Once, a friend who was visiting told me they didn’t really enjoy meditating, and always felt uncomfortable and agitated. I asked if they minded whether I tried out some posture options with them, and five minutes later, they said to me “I have literally never felt this relaxed in my life - this feels amazing - and oh my god, I’m so relaxed even my voice has gotten deeper”

Everything downstream of a good meditation posture is a whole lot easier, and debugging posture is SO FREAKING EASY. I want to personally visit every single person on the planet trying to engage with a meditation practice and spend 5 minutes going through this stuff with them.

If you’re going to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours on the cushion in your lifetime, please, for the love of all that is holy, I am imploring you, take a tiny amount of time to improve your posture - it is very probably the best return on interest you will ever get when it comes to improving your meditation practice. A small amount of time experimenting will get you:

• more comfort for longer periods of time

• more alertness

• less agitation, less restlessness, less difficulty relaxing

These translate very directly to easier concentration and more effective meditations: a stable, comfortable, alert body is a vastly easier place to meditate.

What are we waiting for?? Strap in and prepare your body for the non-stop adrenaline-fuelled thrill ride of sitting down in some slightly different ways! You’re going to be on the edge of your seat! Hahaaaa anyway there’s no time for puns LET’S FREAKING GOOOOO

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Neutral Spine (AKA knees right distance below hips)

This one makes the biggest difference in my experience! The biggest issue I see is people having their seat at the wrong height - and it’s almost always too low.

For some ungodly reason, a huge proportion of meditation cushions are wayyy too thin, so that you’d need two or even three to be able to sit comfortably. I don’t know why this is! I’ll get to specific advice on height later.

The important thing is having a neutral spine. Neutral more or less means balanced. You want your spine to be such that you can relax all your postural muscles and your torso just stays balanced upright.

Your skeleton can do all the hard work of holding you up, so your muscles can relax!

So how do you get a nice comfortable, neutral spine? The astute scholar of human anatomy will note that the spine bone is connected to the pelvis bone. If your pelvis is tilted too far backwards (like it is when you sit cross legged with no cushion, as below), then your spine will curve forwards into a slump, and then your postural muscles will have to get involved. (This is true if your pelvis is tilted too far forwards too, but this is less often an issue).

Your pelvis will tilt backwards like this when your knees are level with, or above, your hips, as in the picture above where I’m sitting with no cushion. When you sit with your knees comfortably below your hips, the your pelvis can tilt forward to the right angle.

So the crucial first step is: make sure that your hips are sufficiently high enough above your knees to allow you to balance your spine in a neutral position. This just means you need a cushion that’s the right height.

I’ll get more into this later when I talk about specific posture options, but this can often be as simple as adding a pillow or two, or a yoga block under your cushion and seeing how it feels. Most people need a little more height than they expect, in my experience.

Incidentally, this is also why sitting on a bed tends to be bad for posture: your butt sinks, but your knees don’t.

When you think you’ve found a good cushion height, you can imagine a thread pulling you straight up from the very top of your head, and settling you back down; you should feel as though you can relax almost completely, and your spine stays balanced and upright. This should feel like the classic “relaxed but alert” that you often hear when people talk about meditation posture.

Shoulders open

If your hands are resting on your knees or thighs, in my experience, after about 20 minutes or so, the weight of your arms pulling down on your shoulders starts to cause some shoulder pain.

There are two simple fixes to this:

1. Supporting the weight of your arms by wrapping a blanket around your midsection, and tucking your hands into it like a little hand hammock. The same effect can be achieved with a hoodie pocket, or an elasticated waistband. Some postures, like full lotus, or sitting on a chair, allow you to just rest your hands in your lap comfortably, but not many postures do.

2. Hold your hands suspended at around the level of your navel, like so. The thumb touch is optional. This is much more comfortable than it looks! You want to roll your shoulders back just a little - so your chest feels open - just to make sure they’re not slumping forward. This posture can also help with dullness and sleepiness.

