Take a Seat

Intro

This guided meditation practice focuses on posture. If you can’t sit upright due to health issues, this is a good practice for cultivating uplifting mental postures in a pose that isn’t erect. If you’re not upright, you can skip the tidbits here about vertical seated positioning.

You can sit on a cushion or chair. If you’re cross-legged stop and make sure your knees are lower than your hips, otherwise your core muscles are working, and we’d like them to relax. 

An erect posture can help us be focused and alert. A straight spine opens an unobstructed pathway for breath and energy, allowing it to move freely throughout the body. Some people can hold meditation postures longer when they’re upright because it prevents aches in certain places. Sitting with shoulders back and chest open can counteract the effects slumping.

This practice suggests a point of view, a pretty nice one. It’s a mental posture that goes with an upright seated posture. This is different from many of our meditations where we let our mind be. This kind of meditation is more suggestive, so we can, once in a while, creatively glimpse a viewpoint that points us toward our true nature. 

Let’s get started. 

Sit upright and close your eyes.

Press back of hands on your upper thighs to straighten up. This should automatically bring your shoulders down and open your chest, extend your head and neck, tuck your chin, and tuck your tailbone. 

Let that movement inform your pose but don’t stay rigid. We want a balance between effort and ease.

Rest your palms on your thighs or in your lap. 

The purpose here is to be relaxed but alert, and to have an open posture for breathing. 

Let’s practice a relaxed breath, slowing it down a little bit, and breathing into the lower lungs.  You’re in an optimal posture for your breath to spread the most oxygen around to the rest of your body. 

Imagine with every exhale your lungs are distributing fresh oxygen to every little hard-working cell. 

This posture offers us to take our seat.

The idea of taking your seat can be a symbol for several mental postures. 

We are arriving. We’ve landed. We are settling in our home. We’re here and no where else, letting go other what has to be done or accomplished. 

When we take a seat we’re giving ourselves the gift of time, space, and attention. Our valuable resources are resting with us. We are appreciating these gifts by experiencing them. 

We’re establishing a balanced base. We’re not leaning this way and that. We have a symmetrical, harmonious bearing.

Now imagine your skeleton as strong and stable and secure in its position.

And then relax as if your flesh and skin and everything around the skeleton melts. Your body trusts its sound structure and relaxes around its foundation. 

Relax your face and jaw and shoulders. and hands. 

With every exhale let your muscles relax while your inner support stays tall and erect. This is a mental posture to carry all the time: relaxed on the surface, strong in the center. 

Notice how calm yet elevated the posture feels. 

Keep your breath steady and smooth, still relaxed and expanding your lower lungs.

Feel as if you’re a mountain, solid and steady, calm and unaffected by the weather of thoughts and feelings. You’re completely relaxed in your mountain-ness, while firmly holding your space. 

As you would if you gazed up at a huge, majestic mountain, sense a feeling of dignity or respect in your posture. Hold in esteem your body, mind, energy and presence. See the same grandeur and magnificence of a great mountain. 

Breathe in a sense of gratitude, for the felt sense of your body, for the energetic resonance of the posture, for the miracle of every breath you take, for your awareness of it all. Awareness permeates and is the essence of this posture, and for every posture you’re ever in. Breathe into a sense of warm appreciation for this blessing of life as an aware being.

Feel a sense of honoring. Your open posture implies a sense of inner power and higher power.  Our true nature, free from conditioning, is unbound consciousness. Even if we can’t grasp this big idea, we can have a felt sense of wonder and honoring that there is much more to us than we think. Honor this mystery.

Feel a sense of sacredness. Breathe into a solemn show of reverence for the time you’re taking here, this space you’ve created, for the energetic happening that’s taking place. You’ve created a little divine sanctuary, a space of peace and devotion. Forget ideas of how worship is supposed to feel and let this little capsule of time be your outpost of sacred tranquility. 

As you feel the vibrancy of this practice, recognize that this state of gratitude, reverence, and wonder is completely natural. This richness  is inherent in our natural presence, and underlies all the ups and downs of what we call everyday life. This resonance is our normal resting state, free of conditioning. Feel a sense of coming home to your natural essence. 

Creating this space helps us see that with posture of awareness and presence, if we surrender to the essence of it, there is joy. There is the calm assuredness of well-being. A permeating sense of freedom and joy.

Now let go of trying to have any particular experience or state. Relax in the assuredness that however your presence is experiencing this moment, it is exactly as it should be.

Rest exactly as you find yourself now. 

You can keep sitting if you like.