The Posture of Meditation

by Will Johnson

  You may wish to begin by taking a number of deep breaths. On your last exhalation turn your attention back to the tactile sensations in your body, allowing your breath to assume whatever pattern is natural to it. You may wish once again to move your attention part by part through the entire body, contacting the feelings and sensations in that part of the body and then allowing the taste and experience of relaxation to enter into that part of the body as you surrender its weight to the pull of gravity. Begin by bringing your attention to the top of the head, your scalp, and forehead. Feel whatever tension or residual holding you may find there begin to melt away, yielding to the ever present pull of gravity. Relax the eyes. You may wish to close them lightly. If the eyes want to stay open, observe the sensations in and around your eyes quite carefully, making sure that you are not inadvertently creating tension by focusing too precisely on a specific object or distance. Slowly bring the feeling of relaxation to your cheeks and ears, your nose, your jaw, your mouth and your chin. As you do this, the mouth may naturally want to hang slightly open. Bring your awareness to the area around your tongue, and feel that this area too can yield to the subtle pull of gravity. Feel the entire head aligned on top of the body and relaxed.

  It may be helpful to remember that the head weighs approximately ten pounds. If it is not balanced on top of the supporting torso, the muscles in the neck and upper back will have to contract to keep the head in that position. Many meditators have a tendency to let the head drop forward and to look slightly down at the floor. This tendency also creates tension in the neck and the shoulders. When the head is aligned and relaxed, the eyes look straight ahead.

  Ordinarily the area of the head may be completely occupied by the presence of involuntary thought. In a deeply relaxed and balanced condition, however, the head can experience a full range of tactile sensations filling and occupying its space. Sensation and involuntary thought cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. Where do the thoughts go when the head is able to experience itself as a mass of sensations? Where do the sensations go when you become distracted by thought? Explore the role that relaxation plays in the creation of these two different states.

  Continue moving your attention through each and every part of the body. Feel how you can release tension in the throat and the back and sides of the neck by gently surrendering the weight in this part of your body to gravity. If you discover any unexpected tension, do not try to force it away. Simply spend a bit longer in that part of the body, patiently continuing to allow the tension in that part to drop away. Move your awareness to your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your chest and upper back, your belly and lower back, your pelvis, your legs, and your feet. You may even be able to feel the dropping away of tension like water in a shower that runs down your body. As you let go of tension in any one part of the body, the experience of relaxation in other parts of your body may be affected as well. As your body becomes increasingly relaxed, you may experience a refinement to your alignment as well. Allow these shifts to continue to occur. In a deeply relaxed state the sensations in the entire body can be felt to ebb and flow. As your alignment subtly shifts through this deep relaxation, watch to make sure that you have not inadvertently brought any additional tension anywhere into the body. As you continue to surrender your weight to the pull of gravity, keep playing with your balance. In the posture of meditation you may ultimately be able to find a place of balance that requires no unnecessary effort at all to maintain.

  Keep moving your awareness through your body, continuing to relax even more. Once you have kindled a relaxed awareness of the entire body, you may choose to focus on only a few places to maintain the ongoing process of relaxation. A convenient formula that can remind you of this says simply: drop your shoulders, drop your belly, drop your mind, open your heart.

  Koans are apparently insoluble riddles that students in the Rinzai school of Japanese Buddhism are, nonetheless, required to solve as part of their meditation practice. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” one student may typically be asked. He or she is then sent off to ponder the koan during long hours of sitting meditation in hopes of arriving at an answer to a question that is essentially unanswerable.

  On the face of it, the task of resolving the dilemma posed by the koan appears impossible. One hand alone can’t clap, and it certainly wouldn’t be able to make any sound if it could. We are clearly not dealing within the realm of the logical world here. The purpose of the koan, however, is to free us from the restrictions that that realm ordinarily imposes, to force us to look at things in a radically different way. Faced with an apparently impossible situation, our customary mental conditioning may have no recourse but to shut itself down, revealing in its place a wonderfully refreshing dimension of experience that is extremely difficult to access under normal conditions. In the words of Hakuin, one of the great koan masters, “If you take up one koan and investigate it unceasingly, your mind will die.”

  The orientation of traditional koan practice is decidedly mental, and the struggle to resolve the koan takes place entirely within the mind of the student. However, just as we have conventional patterns of the mind that serve to obscure some of the deeper, more wholesome dimensions of experience, so too do we have conventional ways of being in the body that limit and restrict us to a diminished condition of vitality and ease. And just as the mind can be presented, for the purposes of awakening, with puzzles or riddles that initially appear impossible to resolve, so too can the body be presented with tasks that at first appear to be contradictory and impossible to perform.