Face and eyes

Smile

A very faint smile, like the kind so often depicted on Buddha statues, can often help to find a sense of pleasantness in the meditation. It can be so subtle that it literally isn’t perceptible from the outside. A slight smile can also help you to relax the face, and relax generally; Thich Nhat Hanh called this “face yoga” which personally makes me want to vomit, but it is true that it can help. Some people find it forced and don’t like it, which is fine too!

Eyes

You can have your eyes open or closed. There’s probably a slight tendency for closed eyes to lead to dullness, and a slight tendency for open eyes to lead to distraction, but in my opinion neither is better - it’s probably best to get comfortable meditating both ways.

A good in-between is allowing some light coming through the eyelids, but not enough to actually see anything. This can take a little getting used to.

If you have your eyes open, the general advice is to look down. I personally have always found it easier to look straight ahead, but if you’re going to look down, make sure it’s just your eyes looking down, and you’re not tilting your head forward because that can start to get uncomfortable after a while.

Relax!

That’s actually more or less it on this point - just do a quick body scan to notice where you tend to hold tension in your body. For me I tend to hold a lot of tension in my brow habitually. I’ve found it extremely helpful to imagine relaxing my whole head, and imagining that I could relax all the way to the centre of my brain.

I once heard from a lady who said that she had heard dozens of guided meditations which started with the instruction to scan through the body and relax, and found it pointless because she thought she was already relaxed, and then one time she finally realised she was actually holding a lot of tension and just never noticed it before. You might have more than you think! But if you find tension that you can’t relax consciously, don’t sweat it. Just enjoy the relaxation wherever you can relax.

Specific Posture Options, and a Few Stray Points About Seats

Mat/Zabuton

Having a mat (or at least a softish carpet) is necessary if you’re kneeling, and can be more comfortable for other postures too.

Benches and Cushions

What kind of seat you pick depends on which posture you want to use, but the two main options are: kneeling benches (also known as seiza benches; seiza is the Japanese word for the kneeling position), and cushions.

Kneeling benches, AKA seiza benches

These are a great option; comfortable and forgiving to the inflexible. When you’re in a kneeling posture, your hips are high enough above your knees that finding a neutral spine should be easy; it’s usually only when you’re using a cushion that you’ll need to experiment with different heights.

You don’t need a cushion for them, but if you want one, get something thin or firm.

It’s honestly kind of hard to get these wrong, but I have seen it happen; some are level - which is weird. They should be tilted down, to allow a neutral spine. I’ve also come across some that are very low, and put too much pressure on my knees.

Around 16-20cm (6.5-8 inches) is about right for bench height. The one I’m using in this image is a Kindseat, which is expensive, but good quality, and portable and height adjustable.

You can also stack enough cushions up and straddle them in a kneeling posture.

If you find that having your ankles flat against the floor gets uncomfortable, then you can fold back your zabuton to create a little bump for your ankles, or roll up some socks or something.

Cushions

You want cushions to be fairly firm. It’s counter-intuitive but really soft cushions like for beds and sofas get uncomfortable much more quickly than firms ones. They also compress and cause issues with your hips being too low. Buckwheat filling is good.

The cushion I have is about 13cm (5 inches) high, which is pretty much perfect. It was listed as being 18cm high, but it isn’t when it’s flat. Anyway, it’s better to buy a thicker one because you can usually remove the filling until it’s the right height.

In my experience, even though it’s the default, the standard round cushion is vastly inferior to the croissant shaped cushion.

The croissant is more comfortable and my legs go dead after a while on a round cushion, but not on the trusty and steadfast croissant.

Cushion Posture Options

Cross legged

If you have very inflexible hips and don’t like kneeling, sitting cross legged can work - but because your knees are so elevated, you’ll need a lot of cushions, both to elevate your hips quite a lot, and ideally to support your knees so they’re not just floating.

Burmese

This is a great option - you don’t need to be super flexible, and for most people it’s pretty comfortable. Your calves are both flat on the floor.

hahaaaa

But notice how this AI guy’s knees are level with his hips? That’ll be uncomfortable after a short while. Anyway. Here’s what the Burmese posture actually looks like

Quarter lotus

Again, not too demanding in terms of flexibility, and very comfortable. I use this one a lot. One foot rests on the other calf (rather than on the floor, as in the Burmese posture.

