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I have a few questions about vipissana meditation posture. I started practicing meditation when I became interested in Buddhism almost a decade ago, but have rarely practiced in the past 5 years. I have started practicing again, but I am having a lot of trouble with my posture. I have weird knees, I could never sit cross-legged as a kid, and would actually sit the opposite way when I was really young, with my legs folded towards the outside of my thighs. Even now sitting in cross-legged is uncomfortable at best. Both my knees are at least a foot above the ground, and I feel very unsteady if I'm not pressing my back firmly against a wall when I sit that way. And if I do that I kind of have to push out against my knees/ankles to maintain a straight back posture. I also have extremely tight hip flexors. I'm also about 6'4, and while I have decent posture standing, I feel like everything about my physical person is very unsuited to meditation postures. How should I go about acclimating my body? I know the answer is "just practice", but if I try and meditate not leaning against a wall I can only go a few minutes before my back aches and it breaks my concentration deeply. I have typically been meditating on a sort of futon with a soft back, and I have been using that for support, but I don't want to rely on that forever.
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Jul 3, 2017 13:33
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:41 |
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SpaceCadetBob posted:Perhaps you should try sitting in the Seiza position on a short stool like one of these? I used to practice Aikido, which required a lot of Seiza, so I can do it but I feel that it is less stable than sitting cross legged. Sitting Seiza always felt more natural to me than cross-legged, but it becomes very painful after just a few minutes, especially in my thigh muscles. I've never tried a bench though, maybe I'll look into one. Paramemetic posted:Posture is important but not that important. One thing you mentioned, though, is your knees being up in the air. That's going to put a lot of strain on your hips and isn't "proper" anyhow. You should sit on a cushion such that your knees are on the groundYou want to create a very stable base with a triangle where your body is resting on the ground on three points with the knees and butt. Could you explain what you mean by this further? Even if I sit on a raised cushion and have my legs in contact with the floor in front of it, I'm nowhere near being able to touch my knees to the ground. The only way I can sit cross-legged is with my right foot under my left calf, and my left foot out a little further with the heel resting under my shin. In this position it isn't even possible for my knees to connect with the ground because if I pushed them down with more force (which at this point I could only do for maybe a minute, and that would push me into real knee/hip pain) they would just be mashing into my feet. I would very much prefer to practice sitting as opposed to a chair or walking. I used to do yoga, but I don't have access to a class or teacher and I always get burnt out doing it alone.
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Jul 3, 2017 14:09
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I'm basically doing the Quarter Lotus position, as far as the feet are concerned. At the moment I don't have any sort of cushion. I meditate on a futon, and it's certainly much lower than the one the man is using in 6. I can double-fold it though, and that would make it roughly twice as high. I will try that next time and put a towel under my feet and see if that helps. I'm moving to a new country in a few weeks though and I have very limited baggage space, so I don't want to order anything I'll have to transport until then, but I will definitely look for a proper cushion. I'm interested in the Seiza bench because when I practiced Aikido I actually found the position of Seiza to be comfortable, it was just that my muscles were very tight and I usually sat on tatami mats, which are not soft. My only question with that is what to do with your hands while using a bench? Having your thighs slope down and away makes it seem like your hands would slide away from you in a typical posture, which would not be good.
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Jul 3, 2017 14:23
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Can anyone expound on the procedural differences and practical purposes between Vipassana and Zazen? When I first started meditating I was very against the Zen tradition (for reasons I can't even remember now) and never looked into it at all. Reading about it recently a lot of people are saying "Purpose of both is the same, Zazen focuses more on a posture and typically has shorter meditation sessions".
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Jul 4, 2017 08:04
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Here's something I've been thinking about for a while, and I'm sure it's been touched on in the thread somewhere but I haven't read through it fully in a while. Buddhism denies the existence of an eternal soul, so how does is this reconciled with reincarnation? I understand the concept of changing forms when your current body dies, but if there's no soul then doesn't your body just become spread out as it is broken down/eaten/changed into other parts of the universe? I've heard the metaphor of the river, where the river you see is always the same river yet it changes from moment to moment, but that doesn't make sense if the river is also the grass and the sky and the rocks and the trees around it, because then everything is just everything. If my body dies, and my consciousness is either ended or broken up into a million fragments, some of which end up as living creatures or minerals or anything else, then how exactly can I be reincarnated into one new form? Aren't I all of those those?
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Jul 9, 2018 22:17
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Escape Addict posted:Yeah, I guess so. Like reality is God playing The Sims, sorta. Or like how René Descartes concludes he can't tell if we're all in a dream? That idea can seem a little scary, and people often think of this world as a hell. Here's a short story by Andy Weird entitled "The Egg" that touches on the themes you talk about. http://highexistence.com/images/view/the-egg-by-andy-weir/
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Jul 30, 2018 22:42
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I picked up a few of the books suggested in this thread, The Wisdom of Insecurity and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I wasn't a huge fan of the the Alan Watts book, it felt as though somehow it was too basic for how long I've been involved in Buddhism (although admittedly I have next to known academic background) but also too erudite. I'll give it some time to simmer and then go back and read it again to see how I feel. I just started on Living and Dying, and I'm enjoying it a lot more. Something I've been thinking about is how the nature of the modern world is so wildly different from even a few hundred years ago. Sogyal Rinpoche points out that in the modern world very few of us can go without spending half our waking life working, and that we can't really afford to spend our life in meditation attempting to reach enlightenment. That being the case, and considering how few people in the history of humanity have reached enlightenment, how can we possibly expect to be liberated even over numerous lifetimes, assuming that this modern life will continue or even accelerate?
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Aug 6, 2018 20:39
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I don't exactly understand the cosmology, because it seemed like being reborn into the realm of gods was a Not Great Thing because gods just hang around feeling pleasure all the time and get attached and will never reach Enlightenment? So how can a human get there at all? For that matter, how exactly do you go from Animal > Human? If animals are just base creatures how can they acquire good karma at all? At least hungry ghosts just get to time-out of their demerits eventually.
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Aug 7, 2018 04:12
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Given that humanity has progressed to a point where we could realistically end our own existence as a species, either directly through something like nuclear war or indirectly like through possible climate change destroying the habitability of the planet, what is the Buddhist line of thought on working to prevent that? From what I understand, the prime reason for not ending another's life, specifically human life, is because you deny that being the potential for enlightenment. But if there was a reasonable degree of certainty that an individual or group of humans were about to push the proverbial Big Red Button, would one be justified in working against that because if there's no humans, there's no chance at Enlightenment (at least for a while, assuming there's life elsewhere)?
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Nov 19, 2018 23:05
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Can anyone recommend me an introductory text on Pure Land Buddhism?
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Jan 19, 2019 20:59
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Anyone read any of Brad Warner's stuff? I have a friend who is huge into Punk/Thrash/Metal/Whatever kind of music, and we had a long conversation about Buddhism and he recommended me to read his stuff.
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Jun 27, 2019 15:55
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I would like to read some of the “canon” of Buddhism, where should I start?
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Jan 24, 2020 03:34
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Funnily enough, that is the only official Buddhist text I have ever read. I've had a small pocket copy in my bag since college. Maybe I'll just stick to that.
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Jan 27, 2020 17:28
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:41 |
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Paramemetic, you are so unbelievably good at explaining these concepts in an easy to digest way.
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Feb 13, 2020 06:20
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