  The posture of meditation itself may appear as a kind of somatic koan. Alignment and relaxation would initially seem to be contradictory impulses. We can easily imagine a soldier standing at attention, erect and straight. We can also easily imagine someone lying on the beach, completely relaxed. The synthesizing of these two impulses into one compatible gesture, however, is much more difficult to visualize, and yet this is what the posture of meditation challenges us to accomplish. The effect of combining alignment with relaxation goes far beyond a mere functional improvement of the body. Just as with the traditional koan, a wonderfully wholesome dimension of experience that is ordinarily elusive and difficult to access may spontaneously present itself. The koan may be simply stated:

  In a sitting or standing position surrender the entire weight of the body to gravity, and yet remain as tall as you possibly can be.

  The exploration of this koan goes far beyond the simple securing of a stable posture. Unlike the inanimate materials that are used in the construction of tall buildings, the tissues and cells of the human body are animated by a life force that adds an extraordinarily dynamic element completely lacking in the steel girders that form the backbone of a modern skyscraper. While this inner force is always present, its fullest expression remains dormant or contained in most humans. One of the simplest explanations for this restriction is that the holding and muscular tensing that are necessary to keep an imbalanced body standing erect effectively serve to contain that force and render it inactive. However, if a human body is able to come to balance not by exerting unnecessary muscular effort, but by establishing a predominantly vertical structure, then that body can begin to liberate this force. As a balanced body continues to surrender its weight to gravity, this force becomes activated, and the body may gradually and quite spontaneously begin to feel as if it is being gently elongated and stretched upward and outward. This elongation and stretching are the natural manifestation of this life force. In the life cycle of plants this force is responsible for drawing the body of the plant upward in the direction of the sky. In human beings this force can be felt as a source of extension or radiation. When, through a gesture of profound relaxation, this force is activated, it may initially cause chills in the body, or the body may tremble or quiver. Sometimes it may almost feel as if you are being drawn up by some mysterious force analogous to the force of gravity, yet opposite to it in its direction of pull and influence. When m
ystics speak of feeling uplifted or drawn closer to God, it is the activation of this inner bodily force that is responsible. To arrive at this experience is to resolve the apparent contradiction posed by the koan and to begin to appreciate the depth of wisdom embodied in the posture of meditation.

  4

  Resilience

  Sit quite still, and breathe comfortably and naturally.

  WHEN WE sit down in meditation, we are instructed to sit very still like an unmoving mountain or a carved statue of Buddha, to let go of extraneous motions, gestures, or nervous movement habits. Stillness, however, is antithetical to life. The common denominator to all life forms is the presence of motion. Everything is moving. Everything is pulsing. This is as true of individual cells as it is of large vertebrate mammals. True stillness and immobility only enter into our bodies when we die. The posture of meditation is able to reconcile this apparent contradiction between stillness and motion through adding the element of resilience to the preliminary conditions of alignment and relaxation.

  It is important to recognize that, when applied as a value to the process of meditation, stillness refers to the gradual softening and quieting of the body and mind. It does not imply rigidity or immobility. The stillness of meditation, rightly understood and experienced, promotes the quality of quiescence. Paradoxically, the quiescent state is a function of softly resilient motion. We can only hold our bodies still through constant muscular tension and contraction. By constantly tensing and contracting the musculature, however, we effectively forfeit the condition of relaxation. We inhibit the natural flow of breath and the passage of energy through the body. By holding the body still, we transform the gelatinous nature of the body’s tissues into a kind of armoring that is able to block out our awareness of the body’s tactile sensations. The result of this physical holding and hardening is a mind filled with involuntary thoughts of attack and judgment, fear, desires, and fantasies. Clearly this is not the quiescent state of mind that we hope to create through the practice of meditation.

  When applied appropriately to the process of meditation, stillness is a relative term at best. It is to be found between the two poles of an imposed immobility and a constant fidgeting. If we sit down to meditate and react to the appearance of every unpleasant sensation by moving or rearranging our body or even standing up and walking away altogether, our meditative inquiry cannot proceed very far. At the same time, if we impose an unnatural stillness on our sitting posture, we create the kinds of conditions outlined in the last paragraph. These too will seriously interfere with our progress. The introduction of subtle resilience into the posture of meditation allows us to avoid the pitfalls of these two extremes.

  Resilience is a function of accepting and then yielding to the forces of nature that so affect and move through us. This may be the force of gravity, the sensations in the body, or the movement of the breath. Resilience is about flexibility and always involves surrendered motion. The leaf that dances on the wind is remarkably resilient. So too is the water of the ocean that allows the force of waves to move through it and constantly change its shape. The tallest trees and skyscrapers sway in the wind. If they didn’t, they would break apart. Indeed, one of the greatest dangers to the tallest and most established trees is an unseasonal ice storm that leaves a layer of brittle ice covering the surface of the tree. If the tree is unable to continue its resilient swaying motion, it may snap apart.

  Resilience is the quality that nurtures the conditions of alignment and relaxation and extends their presence over time. Alignment is not a static condition that we seek to create and then maintain. It is an ongoing process that may change from moment to moment. Relaxation is not a static gesture. It too is an ongoing process. The body continues to let go of tension and yield to the appearance of new areas of sensation that continually present themselves. In the posture of meditation the body is in constant, subtle motion. Without alignment there can be no relaxation, but without resilience there can be no relaxation either. Relaxation without resilience is a contradiction in terms. How can the body be relaxed, surrendering its weight constantly to the pull of gravity, and yet be tensing its musculature in an attempt to hold itself very still?

