Tutorial - Find Your Seat

So welcome to this tutorial on finding your seat. The Buddha taught meditation in different ways. He taught it sitting, lying down, standing, walking, in activities like washing dishes, all different kinds of meditation. In the series, the seven-day series that we're going to embark on together, I'm inviting you at the end to come into a seated meditation. If there's a day that you'd rather stand, lie down, walk, you're welcome to do other formations of the body.

But generally, a seated meditation is a good place to start and get your practice going and anchored. So I'd love to just share with you three different ways, possible ways to sit. And you want to sit with a sense of attention. So different than hanging out on the couch. There's an upright, open, attentive, alert feeling in the body.

So one way is to sit in a chair, and it's fabulous to sit in a chair, either definitely not a better meditator if you're sitting on the ground in lotus or in the chair. It's all the same. If you are in a chair, we don't want to lean to the back of the chair because that's more couch TV pose. We want to sit kind of mid-chair and up on the sitting bones. It's important that you have your feet rooted onto the ground.

So if you have a taller chair or you're not a super tall person, if your feet are dangling, that leads to a sense of being unrooted. So feet have to be on the ground, and if they're not, you could just put a blanket or even some blocks or some books underneath your feet so that the feet feel rooted. Sitting bones descend and the spine lifts upwards. So that's one really good option, and you're welcome to do that any of the days. Another option is a cross-legged seat, and I usually sit on a couple of blankets.

As adults, most of us, not for little children, but adults get tightness in their hips. So for most people, when you try to sit on the ground, the muscles of the hips tug on the pelvis. They tug the pelvis under, and when the pelvis gets tugged under, in turn, the chest sinks, and we don't want our meditation to be in a rounded spine. We want to get the pelvis upright and the spine lifting up out of the pelvis. So I'm going to sit up on a couple of folded blankets, and you can play with what you sit on.

It can be a couple of pillows or one pillow. You know, it depends on the shape of your bones and the flexibility of your muscles. It's ideal to have the knees either the same height as the pelvis or drop down versus the knees higher than the top of the pelvis. So find a height for your pelvis that will allow for the thighs to drop. One thing I really like to do, especially slightly longer meditations where I'm trying to get, you know, settled and comfortable for a longer period of time to open a blanket or it could be a towel, even something like this, lift my knees, slide the blanket underneath my thighs to give a little bit of support there.

And then again, the spine lifts and lengthens, chest is open. Okay, and then the third way that I'd love to share is in Sanskrit, we call it Virasana, means hero's pose. It's a kneeling position. And I like to put a blanket underneath the entire base of the pose. And it's important to have the blanket as unrinkled as possible.

You want to be kind of princess in the pee-like about it. Come onto your knees and then you can use a block or two blocks. You want to put the block in between your feet the wide way, not the narrow way, because you definitely want to be able to have both of your sitting bones well placed onto the blocks. So the blocks go in between the feet and you sit up onto the sitting bones. The thighs can just move in a parallel manner from the hips to the knees.

Ideally the feet point straight back. If it hurts the top of your feet, you could roll a little blanket or a little washcloth and put it underneath the front of the ankles so it's not quite so demanding on the front of the ankle. And you want to hear to feel the sitting bones evenly grounded and then like the other poses, the spine lifted, the chest open, the head floating upwards. So I encourage you to try all three of these and just play around a little bit with it so you get familiar with what the poses feel like in your body. And then when we sit together, hopefully you can have as much comfort and ease as possible.

It's not easy to sit in meditation. A lot of physical things come up, but if you can get yourself as comfortable as possible, it will behoove you. So thanks and I look forward to this journey with you.