You can meditate in any position you like
— recognition of your true nature is not dependent on any particular thing including your body’s posture.
However, there are certain measures one can take to invite more stillness into the meditation, and thus yield better results.
If there is any one guideline concerning your meditation posture, I would say it is to keep your spine straight.
This is especially true if you want to incorporate your body into the practice, and do some work there like raising the consciousness of your body, or healing yourself.
In this post I want to give you the general idea of how to align your body during meditation, and also give you some specific details, which you may apply to your liking.
So for starters, anything is fine: you can always contemplate your true nature, because it is only dependent on your consciousness, which itself is prior to the body even.
This means you can meditate wherever you are and under any circumstances, because the truth is in every single situation.
There is not one situation that doesn’t have the truth in it, if you look honestly enough, because you are the truth.
When I first started out meditating I would get irritated, if the circumstances weren’t “perfect” to support my meditation. But if you’re annoyed by anything, then you’re not really meditating.
You’ll get that eventually.
By the time it happens you will have developed a deep love for meditation, because it reconnects you with your essence.
If you want to go deeper during meditation, for which longer periods of stillness are often necessary, I suggest you find a position in which you can be comfortable and keep your spine straight.
This means either lying on your back, sitting up straight, or standing.
You will notice that just the act of observing the alignment of your spine in your body is already sort of meditative. That is because your body is not your mind, and so focusing on the body quietens the mind.
This form of meditation is one of the first meditations I teach, because it is readily accessible even to the most difficult cases. This practice is called apperception: perceiving within the body.
Now let’s get on with proper body posture during meditation.
The tongue
Your tongue should always rest on the roof your mouth.
Always. I do it even when I sleep.
This is important, because there is a large energy cycle running through your body, which comes down the front channel, where it passes from the mid-eyebrow point, the 3rd eye, to the throat, chest, solar plexus and below the navel area.
This passage runs through your tongue, but also through your teeth and jaws.
If the tongue is not connect to the roof of the mouth, which newborn children do naturally by themselves, you inhibit this flow.
Eventually this practice is forgotten in most people, and society has practically no knowledge of it, so it isn’t encouraged. A tragedy, but that is how it is on this Earth.
The way to do it is to have the bulk of your tongue resting in this position — from the back of your front teeth all the way across the palate and to the throat.
When you do this, you will notice the soft area behind your chin being lifted up, effectively pronouncing your jaw line.
This is how it ought to be. Good tongue posture naturally makes your more attractive, because attractiveness is a sign of health.
In the beginning you might overdo this practice, and you might feel it takes a lot of effort to do it, but eventually it will be natural and effortless.
You will find your balance there.
During meditation you can start feeling the energy run through this segment, where you will also notice the tip of the tongue has a bit of a different feel to it than the chunk of it.
You will feel pulsations there, and it tastes almost like a battery, because the life force, which is bio-energy, is running through this narrow passage between the palate and your tongue.
With good practice clear saliva will gather all by itself, which is good to swallow to help rejuvenate your entire body.
But in the end the body is not too important, because it dies anyway.
What is important is that you know what you are.
The breath
Breath should always be through your nose (in & out).
Mouth-breathing is disturbing to your body and unhealthy.
Breathe into the diaphragm or belly. Do not use your chest. Be easy.
Take two or three deep breaths to get rid of some immediate tension inside your body that you have accumulated throughout the day.
Selected positions
Now I’d like to talk about a few selected positions, which I feel work quite well in supporting your meditation. These positions are stable and comfortable for longer periods of time without much effort.
Lotus position
We start with the mention of the popular lotus position.
There is a reason why so many people adopt this seat independently from each other: It has a tangible effect.
Sitting down like this — cross-legged, your hands resting on one another — you create an energy field around your body, which supports your stillness.
It is almost like an energy sphere shielding you from outside influences.
In this position you become your own little ecosystem, or universe.
The only downside: This position is hard to maintain for many people, because we’re all so inflexible due to culture and civilization.
I have to point out that it isn’t at all necessary that you do this posture, because as I said in the beginning, your body doesn’t really matter. Any discomfort you feel really comes from your mind. Your body will move spontaneously without you having to think about it, if there is need for it.
But anyway, try it, and see for yourself.
When it gets too much, switch to a more comfortable position.
There are many ways you can do the lotus position:
Left leg on right leg, or vice versa. Hands grasping each other in various ways. Just find what works for you.
I tend to switch legs from time to time due to comfort reasons (my chair is not well cushioned, which I like for other reasons), andI generally have my right hand sort of holding my left hand, with palms facing up. I don’t touch the thumbs together, Instead, I have them just sit comfortably and silently with the rest of the hand.
Sitting on a chair
Sitting on a chair might be your go to position for the most part.
Here is how I like to do it:
I sit on the edge of the chair with my bodyweight resting on the ischium of the pelvis (the sitting bone), and my testicles (sorry ladies) hanging over the edge of the chair (not squished against the chair like sitting at the far back of the chair would result in. as a side note: your testicles shouldn’t be very low hanging, because that is a sign of bad health and low virility.), feet planted on the ground and hands grasping each other.
This position is more in touch with the Earth, which means you are less your own of an ecosystem there.
Experiment to your liking.
Lying on your back
I like to lie on a firm surface when doing meditation practice while lying down, certainly not on a mattress! Remember straight spine?
The important point in lying down is not to fall asleep. Any sense of tiredness is also watched and need not be identified with. If not identified with, sleep will not occur.
As you continue practice, you will discover your own almost sacred body positions.
It is a truth that specific body positions have exceptionally good energy flow, where if you moved a part of your body even a little bit the energy flow would be greatly disrupted.
This is why many saints and yogis do weird things with their fingers. It is because of certain energy flows, which support different states of consciousness.
You will get to know this by yourself with practice.
The beautiful thing about meditation that everything is revealed to you, if only you are still enough to perceive it.
General directions
This is true for all positions:
Let the flesh fall and keep your bone structure upright and the head erect. Breathe gently through the nose. Eyes closed or eyes open doesn’t really matter, but for the most part I recommend eyes closed.
This is really it — no magic about it.
I hope you enjoyed this little write-up and were able to gather a clearer picture on the importance of your meditation posture.
If you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram.
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