(Is Burmese outdated? Should it be Myanmarese? I don’t know and I didn’t check)

Half Lotus

One foot rests on the other thigh. Unless you’re more flexible than me, one of your knees will probably float a bit, so it’s a good idea to support it with a cushion, or rest it on your other foot (I do this and it’s comfortable for me, but I’ve literally never seen anybody else do this, so maybe I’m weird.)

Full Lotus

Ohh yeahhh baby, the OG.

This is a pretty ideal posture - if it’s comfortable for you. For me it’s easily the most comfortable for about 20 minutes and then my leg starts to get numb, and I switch to half or quarter lotus.

DOUBLE Lotus

No, I’m just kidding, there’s no such thing.

Gom-Thag

Not well known! This one is just a band of material that’s used without a cushion - it needs to be the right length of course - that goes around your lower back and your knees. It helps you relax but stay upright - even though your knees are higher than your hips - because the band holds your back straight for you.

The advantage of this is that it’s super lightweight and takes up very little space - which is why wandering yogis are often depicted with one. Good for solo backpacking or something, probably. The disadvantage is that it’s not very comfortable (at least for me) after about 20 minutes or so. It feels like it puts a lot of pressure on my lower back. Probably there are ways of dealing with this, or adjustments to posture that you can make, but I haven’t experimented with it very much.

Chair

You may have heard of this piece of ancient technology for making the ground higher.

leaning against the back of a chair can be ok, but unless you have an unusually ergonomic desk chair, you’ll want a pillow for some lumbar support, or you’ll probably end up hunching.

However I generally recommend against resting your weight back, as it tends to lead to more dullness.

Another good chair option is simply to sit on the edge, to allow your knees to drop, and get to that coveted neutral spine position.

You can also put blocks or books (or a folded blanket and rolled up socks, as depicted here) under the back legs to make it tilted to get a similar effect

These ergonomic kneeling chairs are also good.

Standing

Standing is a surprisingly excellent option for meditation! It’s a good posture to alternate with if you’re getting any kind of knee pain, or sleepiness.

If you’re standing, have soft knees - meaning not locked straight. They should have just a little bit of give in them.

It’s better to have your hands in a mudra at around your navel in the way I described before, than just hanging at your sides. Just like in the sitting posture, because your shoulders are rolled back a little more and not slouching forward, this leads to much less shoulder discomfort for longer sits (or... stands).

Again, imagining the thread pulling you up by the top of your head and settling you back down is a good way to find an upright posture.

Walking

Ah, walking meditation. The Luigi to the Mario of sitting meditation - the meditation your grandma gets you for Christmas to the one you asked for of sitting meditation.

But no, I’m joking, walking really is such an excellent option - for lots of reasons. Sticking just to posture, it’s especially good to alternate with walking if you’re on a retreat or just doing many hours of practice each day.

If you’re walking slowly it’s comfortable to hold your hands around the level of your solar plexus, like this. If you’re going at normal pace you can also do that, or just let your arms swing like normal.

The imaginary thread trick is good for walking too.

Lying

I recommend against lying. The man who never lies never has to remember what he’s said hahaa but no really. It’s very hard not to get dull when you’re meditating lying down. However, if you must (and some people do, because of health conditions), you can lie with your knees up, as this can help a little with dullness (at the very least you’re likely to wake up when your knees start to fall!) I’d also recommend keeping your eyes open. A tip I picked up from Vidyamala Burch is to get an almost deflated pilates ball and put it under your lower back for some comfortable support. Lie on a carpet or yoga mat - not in bed. Get a thin pillow that’s a comfortable height for your neck.

Change postures

If you get uncomfortable, I’d suggest:

• If you’re aware that your posture needs correcting (e.g. you’ve started slouching or something), then mindfully do that. Try not to lose the thread of your meditation practice. Actually this applies even if you’re not uncomfortable yet.

