Why There Is No 'Best' Meditation Position | Ep 252
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It feels like every tradition has a prescription on how you should sit; where to hold your hands, what to do with your eyes, and how you should handle sleepiness and pain are all prescribed.
For advanced practitioners, these suggestions should be heeded, but for beginners, they can be a hindrance - one that can be so over prescriptive and off putting that it may cause said beginner to stop practicing.
Simply put, the perfect posture is the one that keeps you meditating.
In this episode, I share with you a talk that I have released on Insight Timer - the #1 meditation app for sleep, anxiety, & stress.
Click play below to listen or scroll down to read the transcript:
What is the Best Meditation Position?
This question gets asked in a lot of the classroom discussions, particularly for my meditation courses. They say, how should I sit during meditation? What is the best meditation position? What is the best posture? It's a big contention among beginning meditators. I've got a few different approaches to offer you, depending on where you are in your meditation journey.
First up, if you are an absolute beginner, if you are just starting out, I would suggest to you personally that it doesn't matter. The goal of a beginner meditator is to just get time on the mat, just to meditate. If that means you're sitting down, lying down, broken posture in a chair, standing up, whatever, just get meditating. The only caveat to that is that you don't want to be in pain and you don't want to fall asleep.
So I typically suggest to people, take a seat or lie down. You can close your eyes if you wish, get yourself comfortable. But if you find yourself falling asleep, you find yourself in pain, tweak it, twist it, make a change. That's the first suggestion. The goal here that I look for is broad principles. What's the broad principle of a beginning meditator? Well, to meditate. How do you facilitate meditation? By making it comfortable and easy. So let's not stress too much about posture at that stage.
Now, a more advanced meditator is going to start wanting to play with posture and start looking at how posture impacts mood. If you were to just sit up straight with me right now, just sit up straight, imagine a rope pulling your head to the roof and just tuck your chin in gently. We're not forcing anything. Notice the inner feeling.When I sit upright in a good posture, I feel elated.
Now crumple yourself into a ball, huddle up. How do you feel now? Right? Your posture can impact mood. The same thing happens if you are lying down. Lying down implies sleep, and sleep does lead to different impacts too, and you can play with the use of sleep as a focus point of meditation too. But what you'll find is that the deeper you dwell into meditation and spirituality and different traditions and practices, oftentimes they do suggest a posture.
Now, once you've established a habit, once you are able to sit on the mat and you know you've cleared that space out in your life for meditation, then I would encourage you to start moving towards a posture. But it’s not about doing it dogmatically. As in, some people look at the technical aspects of the meditation, as in I've got to say these words, sit in this posture, do this exact thing, for it to work.
And that's okay for some people, but for a lot of people, that technical approach misses the overall principles of what we're doing here. Once again, does it matter if you're sitting in full lotus, perfect position to not moving a muscle? Maybe, but I would argue that the inner work and the response and the movement, the introspection, the looking at what's going on in your body, the actual act of the practice of the meditation is more important than posture.
So, with all of that said, I would suggest that you do move towards a more formal posture, but don't hold onto that idea too tightly. And if you feel the need to hold onto that idea so tightly, that it's good to think about why. Are you thinking, ‘I've got to practice in this posture because that's what the guru says, that's what the book says, that's what the tradition says…’
I would encourage you to just step back and just analyze that thought. Introspect on that thought, let that thought percolate. Does the posture really truly matter?
Non Dualistic Meditation
My main focus when I meditate is on mindfulness, a form of is non dualistic meditation. So in reality, from that perspective, the body posture is irrelevant: it's all part of the same ever present now. It's all transient, but to attain that sort of awareness, one must continue practicing, right?
One must practice daily.
There's arguments to suggest back and forth that that's neither here nor there, but I do practice, and I practice daily. I sit, I focus on the breath, I focus on the sounds, I do my meditation. How I sit does sort of impact the quality of the meditation. Now, once again, from a non dualistic meditation mindful perspective, you only have the meditation you're having, or the meditation is just occurring.
It's just a noticing of the moment. But I have noticed that I'm able to be more mindful when I am using a more formal posture. I personally sit, in meditation, either in a cross-legged position, just cross-legged on the floor, with my back resting against a wall, or I sort of kneel on my feet, and sit in that sort of kneeling prayer posture. And that's the way that I do it, that's the way that I practice, because I find that that works best for me.
So find the position and posture that works best for you. If you have certain physical conditions or disabilities or restrictions or movements or injuries or whatever it is, certain postures won't work for you. I would argue that all traditions, all practices, all talks, everything, even this post, is a finger pointing to the moon. It can only guide you so far. And you have to take that step into the, for lack of a better expression, the artistry of the practice.
You have to take it and embody it and make it yours. With everything we do here in the meditation space, in the spiritual space, but also in life space, it's like we learn all the basic techniques and then we try to embody them. And then one day we discard them and we just act. We just go, we just do. We have to start to do that with our meditation practice because once it's internalized, once it's embodied, how can words, how can instruction, how can anything get you to the deepest truth?
It can point you there, but there's something internal, something spiritual, something ethereal that has to happen for you to attain that level of presence. You can practice letting everything drop away. You can practice hyper-focusing on the present moment. You can practice sitting in a super-rigid meditation posture for hours, whatever it is, but there'll be a moment where something happens that arises and then things just click into place. Then I guarantee you that that thing will be independent of a perfect posture. There'll be something else going on.
So the summary is this. If you're starting out in meditation, just meditate. Don't worry about the posture. Eyes closed, open, head tilted up or down, focus, whatever, just meditate. You can be lying down, standing up, doesn't matter.
As you delve deeper into your practice, start playing around with the formal practices of your tradition. In general, that upright, imagine a balloon pulling your head up to the roof, gentle but firm, sort of posture tends to be quite ideal. But once again, consider that it's not about the posture, it's about the practice. The posture is just one part.
