Six tips on sitting position
Welcome Entrepreneurs! I'm so glad you're here.
It seems like we just got into the swing of summer and suddenly my kids start school in a week. I'm pretty sure I heard a leaf blower this past weekend. Summer is my favorite season so I'll be sad to see it go, but I'm really looking forward to calling out the colors of the trees with my boys on the way to school. And of course, football. I'm reminded now that every end is a beginning, truly.
As meditation and mindfulness is a significant part of my coaching practice, I'm often asked for meditation tips. Finding myself answering the same questions over and over again, I decided to write a guide to meditation for my clients (startup & VC leaders), and those like them.
This is part three of my series on meditation. If you haven’t already, start with parts one and two below, to provide proper context for this essay.
Sitting position can make an enormous difference to the depth of your meditation and your overall experience. After 12 years of daily meditation, I’ve dialed in an optimal way of sitting that for most people allows for consistently deep, impactful sessions.
1. Use a dedicated space
If your goal is to dive deep into your practice, you shouldn’t skimp on using a dedicated space and getting a proper setup.
First, having a dedicated space lowers the volume of distractions, allowing you to drop into your own experience more quickly and consistently. It’s much easier to see your mind at work when external noises and distractions are at a minimum. The more boring the external setup, the more conducive it is to looking inward.
Second, investing in a proper setup requires you to spend time and money, and the quality of your setup will remind you of that investment each time you sit. There’s a big difference between meditating casually on the couch and sitting precisely on a cushion designed only for that purpose, with a sincere commitment to your own growth. Investing in a proper setup (including, for many, a puja table with photos of loved ones or other reminders of why you practice) reminds you of the gravity and import of your practice each time you sit down.
For seating, I suggest Samadhi Cushions, as my Zen teacher suggested to me. I work with a Gomden and a Zabuton, which I’ve found well suited to my slightly-less-than-average flexibility.
2. Sit with eyes open, facing a blank wall
The idea of Zen monks meditating while facing a blank wall may seem strange to our Western sensibilities (why look at something boring when you could look at THINGS!?!), but they’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so there must be a reason, right? Sure enough.
You meditate with your eyes open because you live with your eyes open. Meditation is like exercise; it’s a practice that trains your mind to perform the practice better. If you want to improve at basketball, you practice basketball, not golf. For the same reason, to develop your ability to stay present to your moment-to-moment experience throughout your waking life (when, presumably, your eyes are open), it’s important to also practice with your eyes open.
“But,” you say, “you just said that the more boring the setting the better. If I meditate with my eyes open, there will be way more distractions because my visual field will be active.”
Right. Which is why you stare at a blank, white wall. No distractions, just a blank, white vista onto which your mind may project your thoughts and patterns.
3. Leave your eyes unfocused, pointed slightly downward of center
Human beings access their inner experience by moving their eyes. Transformational Neurolinguistic Programming folks have mapped how eye position impacts inner experience, which provides instruction on where and how to look during meditation. When a human rests their eyes pointed slightly downward and in the center of their field of vision, they offer their brain the maximum flexibility of experience.
(If you want to learn more about the relationship between our eyes and our emotional experiences, I’ve written a blog post about it, and my teacher has written a book.)
When the eyes are in this spot, the human brain has access to images, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations with which to construct their inner experience, whereas with the eyes directed at any other point in the field of vision, one’s mind has fewer tools at its disposal.
4. Ensure your knees are below your hips
If you do nothing else on this list, give yourself the gift of low knees.
Remaining upright with good posture while sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor puts a tremendous amount of strain on your hips and lower back, too much to truly relax into the session. I cringe remembering how long I tried to grit my teeth and “be with the pain” of sitting this way before giving up and beating myself up for my lack of commitment.
Luckily, there’s an easy fix. When you sit whether with your legs crossed or uncrossed, in lotus, kneeling, or in any other way you choose, ensure your knees are below your hips. Sitting with your knees below your hips creates a comfortable angle for your hips to hinge, and virtually eliminates pain from longer sits. Just put a cushion or blanket under your butt, and sit with ease.
