How To: Find the Correct Meditation Posture

Having a correct posture in meditation can have a significant impact on your ability to focus and stay alert during your practice, and it is one aspect of meditation that is often overlooked. 

There are many different postures that can be used during meditation, but there are a few key elements that are important for all of them. These include:

Sitting upright: One of the most important aspects of meditation posture is sitting upright. If you keep the spine straight, you allow for better breathing and you promote a sense of alertness. If you slouch or hunch over, it can make it harder to focus and can even lead to discomfort or pain. Opening up the chest, rolling the shoulders back and trying to get a slight reverse curve in your lower back all helps. Sitting upright also helps prevent you falling asleep. 

Relaxed but alert: It's important to find a balance between being relaxed and being alert. A light alertness is what you’re after. You want to be comfortable, but not so comfortable that you become drowsy or fall asleep. At the same time, you don't want to be so tense that you feel stressed or uncomfortable. Finding the right balance between relaxation and alertness is key.

Knees below hips: If you can, use a chair or enough cushions to get your hips above your knees. You’ll know you’ve achieved this when your thighs are slanting forwards, not backwards. This helps achieve that lower back curve, which supports the upright-ness.

Get grounded: Another important aspect of posture in meditation is feeling grounded. This means to have a sense of stability. You can achieve a grounded stability by sitting upright, feeling the weight of your body on the cushion or chair and really relaxing or sinking into your out-breath. Sometimes I recommend three exaggerated breaths (the only controlled breaths I’ll ever recommend) at the start of a practice. This helps you settle, connect and have the stresses of the day wash away.

Hand placement: While there is no single ‘right’ way to place your hands during meditation, common positions include placing them on your lap, one inside the other with the palms facing up, or placing them together in your lap with fingers interlaced and thumbs gently touching. Your hands don't need to be in a specific mudra (the symbolic hand gestures you often see) in order to gain the benefits of meditation. A great tip here is to get a light blanket, sarong or lavalava, wrap in around your chest/waist and roll it down to create a bit of a bunch or roll at your belly. This gives you a small shelf to place or tuck your hands behind, which can be excellent for keeping your shoulders back as it stops your hands and arms falling forward. 

In addition to these key elements, there are a few other things to keep in mind when it comes to posture in meditation. For example, you don't have to sit on the floor! If 20 minutes on a chair is much easier for you than 20 minutes on a cushion on the floor, take the chair option. I don’t mind where you do it, just do it. 

Experiment with different options to find what works best for you, but don't worry too much about ‘perfect’ posture. While having good posture is helpful, it's not the most important aspect of meditation. Focus on finding a posture that feels comfortable and allows you to settle into your breath and practice for at least the first half or so. If you have to adjust at some point, just do it. Our western body shapes are often not used to the sitting, maybe we haven’t sat like that since primary school, but just keep going and eventually you’ll get used to it. If you really want to push yourself to eventually levitating in full-lotus, take up yoga as well!

Another technique that works well is kneeling and straddling a pile of cushions or using a meditation stool (see the image above). This allows for that slight inwards cure at the base of your spine and can be quite a comfortable way to sit for a long time. I recommend the blanket around the waist for these postures. 

Personally, I find meditation easiest with my back to a wall and almost only ever go without when I’m on a retreat. A wall definitely helps support your back and keep you upright. 

Unless your body type really requires it, avoid meditating while lying down. It’s much easier to fall asleep, and if you’re sleeping you’re not meditating! 

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What if my legs go numb or my body starts to ache?

There are two schools of thought around this. The traditional school of thought says work with it. A lot of our physical pain is actually psychosomatic. That is, our brain makes it up. This isn’t to say that the pain doesn’t exist fullstop, but our aversion to feeling pain magnifies our initial slightly unpleasant sensation into a very unpleasant sensation. Perhaps your back was starting to feel uncomfortable. We inherently don’t like “uncomfortable”, so the brain magnifies the feelings of discomfort to make you change your position. 

This is essentially a self-protective mechanism. Your brain is trying to protect your body from harm, and better to do it sooner rather than later and make you change your position. The key to working with this type of pain is to observe it without any labels, trying to observe that you have aversion to it. You can read more about this in my article about my 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. 

The second school of thought (which you’re probably going to like better), is that if your pain is so intense that it’s distracting you from your practice, just shift and become comfortable again. This will help. BUT, the key question is: Is the pain distracting you from your practice, or are you looking for a distraction from your practice, using your pain as an excuse not to sit and press deeper? The mind and the ego can do some tricky things when it thinks that its world view is under threat, and meditation is that threat. 

When I spent a weekend practicing with a couple of Theravadan Buddhist monks in Kaeo they had a good rule of thumb regarding pain: The first time you notice the pain, just notice and observe it. Come back to your practice and maybe it will go away. The second time you notice the pain, again, observe it, come back to your practice and your awareness may quell it. The third time you notice it, shift, relieve it. I think this is good advice.