Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Comfort in meditation
Using zazen as an example, we have learned that this practice comes with certain behavioral standards, which mostly involve posture and leg positioning. Now, in all honesty, this practice is far from comfortable. In fact, if not from boredom, the lack of comfort proves to be another reason for giving up. Familiarizing oneself with boredom seems to be the main process when meditating, just sit there and live the moment without doing or thinking about anything. Yet, what does the body position have to do with it? I am not debating this issue, only stating my obliviousness, I need your input. I want to take this seriously, but have found myself giving up, and not passing my 20 minute barrier.
Note that I have read and learned about meditation, from both Buddhist and Hindu perspectives. Yet when it comes to the actual practice, I even bring shame to the beginner.
Thank You.
Note that I have read and learned about meditation, from both Buddhist and Hindu perspectives. Yet when it comes to the actual practice, I even bring shame to the beginner.
Thank You.
0
Comments
Providing you remain in a state of relaxed alertness, or alert relaxation, you can do it standing on one leg, clutching a rose between your teeth and juggling apples, if you so wish.
The point of Meditation is to discipline the mind.
The body can do what it likes...........
Do they really teach " be in the moment by not thinking or doing anything?" doesn't make much sense to me. Your mind doesn't go calm right away and for long periods even for experienced meditators.. They dont teach you to observe everything? I am never bored working on mindfulness.
One thing I will say is that proper posture is the key to stability which is the key for long term meditation. I have come to peace regarding pain in meditation especially during retreats where you are meditating 6 hours a day sometimes two hours straight, but my main issue is finding a stable sitting posture. This has lead me off cushions and maintaining the practice of a straight natural back while sitting, driving and everything else. This has greatly helped.
Also btw, if you are a true beginner to meditation you will be lucky to go past the 10 minute barrier let alone 20 minutes. Don't expect too much and just be kind to your body and mind.. Meditation never really gets "easier" that's for sure.
Second, they promote physical immobility which is then reflected by an immobility of mind. This creates a deeply settled and tranquil concentration.
Third, they give you the ability to sit with your back straight. The most essential thing is to sit with your back straight. The spine should erect withe the spinal vertebrae held like a stack of coins, one on top of the other. Your head should be held in line with the rest of the spine. All of this is done in a relaxed manner. No stiffness. you are not a wooden soldier, and there is no drill sergeant. There should be no muscular tension involved in keeping the back straight. Sit light and easy. The spine should be like a firm young tree growing out of the soft ground. The rest of the body just hangs from it in a loose, relaxed manner. This is going to require a bit of experimentation on your part. We generally sit in tight, guarded postures when we are walking or talking and in sprawling postures when we are relaxing. Neither of those will do. But they are cultural habits and they can be re-learned.
The objective is to sit for the entire session you have planned without moving much, if at all. When starting out such postures are uncomfortable after a while but the body needs time to adjust, so keep at it. if the pain or comfort arises, note it arising and that it is merely a feeling, maybe if it is prominent project your focal point of concentration onto it rather than the breath. If this becomes to painful obviously move a little.
But again, we need to emphasise that it is neither compulsory, nor is it even recommended, particularly for those suffering from specific back and/or joint ailments. In fact, it can prove detrimental or even harmful.
If people are, for physical reasons, unable to adopt what is considered to be a 'proper posture' then forcing themselves defeats both the physical and mental objects, and can be positively dangerous.
I do plan on experimenting, I would eventually like to adapt the proper straight back posture, for in the long run this can only prove to be beneficial, right?
@Jayantha, Indeed, I quickly face boredom, due to an otherwise busy life. By busy I mean, that I constantly occupy myself, and if nearing boredom, I indulge in how should I say: lustful self-pleasuring(which has consumed my life).
Sometimes I wish I had one of those dudes with the rulers behind me to help with my balance haha.
ThailandTom put it very well in his first post about the spine and head stacking etc. I also find tucking in the chin a bit helps.
When I get home I want to link some videos for you, or you can try and search for bhante rahula as he has plenty of videos on yoga ajd meditation posture.
it is difficult to imagine anything more inherently boring than sitting still for an hour with nothing to do, but feel the air going in and out of your nose. you are going to run into boredom repeatedly in your meditation. Everybody dose. Boredom is a mental state and should be treated as such. A few simple strategies will help you cope.
re-establish what it means to be mindful of what the breath actually is, this can escape us from time to time during meditation as it is so subtle, yet mindfulness brings it up to a micrscopic view point and it is very in-boring. If you think you have sen everything there is to see within the breath already you are wrong, you are conceptualizing the process. You need to observe its living reality. When one is mindful of the breath entirely, it is never boring. Mindfulness can see every moment through the eyes of a child, it can see every second as the first and last second in the universe. So look again, and again and again.
Another thing to notice is what is boredom, what actually is this feeling you have labelled? Where is it? What does it feel like? Does it have any physical feeling/ What does it do to your thought process?
If this is not hitting home maybe you are lacking enthusiasm and effort which is a different story entirely.
