by Will Johnson
These other movements, with the exception of lying down, are all variations on the action of bending. We lean forward or to the side. We bend over to pick something up or to position ourselves to play a game. Bending motions are inherently unstable because they demand that a certain amount of tension be introduced into the relationship between the energy field of the body and the gravitational field of the earth. They are transitional postures, and we can never rest comfortably in a bent position for very long. When you bend, you temporarily relinquish the verticality of the spine and the support of gravity. Even when you bend, however, you can continue to play with balance. Parts of the body will move in front of the imaginary vertical axis through which gravity flows; others will move behind this axis in compensation. Through the coordinated orchestration of these compensating movements the overall condition of balance can be maintained. By consciously playing with balance in whatever action you are performing, you are supporting the embodiment of alignment. Remaining aware of your condition of balance allows you to enter into a bending posture and then return back into a more vertically aligned posture without unconsciously accumulating any unnecessary tension.
Pay attention to alignment as much as possible in whatever you’re doing. Pay attention to the feeling tones and sensations that are generated throughout the body as you focus in this way. Notice how different these sensations are when alignment is not present. Notice how alignment directly affects your state of awareness. Watch what happens to your awareness when you forfeit your alignment. Pay attention as you stand up from your meditation seat, as you walk through your house, as you bend to pick up a magazine, as you prepare and eat your meals (and clean the kitchen afterward), as you take a shower, as you drive to work, as you interact with friends, fellow workers, your children, your parents, your lover.
Once you have familiarized yourself with the feeling tones and sensations of alignment you will be able to begin to monitor yourself, and you will be able to recognize instantly if you are encouraging alignment or temporarily forgetting about it. It is very important to remind yourself that alignment is a lived experience that generates specific awarenesses, sensations, and feeling tones. It is not just an abstract set of spatial coordinates applied to the structure of the body. Alignment is the ongoing play and dance of balance. Let these very alive feeling states guide your body ever closer toward a condition of real structural alignment. When your body becomes aligned with the directional flow of gravity, these feeling states will be present. In whatever action you perform, if your body remains comfortably balanced, these feeling states will also appear. If you stand in front of a mirror and try to force your body into what appears to be an ideal vertical alignment, you will almost certainly generate tension and holding that will not permit the feeling states of alignment to emerge. Every body is different. Find your own way to alignment. There is no such thing as an ideal template to which you must force your body to conform. There are only feelings, sensations, and awareness. Let them continue to be your primary guide. Find the alignment that is appropriate to your body at this moment, recognizing that it may continue to change and become more refined in the next moment. Imagine that the world in which we live is a huge swimming pool filled with the most buoyant salt water, and alignment allows us to float. Keep floating and playing in this wonderful pool of gravity. How can you bring alignment and balance into this very moment? How does that affect your experience of this moment? Can you continue to bring alignment and balance into this next moment? Apply the exercises at the end of the chapter on alignment not just to your formal sitting posture, but to your standing, walking, and moving about.
As you move through the successive activities of your day, allow more and more relaxation to enter into your body. Relaxation means to do whatever you are doing in the easiest way possible. When Chuang Tzu stated that “easy is right,” he was encouraging us to bring as much relaxation as possible into our lives. Life becomes easier when we make the enormous force of gravity our ally rather than our adversary. It is easier to align our bodies with the directional flow of gravity and then relax by surrendering our weight to gravity than it is to brace ourselves constantly against gravity. Relaxation means to let go of unnecessary tension. How much tension can you let go of as you take a leisurely walk? Can your arms hang loosely from your shoulders, or do you feel that you need to hold them up to secure your balance? Can your belly hang comfortably and easily as you breathe and move, or do you unconsciously hold it in? In order to relax you need to develop trust in the field of gravity as your ally. The feeling states of alignment help you to develop this trust, and your experimentation with relaxation will further it significantly. Familiarize yourself with the deeply wholesome feeling states of relaxation. They are your birthright.
As you continue slowly to walk, monitor the sensations in your body and the activity in your mind. The sensations of relaxation have a distinct and recognizable quality to them. They feel softly vibrant and nourishing. As soon as tension enters back into a part of the body the sensations begin to change. The sense of loosely flowing vibrancy gives way to numbness or tightening. The sensations no longer feel healing, but feel as though they need to be healed. A relaxed mind is comfortably alert, able to monitor the different sensory data with which the body is constantly challenged to interact. In a tense body the mind loses its mirrorlike quality, its sense of clarity and alertness. Even though the eyes are open, it may not really see what is in front of it. Sounds may pass by unnoticed. Sensations and feeling states may be blocked out or ignored. In a tense body the mind may be clouded with a layer of involuntary thoughts that have little application to the current situation in which you find yourself. Making matters worse, we often identify ourselves with this layer of thoughts and forget about the depths of being that lie beyond them.