• If your posture is fine, but it’s a minor discomfort, ignore it and stay with the meditation - sometimes these discomforts just go away by themselves.

• If it gets worse and becomes distracting, then change posture! You don’t have to sit through pain. You can switch from a “higher” lotus to a “lower” one - e.g. I switch from full lotus to quarter lotus - or go to kneeling, standing, or walking.

Conclusion

Ok, that’s most of my advice I think. Good posture is pretty easy to find and will make your meditation much easier and much better, so... you know. You should experiment with it a bit I guess. If you want.

If you want some help experimenting with these things, just message me and I’d be happy to spent 15-20 minutes or whatever walking you through some of it and taking a look.

Thanks for reading!

When you’re distracted during meditation*, your mind is kind of ‘zoomed in’ on the distraction, as depicted in this lovingly and painstakingly hand-illustrated graphic:

The thing that allows you to notice the distraction as a distraction, is a kind of zoom-out.

Your attention is on the distraction, and you know that your attention is on the distraction. You’re no longer defined totally by the object of your attention.

You’re bigger than your attention; you can notice what your attention is doing, maybe even notice the effect this is having on you, on your mind states, and perhaps even your sense of self.

Wow!

The knee-jerk reaction is to go “oh wait that’s not where my attention should be” and zoom right back in—only this time on the meditation object.

And particularly to zoom in harder and more intensely so attention doesn’t get captured again. This feels like it’s going in the right direction because when you’re zoomed in, you’re less in touch with potential distractions.

But when you try to fixate harder on the meditation object by squeezing your frame closer around the meditation object, it closes off this wider perspective.

At first this doesn’t feel like an issue - attention is on the meditation object. But when it begins to get captured, without that wider frame (the zoomed-out perspective), you won’t have that meta-level ability to notice the capture.

What Do?

So at the moment of one of these instances of zoom-out, of noticing that you’re distracted, instead of zooming in again, just take a few seconds to notice and appreciate the zoomed out state, where you can feel the pull towards the meditation, and the pull towards the distraction, but not get identified with either.

Just to stress this point, which can feel counterintuitive: this requires not getting hooked by the pull to zoom in on the meditation object just as much as not getting hooked by the pull to zoom in on the distraction.

The pull towards the distraction can feel like there’s something juicy or important to think about. The pull towards the meditation object can feel like frustration with oneself for getting distracted, or maybe a strong resolve not to get distracted again.

From the wider frame of awareness, you can feel both, not get identified with either, and still choose to direct attention towards the meditation. It’s not that the resolve to keep attention on the meditation object is wrong or bad - that’s useful energy, and a beneficial intention, but you don’t want to let it collapse your wider frame.

You can redirect attention to the meditation object, but without losing the bigger zoomed out perspective.

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Then, when distractions start to pull at your attention, you can just notice them and elect to not put any more attention there. They’ll probably still pull a bit of attention, unless you’re really in the groove, but that’s fine. You know it’s happening as soon as it happens, or at least pretty quickly, and it’s not capturing you in the “zoom in” kind of way.

From a zoomed-in frame on the meditation, distractions feel like enemies and ignoring them feels like a battle. From the wider frame, that space can be kind, loving, able to hold whatever pulls at your attention with a spacious warmth that simply allows, and doesn’t get pulled in. And that’s the really valuable thing.

How To

Establishing the wider frame stably takes practice and lots of repetition.

Here are the steps again:

1. When you catch yourself in distraction, take a moment to notice the zoom-out that allowed you to catch it. This moment of opening can pass you by quickly and appear unremarkable, so really intend to mark it.

2. Feel the pull towards distraction and the pull towards the meditation object. Notice that from this wider frame, you can contain both, without collapsing into either. Wow! So cool! So spacious. Ahhh 😌 Allow yourself to enjoy, appreciate, and encourage the spaciousness for however long feels right.

3. Direct the energy of your attention back to the meditation object, but gently intend to keep the wider frame open. Notice how this this wider frame brings more ease.

That’s it! The wider frame will collapse a lot (like, a lot), but over time as you get better at noticing and appreciating it, it will become more and more stable. Which is good.