When I first became interested in so-called spiritual life, I read perhaps 500,000 pages (mostly Hindu-Vedanta oriented) before it occurred to me that if they (all those monks and nuns and people I was busy looking up to) could do it, so could I. After I got over the embarrassment of thinking that thought, the first thing that occurred to me was that for all the reading I had done, I really wasn't quite sure what, precisely, I should do.
So I went back and looked for information that would point me in the right direction as regarded meditation. I still didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I found an old milk crate in the garbage, covered it with an orange cloth, put a candle and picture on top of it and designated the whole thing as an "altar." Then, each afternoon after work, I would sit cross-legged on the end of my bed and in front of the altar -- chanting or breathing or whatever I did. And one of the first things I noticed was that my knees hurt like hell and I whined like fury: "How come if I am doing this for God, he/she/it can't show some compassion and kindness for my knees?! What a lousy deal that was!!!" Spiritual life was supposed to be nice and kind and blissful and joyful and a relief and ... well, yum-yum-yum, right? Needless to say, my knees paid no attention to my complaints.
A couple of years on, I got into Zen practice, which emphasizes seated meditation practice. It didn't take long to figure out that my earlier complaints were child's play compared to my Zen practice experience. I tried everything -- kneeling, sitting in a chair and any other posture I could find that would make things easier, more sensible, more consoling. Finally, after one seven-day retreat, I just made up my mind: If things were going to hurt, then they might as well hurt in the most stable position I could manage. I decided on half-lotus and then did that. The whining did not abate, but I just did it.
Many wonderful things are written about posture and position. I'm willing to grant the wisdom of all of them. I'm not particularly interested in them, but I'm willing to grant them. For my own purposes, there was discomfort and pain. Trying to escape it was not a possibility for me. And, as time went by, I realized that any sort of pain was the kind of thing I had instinctively fled all of my life. Not that I had to embrace pain like some masochist, but the unwillingness to get to the bottom of pain, whether mental or physical (if anyone thinks that's an appropriate distinction), was simply not sensible. Somehow there needed to be a different approach to pain... a more honest approach to the pain that life dishes up.
My Zen teacher, a man with 50 or more years of practice under his belt, once told me it took him about 17 years to get over the pain. He meant the physical pain ... and the mental pain as well.
Am I suggesting that pain while sitting is some virtuous and necessary aspect of practice? No. But I do think that the pain anyone encounters in meditation is a good example of the pain anyone experiences in a less-focused setting. For once, there's no running from what is part of life ... so ... how about it? What is it? Where does it come from? With or without the carefully-couched complaints ... how about it when, for once, I face it squarely?
Just some noodling. Sorry for the prattle.
The following are the 12 points of Mahamudra posture that work at all three of these interpenetrating levels:
1. The seat: We need to feel a connection with the earth
underneath and that our seat is firm and at the right height.
2. The sitz bones: We need to feel our weight landing right on our
sitz bones, neither sitting too far forward (on our upper thighs)
nor too far back (on our tailbone) so that we can receive the flow
of energy from the earth.
3. The hands: We rest our hands on the upper part of our thighs,
careful that we are not pulled too far forward or pushed back.
4. Slightly flattening the lower back: We slightly flatten the
lower back in order to counteract the tendency to push the
belly out, which creates a curve in the lower back and can
produce tension.
5. The shoulders: We relax our shoulders.
6. A feeling of the spine from the perineum up to the top
of the back: The entire spine feels elongated and relaxed,
beginning at the perineum and then up through the flattened
area of the back and up to the top of the head.
7. The chin: The chin is slightly pulled back and the head is
slightly bent.
8. The neck: The back of the neck is elongated.
9. We feel the top of the head lifted up: There’s a place about
two-thirds of the way back on the top of the head known as
the brahmarandhra (point of brahma), and it is as if there is a cord
attached there, pulling the top of the head up,. This gives a
feeling of the chin being pulled back, the back of the neck
elongating, and the central channel being further opened up.
10. The central channel: We feel the energy flowing up the
central channel.
11. The mouth position: The mouth is slightly open, tongue
floating. There is a sense that the mouth is expressing relaxation
and the openness of the central channel.
12. The eyes: We put our attention in the back of our eyes, as if the eyes are turned around backward, looking into the central channel—as if awareness is looking at awareness."
-Reginald Ray
This may be a bit in-depth and even probably a bit advance for most. But I'll put it out there. Posture is something that comes with time and practice. It is something you naturally tweak while meditating in even microscopic movements. In the gross form you're working with an alignment that is relaxed, open and firm, which essentially is about balance. With time we can then see how this relates to our overall sense of awareness, attention, and just the sense of being here in a wakefulness. The posture alone can kick the mind into this sense of wakefulness. The body is basically the extension of the mind and essentially meditation as a whole begins when we are as the body, not in the body. That may take a while to get but the process of meditation is a process that moves from the conceptual left brain processes to the right brain processes, which is the soma or the body in all its aspect (physical, energetic, and consciousness without feature).
