stillness

The speaker talks about the importance of posture and stillness in meditation. They mention that slowly moving exercises like the salutation to the sun can prepare the body for sitting still. They also discuss different approaches to sitting, such as sitting on soft cushions or using the Egyptian posture. The speaker emphasizes the need to find a comfortable posture and not force oneself into a position that causes pain. They mention that with practice, stillness of mind and calmness can be achieved. Hi everyone, I thought today I'd talk a little bit about posture, and we've done this, we've talked about this before, but I think what is useful is to talk about stillness in the posture that you take, and quite often you don't have to start with that. For example, if you were doing the salutation to the sun, it's nice and sunny where I am at the moment, I haven't done this for quite a while, but the salutation to the sun, if it's done very slowly and very carefully and very gradually, it is a good set of exercises, moving exercises that will prepare your body for sitting still. Now people get very obsessed with this still sitting, it's one of the, sometimes it's so rigid, you'll see it particularly in Zen, people are almost terrified of moving, but this is, part of this is to do with the relaxation in the posture. To give you another example, in Sufism, it's not unheard of for people to sit on very soft cushions and to slouch, and to actually fall asleep, and there's other systems where they fall, they're called this drifting, where you go into, this is partly because of, we've talked about asceticism a little bit in the past, in asceticism, the ability to be very still, for a lot of people, seems to involve a great deal of pain and distress and suffering, it's actually quite painful for them to sit still, that means they're not sitting properly, or when I say properly, they're not sitting in a way that is comfortable for them, so it's quite natural to move about a bit, and one of the ways of moving about is something like salutation to the sun, Tai Chi is another system that will enable you to move in a meditative, slow, graceful, stretching way that will allow you eventually to sit still. The Tai Chi people will do sitting meditation, but there's various ways of doing that. Okay, so let's also talk about how you can sit, or even lie, for example if you're in a wheelchair, there is a posture known as the Egyptian posture, where you're sitting in a seat, a chair, with a straight back, so this allows you to sit in a way that is quite comfortable, use a cushion or a pillow behind your back if you need to, the important thing is that you stay awake unless, as I say, you're drifting, drifting is a kind of moving into a sort of dream state, this is part of the problem, this is part of the asceticism within Sufism, they like to stay awake at night and pray and then they go into visionary states, drifting, in which they literally meet up with the various, let's say, the various saintly images or attributes that they've been chanting with or that they've been praying with, alright, so this is a completely different approach and approaches are different, they all work in different ways and I would always recommend a small amount of sitting in a way that is natural or comfortable for you, rather than trying to sit through the pain, like people do this, they insist on sitting in a full lotus when it's just not natural to them, it's not something that they've prepared for, I've done it myself, you know, sitting in a half lotus and then thinking, oh okay, well I can do a full lotus and I could only really, realistically and comfortably do a half lotus for half an hour and I'd have to swap over if it was like an hour meditation, when you're doing a lot of seated meditation in a monastic setting, let us say, which I've done, you do eventually find that you can sit in a full lotus and it's like five minutes, you know, it's like a five minute meditation, the whole hour just goes because you're comfortable in the posture and you're achieving a stillness and stillness, stillness, stillness of mind, stillness of being, calmness, peace, all those qualities, they do arrive with practice, you have to practice, you have to practice, you're not going to get anything for nothing, so that's the trick really, is to find something that works for you, to do it, to learn it and to gain the benefits from it. Okay, that's all from me for today. Bye now.