramas

By Ezra Bayda, Photography by Corey Kohn (WINTER 2009)

Practice implores us to do the simplest yet most difficult thing: to sit still and simply be present. In meditation, we let whatever comes up, come up. We invite it in. We welcome all of it, including the resistance, the boredom, the judgments, and the endless spinning. We let it all come up and just watch it.

When things come up that we don’t like, we try to remember that these thoughts and feelings are our teacher—we can learn from them. They’re not the enemy that we have to get away from. In other words, we don’t try to change our experience; we just try to be aware. Observing ourselves in this way does not require thinking, judging, or analyzing. It only requires watching. This is what it means to watch with curiosity as our experience unfolds, without trying to make ourselves different.

We don’t have to live out of our cherished self-images. We don’t have to appear to be calm or clear, or to look “spiritual.” Instead, can we acknowledge who we are—including all of our so-called shortcomings? Can we give up our ideals of perfection?

The constant effort it takes to try to fulfill these self-images is not only an ongoing drain on our energy but also the source of much of our anxiety. Without our self-images, we feel exposed, both to ourselves and to others; we feel that if the truth about us were known, we would be seen as worthless, or, at least, as not enough.

The alternative to living out of these self-images is to honestly acknowledge ourselves as we are; to let whatever comes up be observed and felt, with no added judgments; to watch the many ways we present ourselves; and to reflect, without thinking. This is one way we can bring kindness to ourselves, just as we are, no longer making so much of an effort to present ourselves in some special way. Needing to be special keeps us solidly stuck in unhappiness. So whether we’re at work, walking down the street, or visiting with friends, we could watch the need to be special, notice the self-images we’re holding onto, and feel what that feels like. Simply watching also allows us to stop struggling: to stop trying so hard to accomplish, to prove ourselves, to measure up—to cover over whatever sense of lack we might have. It may be frightening when we first stop struggling; we’ve become accustomed to this way of being, and feel anxious about leaving the comfort of the familiar. But when we stop the struggle, we then have the space to be at home with ourselves.

Learning to be at home with ourselves is one of the prime benefits of meditation practice. But remember: practice is never a straight line to a fixed goal. It is always a mixture of moments of confusion and moments of clarity, periods of discouragement and periods of aspiration, times of feeling like a failure and times of going deeper.

For example, what usually happens when we sit down to meditate? If we happen to have a busy mind, we often think that something is wrong. And when we think that something is wrong, we usually translate that into the belief that something is wrong with us. Furthermore, we think that we have to do something about it.

But there’s an alternative way to approach our so-called problems. No matter what we bring to our meditation, no matter how we may be feeling, the practice is to simply sit down, acknowledge what’s going on, and then let it be. What this requires is the basic understanding that our states of mind are not problems to be solved or obstacles to be overcome. Just because something seems off doesn’t mean that something is, in fact, off. Things simply are what they are. It’s primarily our judgments about them—our expectations about how things should be—that cause us endless difficulties.

For example, if we get bored or sleepy during sitting, we will often proclaim it a bad sitting. If we get agitated or upset, we will often think that we have to become calm. If we get confused, we will long for clarity. But the fact is, no matter what may be happening with us, all we need to do is acknowledge what’s happening, and then be as fully aware as we can. And in that very awareness, our upsets become our path. The underlying principle is that awareness heals. So the idea is to simply let it be. Please be clear: this is not a passive or pseudo detachment; we still need the discipline to stay present, to remain still, and to be precise in our self-observation. But there’s a particular attitude of mind that’s simply willing to look, to be open to what comes up, to be curious, and to cease judging and resisting.

And as we cease our resistance to what is, there will be a growing willingness to be with, and perhaps even enjoy, our repeating patterns, our little human dramas, the whole passing show. We learn how to rest in our experience without falling into the trap of wallowing in it.

This practice, in a way, is very simple. But it is also very difficult to do; the mind is not inclined to let things be. It does not want to give up its pictures, its opinions, its ideas of how things should be. It is much more interested in analyzing, blaming, controlling, and, above all, making things “better.” But it’s possible to learn one of the most important secrets of spiritual practice: that we don’t have to be some particular way, nor do we have to feel any special way. When we truly understand this, it’s like letting go of a very heavy burden.

Although the emphasis is on just watching our experience and letting it be, that does not mean that our sitting practice is amorphous or spacy. We still stay focused. So through all of the ups and downs, the practice is to rest your mind in the breath, to feel it fully. Rest your mind in the environment—feeling the air, hearing the sounds, sensing the spaciousness of the room. Rest your mind in the silence, which includes the endless mental chatter. Remember, though: we enter the silence not by trying to enter, but through the constant soft effort to just be here.

Let whatever else comes up, come up, including the mindless daydreams, the compulsion to plan or have internal conversations, the moments of spacing out, and the periods when discomfort or pain, both physical and emotional, get intense. Just watch all of it. This is how we use the experience of sitting still—basically doing nothing—to awaken our sense of what’s most real, and what’s most important. As long as we live in the bubble of our thoughts and judgments, we cut ourselves off from the mystery of our being. Yet we can often tap into the mystery through just a quiet presence in the moment. Through watching, and reflecting without thinking.

Ezra Bayda, the author of seven books, has been practicing meditation since 1970 and currently teaches at Zen Center San Diego.

Original article HERE