Essentially with practice and working on the physical posture we are working on the subtle body, which is in the dimension of energy. Particularly we are working with the central channel, which runs along the spine. Each part of the body becomes gateways essentially through energy into vast spacious awareness. So really its important to be connected to the earth through the perineum and that opens up the awareness and energy in a much more dynamic way.
Well in my own practice posture is very important while meditating. But generally I am not meditating on a zafu or cushion. I am sitting in odd postures and walking around, etc. So with time the power of concentration and mindfulness are nurtured and posture isn't as important as it becomes a secondary condition for clarity. But nevertheless its like night and day if you have the correct posture.
Some thoughts for you. Remember this is just all information and probably meaningless for most people. Just take it for what it is.
by David Nichtern
::snip:: ::snip::
As a teacher of the Alexander Technique I see this patterning asserting itself all the time.
Alexander called this endgaining, Ed and Jack called it attachment and contraction.
For me personally, my posture is like a garment I wear, how I wear this garment conceals a deeper reality. The middle way so easily becomes the muddled way when like Jack, Ed and numerous others, we become fixated in the end result at the expense of the means wherby.
Were all in this (attachment) together.
One of my teachers used to say "alert yet relaxed", which I think is a good description of meditation posture.
As for boredom, it probably means you're not looking closely enough.
here are those videos I said I'd post. These are very good for learning basic natural posture for meditation -
Like it or not, there is nothing sacred or special about sitting with your legs twisted up like a pretzel. It just happens to be how people sit when they are not raised in a culture that uses chairs. To someone in the East or any culture that doesn't use chairs, telling you to sit down doesn't mean pulling up a chair, it means putting your butt on the floor or cushion. It's as simple as that. Their legs aren't in agony after a few minutes because they've sat this way their entire life. You can't meditate when you're in agony. You're only fooling yourself that you're doing anything useful.
And it's dangerous. We now know that blocking circulation in the legs can cause blood clots and nerve damage. That pain is your body telling you to stop. If you want to sit this way, find someone who knows sports medicine and get them to help you develop more flexible joints instead of just toughing it out.
After half a lifetime of enduring pain and trying to make it to the big lotus posture goal, I never did manage more than a half-lotus and now my knees are shot, to where I can't get off the floor without help. So do yourself a favor, and use a stool and cushion and listen to your body. When your legs say "I'm hurting!" get up and walk around a minute. Then sit back down and meditate in comfort like it's supposed to be done.
But anyone who might be a little older - and/or with a moderate level of joint issues like arthritis, tendonitis, etc (especially in the knees and/or hips) would find these meditation poses pretty much excruciating. And even if you can force yourself to deal with the pain, you would likely be causing more damage to an already damaged body.
Then there is the issue of fat people, not "chubby" people- fat people. They meditate too. However they may not be able to flex their bodies into these positions even though joints and muscles may be perfectly healthy and normal, their larger body mass gets in the way and usually causes discomfort or circulatory issues.
So for these people (like me- old, fat AND arthritic!) or with other physical limits to traditional 'sitting' - there's nothing wrong with sitting in a lightly cushioned, straight-back chair, or bench, at the perfect height so that feet can be firmly (and flat) on the floor, while thighs are perpendicular to the floor as well. You would still need to be aware of posture, head and spine position, but at least the rest of the body is pain and damage free.
Bhante G, a very famous monastic to westerners, talks about how he never even tried to do a lotus position until he was 65 ( he's 85 now and has been in robes since 12). Again it's not about any specific position.. it's (or at least it SHOULD BE) about stability.
PS. I will say one thing about pain.. no matter what you do you will have some kind of pain in meditation.. Bhante G, Bhante S, and many other monastics i've listened to all say it's about being with the pain, observing it( This is of course assuming you don't have physical issues like back problems etc). What I've found by observing is just HOW MUCH this mind tries to run from pain and avoid it.. when you are in a meditation hall for two hours you can't run(other then incessantly trying new positions.. which again is a lesson and insight). Looking back all those hours in the meditation hall at Bhavana has created in my mind a negative aversion to that hall.. but it has taught me so much that it has been worth it.
As for boredom, make sure you are trying not to go into it with a sense of boredom. If that is what you expect that is what you will get. Try not to have any expectations at all and set a shorter time limit. Try 5 minutes, and when you are comfortable with that, go to 7, then 10 and so on. It works much better. The first time I meditated, 5 minutes felt like torture. Now I can meditate for a half hour or longer and have no concept of the time that has passed, at least until a couple weeks ago anyhow, lol.
Sado masochistic endomorphins release is not helpful, it is a body high based on a pain response. One of the reasons people get addicted to exercise . . .
Led meditations, using apps or recordings can keep the agitated and stimulus addicted mind occupied . . .
Please don't think that boredom is unusual. It does pass eventually.
I don't plan to sit through long periods of pain; I'm running a marathon in two weeks - I can deal with pain when there's a good reason, but I don't see any good reason for dealing with it when I'm sitting.
I could be wrong though; I'm just regurgitating stuff I've read.