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How to Meditate - Taking Your Seat

practice is something that all of us have some familiar familiarity with in terms of something that we've learned how to do well. So I think if everybody could just in your mind think of one thing that you learned how to do well in your life and how did that happen? How did you get there? And probably there was some dimension of practice and study actually and applying yourself to it, recognizing the desire to do that and then really getting into it. So our our segment today is um actually digging into um digging a little deeper into the practice. So what I'm gonna do is basically kind of lead us into it, sort of stepwise. There's it's very simple meditation practices. Sometimes the instruction is very simple, very straightforward, Essentially. We're talking about three steps. The first one is just, what do we do with this clunky thing that we seem to be walking around and called the body? You want to meditate? Well, what do you do with your body while you're meditating and and you kno...

w, we have a certain body, which is interesting that you kind of can't trade it in actually, you can trade in your car and you can swap houses and so forth. You can, you know, work with the body you have. So this is meaning that there is no ideal body shape for a meditator, and even somebody who looks fantastic and look about why they look great, there could be a mess inside their mind and it doesn't really matter. So really what we're working with is our state of mind, but obviously we have to park the body in a certain way and that's ergonomic, you see, because we have basically what we have as a trunk, central thing and then four limbs hanging five. Really, if you look at the head as a limb, usually people think of it as more important than that. But um we have these two flappers and we've got the legs, we've got the head which has all the sense perceptions on it and we've got this sort of trunk of a body here. So we're trying to align those that there's something uh effective in terms of settling in in a way where we can create a certain kind of strength and stillness in the body. Uh normally like we're moving all the time and you know later on we'll say, well can you meditate and move around at the same time, which is called meditation in action. Right? But for right now we're saying to focus on this mindfulness practice, the best thing we can do is get our body into a comfortable seat a seated position. And of course does that mean you can meditate, standing up? Sure you can, can you meditate lying down? Sure you can. But the thing about lying down, what's happening when you're lying down? What's the next thing that happens right after you lie down? Everybody, you've got to get a close up of these people. Can we have a look at what happens again when you lie down? Okay. So yeah, it's gonna lead towards sleep most likely. Uh And if we're standing up, what's the most next next thing going to happen, visiting, moving around, accomplishing things that and so forth. So uh the seated posture is is like a tripod. The idea is that we create a kind of very stable position in which our body is aligned and very healthy and very strong within whatever limits we have with the body that we have. So you can see that I'm sitting on a cushion. Yeah, I have a flat cushion that's sort of softening the knees on the ground. It's a little hard if you're sitting on a hardwood floor or even a carpet. So some kind of under cushion is a deal. If you don't have it, you can you can work on carpet or even on the floor or a blanket you could use to put down at home. I'm gonna work with the people at home here. So they have some idea of how to go about this. And then some kind of cushion. If you don't have a meditation cushion, you can use a pillow from your bed or couch or whatever. And then some kind of cross legged posture. In this case we have the kind of native style of just sitting with the legs loosely crossed. Okay, that's gonna be easiest for most people. Uh if however you're very loose and open in this pelvic area and you want to uh extend the posture you can work with. Um This is called a half lotus position. Um There's uh other ways that you may have learned in a yoga class or fitness class to sit across the any of them are fine from this point of view, Whatever is going to be comfortable for you. So if you're not sure, just start with a simple cross legged posture, then the next thing is you want to have mm your knees should be lower than your pelvis is. So some of us, you know, we're not used to seeing this way, we may find ourselves in this kind of position like this, right? And if that's the case, get more cushions and get your but up higher, so um you have to make those adjustments and I'm going to work with the people here in a minute to make those adjustments. The main thing is you're finding some relationship where you can sit cross legged, your butt is firmly on the ground. You've landed, you know, this is not a flying perched kind of situation, like, you know, you have landed on the ground like a, like a the chiefs that you are, you know, boom is sitting bull time, you know, from that point of view. Strong seat, okay, grounded seat. Then you can take your arms and just let them hang by your sides like this from like see how your arms are just gonna dangle if you just let them relax and then so the arms wannabe sort of parallel to the torso and then just raise your arms up and just let them drop down onto your knees or your thighs wherever