What do you do when you meditate? (2/4)

(1) Finding a calm and comfortable seat - your body

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Although (or probably because) many of our lives involve a lot of sitting, it can come as a surprise just how painful and uncomfortable it can be to sit still. If you add the challenge of sitting upright without slouching, the amount of pain your body can generate over the course of minutes, is nothing short of mindboggling (try at your own risk).

When you start to meditate, quickly you might notice a clear tension between sitting upright, sitting comfortably and sitting calmly. So where do you go from there? Sit in pain? Slouch over? Move to ease the pain? Just push through it?

While you will get stronger just from sitting more, rather than forcing yourself into an uncomfortable position, during meditation you learn to experiment with different ways of sitting. You could e.g. start by sitting very straight until you start to notice discomfort, then try and let go a little to be more comfortable. If you start to feel uncomfortable there, experiment again with dialling the tension in your spine up and down based on how you are feeling. Similarly, you can try sitting very slouched down, feel the discomfort and then adjust gradually into a more upright position.

The purpose here is to learn to pay attention to your body and your physical sensations.

In this sense, the very act of sitting becomes similar to ‘balancing’ – you balance motion with stability, muscle tension with relaxation. This is similar to how you make small adjustments to stay balanced on one foot, i.e. not to fall. As you gain strength and stability, it might look as if you were standing perfectly still, but actually, you are adjusting constantly to keep yourself in an ever more neatly calibrated balanced state. This is also how professional violinists think about playing ‘on pitch’ – they constantly adjust, rather than hitting the ‘right’ pitch all the time.

If you are a purist like me and find yourself thinking ‘wouldn’t it be less distracting if I didn’t move at all?’, it has helped me to consider my breath. Even if you were to sit ‘perfectly still’, your breath consistently moves your stomach, chest and shoulders, without disrupting your stillness. As with the movements going on in your stomach or nostrils, sitting still is more about noticing motion and not be distracted by it, rather than suppressing or controlling it.

This point is worth expanding upon, as the purpose of sitting ‘still’ and ‘comfortable’ is to enable focus without being distracted by your body, not an end in itself. So what I found most helpful in ‘adjusting my posture’ has been to think about sitting in a way that is the least distracting to my focus. Differently put, rather than thinking of ‘still’ as an absolute, think of it as ‘the most still I can comfortably be’. On some days, I sit very still (yey!) and on others, sitting involves a lot more motion and flapping about (I generally feel more calm after light exercise or in the mornings; and more restless in the evenings and or when I have been sitting at a desk all day).

As your practice develops, you will find a more and more nuanced understanding of what ‘sitting still and comfortable’ actually looks like for you and how it varies depending on the time of day, your mood or your alertness. In hindsight, when I started out, I had a very limited understanding of what ‘sitting comfortably’ felt like. When paying more attention to how your body feels when you sit, you learn to notice a lot earlier when individual parts of your body start to become uncomfortable and what kind of minimal adjustments you can make to minimise tension.

While this process of responding to your body might feel like a lot of conscious effort at first, it becomes more automatic over time. As your practice progresses, you will notice how your body makes small adjustments to keep you still and comfortable increasingly automatically, keeping you comfortable and as still as you can be, in a way that is not distracting to your focus.

So in summary, one of the things you ‘do’ during meditation is learning to pay attention to your body and adjust your position in subtle ways to keep you comfortable to allow you to focus. This will also seep into your normal life. You will become more attuned to when you are physically comfortable (or uncomfortable), and able to make small adjustments to keep your body from becoming a distraction or source of pain: while sitting, but also during exercising, walking, standing etc.

In the next post, I will write about what you do during meditation with your mind and thoughts, i.e. how to focus.

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