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    Sitting: The Physical Art of Meditation
    Sitting: The Physical Art of Meditation
    Sitting: The Physical Art of Meditation
    Ebook170 pages2 hours

    Sitting: The Physical Art of Meditation

    By Erika Berland

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    About this ebook

    “Sitting on a meditation cushion sounds like it should be easy, but for many of us it is a journey of aches and pains. Fortunately, there are compassionate and articulate guides, such as Erika Berland, who have deeply immersed themselves in the art of sitting. Her book is a rich blend of traditions, so there is a wide variety of exercises to choose from. I invite you to engage these teachings as a way to wake up your life with good posture and to inspire your posture with a good heart.”
    —From the foreword by Ashe Acharya John Rockwell

    “This book is for anyone who wants to sit with ease, presence, and vitality. If you are just beginning your search into quiet sitting, Erika offers basic guidelines to direct you on your path. If you are already immersed in the deep practice of contemplative sitting, she opens the way to subtleties of consciousness through embodying your body systems. This is a gem of a book.”
    —Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, developer of Body-Mind Centering®

    “Sitting” is a handbook for deepening your experience of the ancient posture of sitting meditation. Drawing on research in somatic education and experiential anatomy, many guided exercises offer you imagery you can use to release tension and stress, contemplations to increase your body awareness, tips for making gravity work for you rather than against you, physical and energetic methods for relating with the systems in your body, and much more—including ways to bring your new awareness into daily life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherErika Berland
    Release dateJan 23, 2017
    ISBN9780998587615
    Sitting: The Physical Art of Meditation
    Author

    Erika Berland

    Erika Berland has been guiding meditators for more than 25 years. An early student of Chögyam Trungpa, she is a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage. A pioneer in somatic movement education, she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Theater: Contemporary Performance program at Naropa University, where she integrates meditation practice and view with performance techniques.

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      Book preview

      Sitting - Erika Berland

      Sitting

      The Physical Art of Meditation

      Erika Berland

      Copyright 2017 by Erika Berland

      Illustrations Copyright 2017 by Lydia Kegler

      Somatic Performer Press, LLC

      Boulder, CO

      All rights reserved. No material from this book may be reproduced without permission from the author.

      Print ISBN 978-0-9985876-0-8

      Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9985876-1-5

      All rights reserved.

      Smashwords Edition

      Licensing Notes

      This e-book is licensed for your personal use and enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please visit Smashwords.com and purchase a copy for yourself. Thank you for respecting this author’s work.

      E-Book by e-book-design.com

      For my teachers:

      Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

      Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

      and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

      Contents

      Foreword by Ashe Acharya John Rockwell

      Introduction

      Part One: The Ancient Wisdom of Meditation Meets Somatic Education

      One – The Somatic Approach

      Two – Experiential Anatomy and Embodiment

      Three – How to Use This Book

      Four – Discovering Support

      Part Two: The Path of Guided Practice

      Five – Making Friends with Gravity

      Six – Dynamic Structure: Our Skeleton

      Seven – Soft Underbelly: Our Organs

      Eight – Exquisite Sensitivity: Our Nervous System

      Nine – Energetic Essence: Our Endocrine Glands

      Ten – Going with the Flow: Our Fluids

      Eleven – The Life Force: Our Breath

      Part Three: Mindfulness of Body in Everyday Life

      Twelve – Beyond the Physical Art of Sitting

      Thirteen – The Four Postures of Meditation

      Fourteen – Frequently Asked Questions

      Fifteen – Basic Meditation Instruction

      Parting Thoughts

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Further Reading

      About the Author

      Exercises

      Yielding

      Positive Supporting Reflexes

      Balance the Curves of Your Spine

      Establishing Your Seat

      Shoulder Girdle and Rib Cage Alignment

      Align Your Skull on Your Spine

      Connect to Your Organ Body

      Release the Kidneys and Lower Back

      Energize Your Lungs

      Heart and Hands

      Breathe into the Heart

      Bring Awareness to the Sensory-Motor Loop

      Eye Gaze

      Turn on the Glands

      Fluid Ground

      Cellular Breathing

      Activate Your Thoracic Diaphragm

      Engage Your Pelvic Diaphragm

      Foreword by Ashe Acharya John Rockwell

      The simplest things are the hardest to do. Sitting on a meditation cushion sounds like it should be easy, but for many of us it is a journey of aches and pains. We discover that we do not know how to sit properly, much less sit still! This is a humbling discovery and the beginning of making friends with our body.

      Fortunately, there are compassionate and articulate guides, such as Erika Berland, who have deeply immersed themselves in the art of sitting. Erika comes from excellent lineages of body-mind wisdom with such teachers as Chögyam Trungpa, Sakyong Mipham, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Irene Dowd, and many others. Even more importantly, she is a practitioner who has been on this path herself for many years. So, she writes from her own experience.

      In the same way, this is a source book for you to work and play with. It is designed to empower you to explore your experience of body-mind harmony in your own way. Her book is a rich blend of traditions, so there is a wide variety of exercises to choose from. I invite you to engage these teachings to wake up your life with good posture and to inspire your posture with a good heart.