As you continue to experiment and familiarize yourself with alignment and relaxation, you will learn to distinguish between the feeling states of alignment and misalignment, relaxation and tension. The more familiar you become with these different sensations and feeling states, the easier it will be for you to maintain the process of aligning and relaxing the body and mind. Tension reenters the body and mind when you react with clinging or aversion to any bit of sensory data with which you interact: a sight, a sound, a bodily sensation, even a thought or memory. As soon as this reaction occurs, the feeling tone of relaxation is lost and is replaced by the growing feeling tone associated with tension. As you learn to monitor your sensations, it becomes much easier to catch yourself when a reaction has occurred and to let go of whatever tension has developed as a result. In this way you can continue to let go of tension and invite relaxation, and its attendant benefits, into your posture as much as possible.
From moment to moment as you move through life relaxation is possible. The habit pattern of reaction is so subtle and ingrained, however, that you will continually be challenged to remember to relax, to let go of tension, to learn how to do things as easily as possible. The way you eat your food, drive a car, bathe yourself, wash the dishes: there are no activities in life to which the action of relaxation cannot be appropriately applied. Inevitably you will find that it is easier to bring relaxation into some situations than into others. Relaxation generally involves a noticeable slowing down. You may find, for example, that you need to slow your normal pace considerably if you wish to walk in a truly relaxed way. Learning to do things differently always brings challenges. As you walk more slowly down a familiar city street, you may experience yourself and the neighborhood in quite a different way. Can you stay open to this new awareness? Do you feel more vulnerable when you relax in this way? Do you feel stronger? Is it okay to feel this vulnerability or strength? By applying the posture of meditation to your movements through life, you will inevitably begin to experience a profound transformation in your body and mind. Can you accept this transformation? Can you accept who and what you become when you move in this way? Sometimes your conventional pattern of holding,
even though it is painful, has an appeal due to the comfort of its familiarity. Can you shift your goal as you walk from reaching your destination as quickly as possible to relaxing into the experience of the present moment as you move along your path?
Surrendering your weight to the pull of gravity does not just diminish and transform the sensations of physical tension. Inevitably the self-created masks or personae through which we interact with the world begin to soften and fall away as well. Commitment to the posture of meditation will force you to let go of the unconscious reliance on different masks or ways of posing in the world. It will allow you instead to meet and become familiar with a deeper, more authentic sense of self, one that does not need to rely on artificial poses and projections of self-image. This deeper self may simultaneously feel completely natural and yet empty of specific definition. It too is marked by a definite and recognizable feeling state. Relaxation leads you directly to this deeper self. Once you have contacted it, relaxation continues to nurture and support it. This deeper self may feel radically different from your conventionally egoic sense of self. It may feel more like empty space than the solidified entity that the ego would like to convince you is your true nature. Can you allow this deeper self to continue over time, or do you feel an almost unconscious urge to cover it over and resurrect your more recognizable and conventional sense of self? To reassert your more familiar sense of self, you must bring tension back into your body. We all want relaxation. How relaxed are you willing to let yourself be? If your conventional awareness of self begins to dissolve through relaxation, can you simply accept the new condition and allow the relaxation to continue? What happens when this transformation occurs on your sitting cushion? What happens when it occurs while you’re walking down a busy city street? What happens when it occurs when you are walking alone along a remote mountain trail? Are you able to allow this emerging transformation to continue if you are at a social gathering?
Resilience completes the posture. A relaxed body does not artificially hold itself still. Like a small child, it does not need to resist the impulse to move responsively. As a body continues to become more relaxed, it naturally becomes more resilient. Its movements become more streamlined, coordinated, and graceful. Resilience extends relaxation over time. With every breath you take, the body can respond resiliently. With every movement you perform, the body can respond resiliently. True resilience of movement involves the entire body acting as a coordinated unit of interdependent parts. The slightest movement in any one part of the body can spread throughout the entire body. A sudden movement in the head or the shoulders can be transferred joint by joint through the entire body and ultimately be felt in the feet. Like a wave that laps against a rock and then returns back toward the ocean from which it came, the movement may not stop there. It may instead begin to move back up the body, arriving back at the area where the initial movement originated. By remaining open to the possibility of resilience, the body can stay in perpetual, subtle motion. Paradoxically, this motion will not exhaust the body, but will keep it refreshed and vibrant. To hold the body artificially still is exhausting. Great grace enters effortlessly into the actions of a person who can move resiliently.
Riding in a car presents a wonderful opportunity to practice and explore resilience. Ordinarily we hold ourselves very still as we sit in or drive a car. We brace ourselves against the bumps of the road and the motion of the car. If we relax and allow our bodies to respond resiliently to the ride, however, our experience will be quite different. The body rocks randomly up and down and from side to side. The head, which is ordinarily held very still in a car, bobs and jiggles atop it all. Play with this resilient motion the next time you ride in a car. Then hold your body very still in contrast and observe how different this feels. Can you relax your arms and your hands as you hold on to the steering wheel? Does placing a small cushion behind your back improve your alignment?