  The final challenge for the meditator who has brought the body into a condition of alignment and then surrendered its weight to the pull of gravity is to invite the quality of softly resilient motion into the posture. Paying attention to the process of breath is one of the most direct ways through which we can contact the perpetual nature of subtle, resilient motion. The presence of breath belies the potentiality of stillness. Where there is breath, there is movement. If we hold our breath for any reason, we do so by holding our body still, and whenever we bring stillness into our body, we inhibit the breath. In that we breathe all the time, there is always going to be some accompanying movement even in the stillest of bodies. Furthermore, in an aligned and relaxed body this movement will not be limited to the area of the body around the organs of respiration proper (the chest and diaphragm), but can be experienced to extend throughout the whole body. Like a wave that moves without interference through a body of water, breath can be experienced to move through the entire length of an aligned and relaxed body. The force of breath invites the body to respond resiliently.

  The action of breath is initiated through the involuntary contraction and relaxation of the diaphragm. The contraction of this powerful muscle creates a bellows effect that draws air into the lungs. Its relaxation encourages the oxidized waste to leave the body. With every contraction the belly can be seen to expand slightly; with every relaxation the belly becomes once again smaller. This amount of movement, so directly associated with the action of the diaphragm, exists in everyone (including the meditator who interprets the instruction to “sit still” to mean to sit with complete immobility).

  In an aligned and relaxed body, however, the movement associated with breath need not be confined to this one small area of the body. Like ripples moving through a still pond into which a pebble has recently been dropped, the movement initiated by the involuntary action of the diaphragm can expand joint by joint through the entire body. As the diaphragm contracts, the belly and lower back expand slightly. In an aligned and relaxed body the force of this expansion can then be felt to move simultaneously up the torso through the top of the head and down through the pelvis and the legs. The amount of actual movement may be very small, but its existence is real. Ida Rolf once stated that in a completely relaxed and balanced body the motion of breath would generate subtle movement at every joint in the body and that this would include the sutures in the skull and the joints between the small bones in the feet!

  Moving upward from the belly, the force of the belly’s expansion can stimulate the chest to open. The chain reaction continues as the force from this opening is immediately transferred to the shoulders, down the arms, and into the hands, all of which can be felt to respond to the force of the breath and to move ever so slightly. Finally, the neck and head can be felt to bob on top of it all. With the exhalation the movement retraces its path. As the cycle of breath keeps continuing, the whole body can be felt to expand and contract in the manner of an amoeba. The movement down through the pelvis and the legs on the inhalation and back up into the naval on the exhalation is even subtler, but can still be distinctly felt. If this kind of resilient movement is unavailable, it is a sign that the body is still holding and bracing itself and has not yet relaxed as fully as it possibly can.

  In addition to the movement of the breath, the sensational presence of the body itself is another strong force to which we are challenged to respond resiliently when assuming the posture of meditation. The significant letting go of tension that the posture of meditation activates powerfully loosens the lid on the long-contained cannister of the inner world of the body’s tactile sensations. The body is revealed to be a dynamic process of vibratory phenomena, all of which can be distinctly felt. The sensations of the body can be felt to flow, shimmer, throb, and vibrate
. Some of the sensations may be very pleasant, others extremely uncomfortable. In the face of the uncomfortable sensations it is all too common a reactive habit pattern to tense the body in an attempt to modify or completely conceal the discomfort. The movement of the sensations, however, kindles the force of purification that clears the mental and physical blockages keeping the states of awareness that are the goal of our meditation practice contained and unavailable. By not shutting down on the emerging sensations, whatever their nature, but remaining resiliently open to them, we allow the process of purification to continue, and our experience of meditation naturally deepens. By holding back on the powerful flows and surges of sensations that may occur, we lock ourselves into further patterns of tension, and the posture of meditation becomes even further elusive. Resiliently yielding to the breath and to the emerging awareness of the body’s sensations are two of the most powerful ways in which we can ensure that our practice continues moving forward.

  “Resilience is the function / Of the self forgotten,” sings the seventeenth-century Chinese poet Han Shan Te Ch’ing in his poem “On Clear Mind.”1 This attitude is further reflected in the words of the Zen poet Ikkyu, “To harden into a Buddha is wrong.” As we become increasingly familiar with the process and experience of resilience, we come to recognize how the superficial dimension of mind and identity, which our meditation practice is designed to pierce through, is itself a function of holding still. We cannot stay open to the senses and be lost in the internal monologue of the mind at the same time. Clear, unfiltered awareness of sensations, and by extension sounds and sights, can only truly occur in a body that is relaxed and resilient. If that body is challenged to respond resiliently to a motion that wishes to move through it and it declines, then that body reintroduces an element of tension and forfeits its relaxation. As the awareness of sensations recedes, the internal monologue of the mind reappears to take its place.