they fall, depending on the length of your arms. Yeah, actually this is actually called resting the mind. Um it's actually a hand gesture. It's not just Vegas, like there's a definite sense of purchase and taking your seat that way. So having uh gotten that far then the next thing is the torso, right? So isn't this funny? We're just like, we have a body, it's like we're living in this thing and we're moving through the world in it. So we're just talking about how to relate to that in this particular situation. And the torso now has a kind of this spine thing in it, you know, that have you ever seen a spine what that looks like? It's sort of not straight by the way, it's curved, but we want to elongate the spine. So some of us at home, the people here have pretty good, pretty good posture, but some of us may either not be used to sitting up straight or you know this we might have a lot of curve in our spine. Just kinda from hanging out at the the old computer or the T. V. Set or whatever reason but whatever you have just imagine that I just came into your house hologram of me and I'm pulling up on this little hair on the top of your head and your spine is elongating and coming up but without tension and all of a sudden you have a kind of beautifully upright posture wow everybody looks fantastic. So then working with the torso we make sure that the front part of our body is soft and open. We're not like looking to like get all tough and defensive, this kind of softness but the back part everybody is strong, powerful and the shoulders you know maybe some of us are used to this so just drop your shoulders a little bit, you know, there shouldn't be much tension needed to hold you up right this way. Then um if you like just tuck your chin in slightly so to counteract this kind of you know jutting jaw syndrome, just kind of like mm Yeah right, so it's again not tense but just sort of contained so that your head is in alignment with your spine and then we go into the head and uh huh you're josh should be relaxed and I can feel your tongue in there is relaxed, can rest it lightly against the roof of your mouth. If you like. The mouth can be just lightly closed door slightly open as if you were saying the word uh mhm. Even sometimes in meditation, you see a little smile, just a little trace of a smile and that if you've seen that little enigmatic smile because we're not really going into a painful situation, we're going to a very ease fel our situation. So the fake muscles and face can relax, you can relax your face and then the sense perceptions because we're doing basically what's going to be an awareness practice. The sense perceptions are open. So I want you just for a moment now if you close your eyes open your eyes just right and look what's that right in front of you. We're not trying to get away from anything here. There's a little bit of a thing like and pulling in. But this practice is an awareness practice you're practicing for everyday life Right? So we keep the eyes open but we soften our gaze and and and allow the gaze to drop at about six ft on the floor in front of you at home. 4-6 ft on the floor. Mhm. The gaze is called a relaxed, defused gaze. It's not that hard staring energy, but it's also not internalizing or going to sleep. It's not it's not an internal practice in that way. So if you're sitting on the chair, let me go through that with people who would rather sit on the chair. Usually people can do one or the other of these. So if you're sitting on a chair um maybe uh we could look at Willow here. Is it possible to get a shot of uh will out there at the end? You can see that she's sitting upright with or without a cushion. Actually have an extra cushion underneath you, but you don't need that necessarily. And her hands are resting on her thighs and her feet are flat on the floor in front of her. Um So she's got the feet about shoulder width apart and flat on the floor in front of her. That's better than sort of dangling or crossing your legs or something like that. And if you look at Allison, Alison's got a cushion underneath it because that's uh maybe it's too long away down to the ground. So that helps her to to have a better seat. Now let's try again to take your seat and watch the transition that happens just with this first stage of practice, just to take your seat. And that's what it's called, taking your seat. That's the actual first step of meditation is taking your seat. Uh huh. You can and then I kind of have a feeling you've arrived and sometimes we say there's a sort of almost regal quality to this posture and if you look throughout history and time and space, people have taken this seat in a lot of different cultures at different times. American indian, you know, Europeans, asians. So there's something quite uh anthropomorphic about it, it's it's a very uh universal kind of thing and you're taking that posture and you feel like okay, you know, and then there's also a feeling like kind of being more exposed maybe than you used to. There's something about just taking the seat that opens up a lot of space. So notice if you're kind of tending to like shy away from it and allow yourself to expand out into that regal seat. So that's the first step of the Sharma to our mindfulness meditation construction. Let's just try for a minute or two just to sit that way and see what that feels like. Okay, we've taken our seat and eyes are open with a soft downward gaze, hands on the thighs and just experience, just feel what it feels like to be there right now doing that. So just for a minute or two