      —Ashe Acharya John Rockwell

      Introduction

      "If you can raise good posture in your head and shoulders, then regardless of your living situation, you will feel a sense of joy."

      —Chögyam Trungpa

      When I was in my early twenties, I sat my first month-long meditation retreat. Because I was a professional dancer, I thought sitting cross-legged with an upright posture for days on end would be a piece of cake. After a week or so, I was in agony. Every part of my body hurt that could hurt. I remember thinking, I’ll never dance again!

      At the end of every sitting-meditation session, we were encouraged to wander off and explore the countryside for a short break and, strangely, I found that my body felt just fine. I realized that I was confronting and shedding years of habitual holding in my body, plus adding tension and stress by trying to be the perfect meditator with perfect posture. Ever since, I have been working with the posture of meditation as a practice of deep bodywork and psychophysical transformation—a practice that continues to alter my perceptions of who I am.

      At the core of this guide to the posture of meditation are practical, experiential exercises and techniques that you can continue to work with over many months and years. You are invited to integrate the basic principles into your practice, explore what is most effective, and tweak or alter the instructions to best support the changing state of your body and mind. For more than twenty-five years, I have been giving meditation instruction in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and engaging with students at all levels of experience, from brand-new meditators to the old dogs with decades of experience. For many meditators, specific and detailed instruction in the sitting posture of meditation has often made the difference between the struggle to conform to an ideal posture and the ability to relax into the posture as a perfect expression of joy and freedom.

      Implicit in the many Eastern traditions that emphasize meditation is the centrality of the body to the meditative journey and the power of posture to shape the mind. Years ago, I had a Peanuts cartoon pinned up on my studio door. In the cartoon, Charlie Brown stands with slumped shoulders, looking down at the ground while trying to explain to Lucy why he can’t stand up straight. Finally, he says, If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you have to stand like this. While we might not be as aware of the effects of our postural stance on our state of mind as Charlie Brown, it’s easy to recognize how our body language, gestures, and posture impact our perceptions of ourselves.

      Mindfulness-awareness practices can permeate our physical tissues down to the cellular level with awareness and presence. Through meditation, we can actually alter our physical karma. And by adding a simple anatomically based instruction, such as finding the proper balance of the skull on the spine, we can enhance the body-mind integration associated with meditation, relieving physical pain as well as mental holding and distress.

      For meditators, it is common to experience a degree of physical discomfort at some point along the meditation journey. The posture of meditation can be challenging for advanced meditators as well as beginners. When we slow down enough to notice how we feel in our body and mind, our sensitivity is naturally heightened. We might notice all the extra tension we are holding in our shoulders or the uncomfortable feeling in our gut. It can be a bit like anesthesia wearing off after surgery—areas of our body that were relatively numb begin to awaken. Sometimes these new sensations can be experienced as discomfort or even pain. Regardless of how long we’ve been meditating, if we lack a sense of body awareness it is much more difficult to know how to relieve physical discomfort or change a debilitating posture.

      The title of a well-known book on meditation by Sakyong Mipham states that the purpose of meditation is turning the mind into an ally and the same can be said for the body.[1] Turning our body into an ally or friend not only lessens the fear and judgment of our bodies that is so often a part of our inner dialogue, it also gives us the tools and awareness to shift habitual patterns of body and mind.

      My hope is that the guided instructions in this book can be used in an exploratory way, not so much to fix every physical problem, but to discover a deeper sense of body-mind synchronization through inquiry and mindfulness that will benefit your meditation practice altogether.

      Part One

      The Ancient Wisdom of Meditation Meets Somatic Education

      One

      The Somatic Approach

      Somatics is a new field of study and research that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, unlike the meditative tradition that has been developing over thousands of years—yet both disciplines are closely related in their emphasis on personal experience and a shared view of the relationship of body and mind. Philosophers, bodyworkers, movement educators, and artists were the first to formulate many of the techniques and practices of the new field.[2] Philosopher and teacher Thomas Hanna coined the word somatic in 1976 to refer to the body as the experienced or conscious body, in contrast to the objective, mechanistic view of the body as inherently separate from the mind and awareness.[3]

      The somatic methods that I have found most effective in working with the posture of meditation are primarily based on the practices and techniques developed by pioneering somatic educator Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and The School for Body-Mind Centering .[4] I first met Bonnie in 1981 at a movement workshop in Boulder, Colorado. We spent two days rolling around, crawling, playing, resting, and investigating our bodies and the environment with all our senses. What became evident to me during the workshop was Bonnie’s almost uncanny ability to weave physiological and anatomical information with profound instructions on the mind’s ability to access the body’s wisdom and intelligence directly. The experience was revelatory.

      A few years after that initial experience, I had another life-changing experience when I attended a workshop that Bonnie taught as part of a festival celebrating the Dalai Lama’s visit to the United States. Called The Physical Art of Sitting, Bonnie introduced embodied maps of the body as

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