5. Begin with symmetry
We humans think using much more than just the brains in our heads (ever seen a picture of the entire human thinking apparatus?). Our nervous systems gather and send signals from all over our bodies to our brains through our vagus nerves, creating the context in which all logical thinking happens.
Accordingly, noticing our experience through meditation involves not only our thoughts, but also our bodily sensations. Particularly for those intellectually inclined among us (raises hand), it’s easy to become so entranced with our thoughts that we forget we even have bodies. But by taking the time to ensure we’re sitting symmetrically at the beginning of a session, checking that everything feels balanced and that we’re firmly in neutral, we add our physiological sensations to our field of awareness and make it easier to notice subtle physiological shifts throughout the session.
A small shift in the position of our knees, or a tightening of the shoulders or jaw, doesn’t often happen by accident. Noticing these subtle movements can give us valuable data around the structure and patterns of our experience. For example, this is how I realized, with practice, that I reliably experienced a tightness behind my eyes when I was trying to be someone “impressive” and in my lower abdomen when I felt threatened, realizations which opened up entirely new toolsets to work with my experience somatically.
6. Hands have meaning (but I mostly ignore them)
If you study Zen, one of the other factors that people are very serious about is the position of one’s hands. There is actually a taxonomy of specific hand positions (called “mudras”) that correspond with different experiences, which I know some take very seriously. However, my own experience has been that comfort in hand positions is more impactful than any specific mudra, so I’d suggest you let your hands be comfy (subject to the point about symmetry).
Meta-Instruction: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
With any specific instructions, it’s tempting to consider them “the way” and in so doing introduce a sense of attachment, whether conscious or unconscious. In the midst of a sit, attachment is something to notice and let go of, and so it is here as well. If these guidelines feel tight or restrictive, or so important that it seems hard to meditate any other way, let them go.
In building a lifelong meditation practice, the most important thing is, simply, to practice. So anything that gets in the way of that isn’t helping. There’s no better way to kill someone’s blossoming love of music than to mandate piano lessons in a specific room at 9am every morning.
On the other hand, if these instructions feel useful, use them. They’re the result of more than a decade of rigorous experimentation on the best ways to explore and discover my own mind, and I’ve pulled each one from lineages that in some cases go back millenia.
Sure, you can play piano upside down, and it’s still piano. And you can meditate on a plane and it’s still meditation.
But in either case, to progress rapidly, it helps to have proper sitting position.
Things I read this week
One: Links for July (Astral Codex Ten)
For some of my readers ACX is required reading. If you're not already among them, I highly encourage you to check out the monthly links (they are interesting, surprising, wacky, smart, thoughtful...). It is my favorite automated email that shows up in my inbox.
LINK >>
Two: Review: Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery (Sasha's Newsletter)
I've been enjoying Sasha Chapin's writing recently, and especially his review of an obtuse magnum opus(?) about "wayfinding" meditation. My favorite part is the application of the term "technical debt" to refer to the coping strategies and ways of being we develop in response to traumatic lived experience, which I think captures the essence and purpose of that stuff.
LINK >>
Three: Remote, Hybrid or In-Person (AVC)
Many of my clients are figuring out how to manage this decision right now, and I thought Ben Horowitz's take here was instructive:
"People are happier with flexibility around where they work. Companies, teams, and organizations are happier when people are working together."
LINK >>
Four: Sam Harris on the Meaning of life (YouTube)
Sam Harris was asked, on Lex Fridman's podcast, "what is the meaning of life?" and it's worth your time to listen.
LINK >>
Five: Google's CEO's 4 words on how to lead (Inc)
"Reward efforts, not outcomes." That's the bullet point. My ego just liked Sundar backing me up on my essay about Moreyball from back in 2020.
Want to dive deeper?
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