More resources to understand and get the hang of this key difference here.

_{*This mostly just applies to focused attention type meditation practices}

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In meditation, there’s often a sense of needing to go uphill to get somewhere; to overcome subtle dullness, open or maintain awareness, view things through a particular insight lens, or whatever it is that you’re working on in your practice.

It feels like “things will roll back downhill if I don’t keep pushing.”

But this sets up a self-confirming view of the mind as something unruly, stupid, or bad. If distractions arise, dullness increases, awareness collapses, or whatever, then it must be because that’s the default state of the mind reasserting itself. You let your guard down, you relaxed that effort, and so things started rolling back downhill, back to baseline - back to how the mind naturally is - which is distracted, dull, and deluded.

I find that a prompt which very often clicks for people is this: whatever you happen to be practising in meditation, try to find a downhill path to get there.

In other words, you notice the ways in which the mind wants more vividness, more unification, insight, etc. How those things feel good, feel right, undercut suffering, lead to a sense of release, lightness, and joy.

Because the wonderful thing about the mind is that unification/samadhi/concentration, insight, and love all do actually feel really good, and the mind naturally wants to spend more time there and go deeper when it gets a taste.

Imagine the difference between a teacher who thinks that you’re a little shit who needs constant supervision to be kept in line, versus a teacher who can see your potential and is delighted by it, encourages it, trusts it.

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When you trust that there’s a groove the mind can fall into that aligns with your practice goals, then you don’t have to constantly feel like you’re standing outside of your mind, pushing it up a big hill like a cart full of bad habits. You can start feeling more like you’re riding it downhill, and your practice is more like finding a good route. It may not be obvious, and it might require some exploring and playing to find, but it’s there.

This also doesn’t mean that practice should always feel effortless - there are some types of effort that feel more downhill than doing nothing, like how making some food is easier than abstaining when you’re hungry.

And of course some habits of the mind will still have momentum; some parts of the mind haven’t seen clearly, don’t trust or don’t know what’s on offer in terms of the fruits of practice, but this is your opportunity to let the beauty and naturalness of the downhill path sink in, by really taking in and savouring what feels good and right. Even if the feel-good is small and imperfect, let it touch your heart. It takes time and repetition, but doing this is like getting better and better at finding the downhill paths. You’ll feel lighter, freer, more spacious; things feel more spontaneous and less effortful.

The mind isn't something you have to fight, because it isn't defined by its habits. Getting caught up in habitual grasping and conceptual fixation takes huge amounts of energy - that's the uphill path, not the movement towards insight into the nature of mind. The more you're able to experience the nature of the mind clearly, unobscured by habitual involvement with concepts and appearances, the more it will be clear that your most basic nature is clarity, openness, and love. This basic nature is like gravity, pulling you towards what's true; you can trust it.

There’s a feeling that I sometimes get in conversation, when I feel as though I’m at a slightly awkward dead end.

The conversation topic could be a new job, an emotional experience, a relationship, whatever, but this feeling arises when my brain goes cool, I now understand or have expressed everything that’s important about this, and there is nothing else to say or ask about it. We’re done.

Yes, you’ve told me that you’re angry with your ex, and why, and I understand, and it makes sense, and I’ve sympathised, and you know that I totally get it and that I care about you. So why is there still some pregnant charge in the air around this topic?

I recognise this in doing IFS-style parts work too. It happens when I’m hearing from a part (my own or somebody else’s), which has a particular view or a particular purpose in mind.

I understand exactly where this feeling came from - and what the implicit belief behind it is, and why it’s wrong, and how I picked that up from childhood. But it’s still not going away.

What’s common to these kinds of ‘dead end’ experiences is a grasping after knowing.

When you understand, you’re relating to a concept - a model - that’s useful (or at least you hope that it will be useful) for a particular purpose, like making sure that your friend feels adequately understood or undermining a painful belief. Surely you can get there if you just know enough, in the right way, with the right tools?

