This post want to go back to the basics and begin again. Meditation is not something one can do once or twice and gain benefit. You must make a committment to start a meditation practice and to continue it long term.
We live in a culture of noise and distraction. The more we experience noise and distraction the more we need to meditate and to do so on a regular basis. There are more profound ways to meditate and to practice sitting, but this, again, is geared toward those who are beginners.
When you decided to try meditation, just sitting, relaxing and breathing is a way that you can become familiar with the very basic action one takes when starting a meditation program. When you sit, do the best you can at first. Do not stress yourself by trying to sit “correctly!” Just sit. As you are seated on a chair relax as much as you can. I am convinced that many of us are not that familiar with relaxation and we really don’t know if whether or not we are relaxing. Being relaxed is to let you body kind of “hang” there without the physical stress and attention that you have to have when you are sitting at a desk or working on an assembly line.
One should not slouch, nor should on compromise good posture, but one should (the best way the can) relax. Many people have back issue or pain in their body. If you do a kind of sitting that causes pain you will not be able to meditate correctly and your focus will be on the pain or the body part that hurts instead of on the object of meditation. So, in the very first meditation class that I teach to groups or individuals we each decided how we can best relax while we sit. I want to clarify that sitting with ones legs elevated is not necessarily conducive to successful meditation, but if that is actually all you can do, please do not stress over it.
The next aspect of meditating is breathing. When we sit and relax and we breathe, the breath should be normal, neither too shallow nor too deep. You see, this is the beauty of meditation. Everyone is on the same level as beginners and even those who are considered to be meditation masters have to go back again and again to the basics. It is the basics that one must learn to do correctly and do consistantly in order to be successful in meditation.
The practice I call Sit, Relax and Breath is not meditation. It is a way of preparing an individual or a group to sit in meditation. I will be posting more about how to sit, relax and breath and move on to basic meditation in future posts.
James
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