Sitting at a desk, you may need to reach forward to grasp an object. Do you reach forward only with your arm, keeping the rest of your body completely still and braced? Or can your entire body, even down to your ankles, participate in the simple action of reaching forward? Observe how much less tension is felt to exist if your entire body can participate in a coordinated and resilient manner. Observe how much more alert and clear your mind is if you reach forward in this way.
Alignment, relaxation, and resilience can be experienced in everything we do. The effect of their coordinated interaction is particularly noticeable in the action of the breath. When the body is aligned, relaxed, and resilient, the breath is naturally smooth and long. Inhalations and exhalations flow smoothly one into the other. The pacing of the breath is regular and even. Over time it may begin to feel as though the breath were moving through the entire length of the body, cleansing the sensations of the body of any residual tension through its movement. If this cleansing and wholesome quality of breath is absent, you can be certain that the posture of meditation has been somehow compromised. Any holding in the body will interfere with the free and natural movement of the breath. As we release unnecessary holding through embracing the posture of meditation, the breath naturally assumes a pattern of fullness, length, and regularity. Combining an awareness of breath with an awareness of alignment, relaxation, and resilience can create a powerful meditative base with which to walk through life.
Alignment, relaxation, and resilience are ultimately capable of transforming consciousness itself. The effects of holding in the body are not just limited to the creation of painful physical sensation and restriction of the free flow of the breath. They also create holding and tension in the mind. They fuel the internal monologue and directly support the fearful and limited view of the world that the monologue would like to convince us is an accurate reflection of reality. As the monologue gains a firmer foothold in our consciousness, the body tightens even more.
As you learn more and more to bring the posture of meditation into the activities of your life, the meditative states and goals that your formal sitting practice is designed to lead you to may begin to become more commonplace. Gradually you will come to recognize that the effect of embodying the three primary gestures of the posture of meditation is not just limited to an improvement of the mechanical function of the body. As tension and holding are released from the body, the hard edges of mental tension that manifest in the limited ways in which we view ourselves and the world begin to soften as well. It cannot be otherwise, for just as holding and tension in the body create holding and tension in the mind, so also does the release of physical holding and tension release mental restrictions, contractions, and limitations as well. This relationship will become particularly apparent over time as your ability to embody the posture of meditation becomes increasingly refined. As it does, you will be challenged to let go of many of the limiting beliefs and perceptions with which you may have formally identified yourself. It is simply not possible to enjoy the increased sense of physical well-being and the improvement of physical function generated through the posture of meditation while simultaneously holding on to these limiting beliefs and perceptions. As this refinement occurs you will also begin to realize that the meditative states of awareness that are becoming increasingly common are not exotic or special in any way, but are simply the natural state of a person who is aligned, relaxed, and resilient. Instead of relying on the many beautiful and inspiring descriptions of this natural state that can be found in spiritual literature, trust more and more in the posture, and discover this state for yourself.
As with any skill the posture of meditation requires patient practice if we hope to become proficient in its application. This is what the Buddha meant when he urged his followers to work out their own salvation with diligence. By diligently and patiently bringing as much attention as possible to alignment, relaxation, and resilience in everything we do, we become increasingly skilled in the art of living and dying. Practice patiently, but never with tension. You cannot force the posture of meditation
into existence. You can only allow it to emerge as you keep letting go of whatever restrictions to its manifestation are revealed through your patient inquiry. Ten thousand times a day the posture will burst into awareness. Ten thousand times a day it will become lost again as the former habit patterns of your body and mind reestablish themselves. Over time, however, the long hours of practice begin to pay off, and your former habit patterns begin to weaken and dissolve. New ones will now emerge to fill their place, and these new patterns will be based on the principles of body and mind that the posture of meditation directly supports. And when such a transformation begins to embody itself in the tissues and patterns of your body and mind, you will realize that you have moved much closer to attaining the goal of whatever form of meditation practice you have been fortunate to have brought into your life.
Afterword
ALIGNMENT, relaxation, and resilience are for everybody. Unlike individual sports, which tend to favor certain body shapes and sizes over others, the posture of meditation is available to everyone. It does not matter whether you are tall or short, heavyset or slender. It does not matter how flexible you are. By conscientiously exploring and applying the principles of the posture of meditation, you will gradually become adept in bringing alignment, relaxation, and resilience into your life. There is no ultimately perfect posture that you need to strive to embody. There is only the posture that is appropriate for your particular body, and your body is unlike anybody else’s. The first taste of alignment, relaxation, and resilience will significantly transform your posture and experience. Subsequent tastes will refine that experience, adding subtle dimensions and nuances of sensation that you may have never known about. The posture of meditation is a process, not a goal. The application of the three primary gestures will allow you to experience the insights that are appropriate to your development at this particular moment in time. Benefits begin immediately and continue over time.