It’s reassuring to have a handle on reality, and sometimes understanding is - of course - very helpful. But understanding something will cut you off from presence with the real thing if you hold it too tightly. We can only understand things in relation to an agenda. That becomes the reference point around which things can be categorised as helpful or hindering, good or bad, a problem or a relief, clear or murky, not enough or too much.

When we have an agenda, then we try to know.

But true intimacy - with others, and with your own experience - can only arise from not knowing.

There is a space that opens when we set aside our knowings and our doings, our hopes and fears, in which we can simply be present with, and be in the presence of, the messy vitality of our humanness, and not have a handle on it - and for that to be totally okay.

If you’re trying to tame a bull, the idea of letting go of the handles feels terrifying and dangerous, just the absolute worst idea. You could get hurt. The bull, wild and intractable, in its refusal to present you with effective handles, has become a problem, an enemy.

But if you’re the wide open field, then you don’t need the bull to be a particular way, and the bull can start to be itself. Rather than experiencing it as your enemy, you can start to experience it as it actually is.

And the surprising thing is that there is no particular, final, ultimate, definable, static way that the bull is. It’s alive. It’s unpredictable. It’s inseparable from its environment. It may be friendly or belligerent, quiet or adventurous. You can never pin it down, you never fully control it, never get the same bull as the day before. And that can also become not a problem. More than just not a problem - a wonder. Something sacred. Even when it’s taking a big fat smelly dump.

Awakening as Intimacy

Intimacy isn’t a “thing” that you arrive at; not something you can write down clearly in a notebook to remind yourself about.

If you cling to something that feels like that, you’ll lose contact with the living reality of experience - your own, or somebody else’s, or both. You’ve got it, bottled it, that’s the end of the conversation.

You’ll be continually frustrated at reality when it doesn’t fit your model, or frustrated at your own stupidity and inability to get it right and finally take hold of the perfect handle. That’s what it feels like from the inside when you’re holding your understanding project too tightly, taking it too seriously.

Of course, psychological insights can be immensely useful, and it’s very useful to remind yourself about them. But insights aren’t some new extra thing that you add in to your experience. They’re better understood as a kind of dropping of a habitual way of looking. When you remove the lens from your eyes, then you can actually see the lens, rather than seeing through it.

The lens is probably some attempt to make sense of, control, or monitor, perhaps in service of avoiding some experience, or preserving your worth as a person, or your worthiness of belonging.

The insight that comes from dropping those lenses isn’t about better understanding - it’s that the lenses were optional. Intimacy is to receive somebody - or yourself - without lenses.

Or instead of “without lenses” it may be more accurate to say that you know which lenses are present, and you’re holding them lightly, with a flexible facility with some other lenses that might be helpful, but without taking any of them all that seriously - knowing that none of them can ever reveal the final truth.

Awakening is intimacy with your own nature. Which is why it’s not a “thing” that you can get, because it has no content, in the same way that intimacy isn’t about what kind of content is present. Only that the connection is open and alive and loving.

When we’re trying to know something, remaining in non-doing seems like… well, doing nothing. We expect that nothing will happen - the problem will keep being a problem.

But when your experience is held within that open space without agenda, and allowed to be itself, the question of whether it is a problem or not simply no longer applies. It just is.

Have you ever felt somebody convey, through their presence, in a way that you could really trust it: “You’re ok, just as you are. I’m with you, and there’s nowhere else I want to be. I know you as you are, I see you without any comparisons or judgements or ‘shoulds’, and I love you, just for being you.” Awakening isn’t about content - but it just so happens that holding yourself and your experience in this way is also deeply healing.

Compare that to being regarded as a problem and an enemy, and report back about which one makes you feel more capable of transformation.

With repeated experiences of loosening and letting go of handles, you begin to trust more and more that the bull can’t hurt the field - and you are the field. And so you’re able to hold more and more of yourself, more and more of the time, with that kind of warmth and presence.

There will still be problems to solve on the relative level of content - the bins need changing, attachment issues needs healing, democracy needs protecting, illnesses need curing - but the sense of problemness is replaced more and more by an open, loving intimacy with reality.