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A Discussion of Posture and Kinhin - A Somatic Practitioner’s Perspective. - by Hokaku Jeffrey Maitland.
As Sokai said, today will be a little bit of an experiment. If it’s successful, what we hope for all of you is that by looking at posture and breathing and kinhin in this way you will be able to deepen your practice a little bit.
Whether you’ve been sitting thirty days or thirty years, the one thing you consistently notice is that your body is always in the way, or so it seems, especially in the beginning. As you engage in zazen you may be thinking: my knee hurts... my foot’s asleep...my back hurts... my mind is racing... my breath isn’t into my belly ..my wife left me and I have hemorrhoids...oh, this is just too hard for me. What you come back to is the fact that you have, at least initially, a body. Over and over again as you sit in zazen you are brought back to the fact that you have this body.
So it’s very important to understand how Zen practice deals with this body that we are. True, so much of what we struggle with in our bodies during zazen is deeply rooted in our psyche, in our mistaken beliefs, in our misery, in our betrayals, in our past. But this struggle takes place in no other place or form of existence other than the one in which we are, right here, right now. It doesn’t take place anywhere else. Zen practice engages all of what we are as the whole of what we are right where we are, right now.
Have you also noticed how your aches and pains and miseries change from moment to moment, from sesshin to sesshin, from meditation to meditation? Sometimes your feet are falling asleep, sometimes they’re not falling asleep, sometimes your back hurts, the next sitting your back feels wonderful; one sitting you are sad and the next you are happy. Your experience of your body is always changing and shifting. So what I’d like to do is work a little bit with your struggles around your posture, your breathing, and your sitting in the hopes that our experiment will allow you to deepen your Zen practice.
What I’d like you to do now is get into zazen posture for a moment. Now just feel how you’re sitting, just notice it. Feel all the way through your body. Check your back, feel your knees, feel your breathing. Where is your breath? Is it in your chest ? Can you bring your breath easily, without effort, to your belly? Do you feel strain, pain, difficulty anywhere?
Now, take a full breath and feel how it behaves. Don’t just breathe into your belly as you do in zazen, but take a full breath. The next thing I want you to do is collapse. Let go of your posture completely. If this was the worst day of zazen in your life and you feel as if you just cannot manage sitting anymore, where would you be? Do you know the kind of experience I am talking about? Imagine you are at the end of three intensely difficult days of sitting, it feels like you can’t endure it anymore, it takes everything you have to just approximate sitting straight, and you just want to collapse - go to that place. Feel that. Again, just feel through your entire body. Take a full breath in that position. Feel your breath through your entire body. Now, go back to your best zazen posture. Take a full breath in that posture. Feel that. As you now sit in your best zazen posture notice how you are struggling with finding the appropriate place for your body. Remember how when the struggle overwhelms you and you get exhausted, your body collapses and...well you already know where that goes. These are the two extremes you struggle with when you sit. Now the idea in zazen is to allow your practice to bring your body to where it belongs. After you’ve been sitting for a while you’ll have these moments when your body just goes to where it belongs, there’s no pain, there’s no difficulty, everything is just fine and perfect as it is. In those moments you don’t struggle with your body, you don’t struggle with your thinking. But until that happens you are stuck with imitating what you think is your best posture. In your attempt to imitate this sitting posture you willfully try to maintain it until something else takes over. I don’t want to give you some ideal picture of how to sit that you must try to measure up to. I want to give you a way to feel into a sitting posture that is not a matter of forcing your body to conform to some ideal posture. So as your sitting here just feel what you’re doing to make your posture happen. When you take a breath does it go into your belly or do you feel some difficulty getting through your solar plexus?
Now collapse a little bit, just a little bit, let go of your posture a bit.
Imagine that you’ve got two wheels on each side of your pelvis. Feel how you can roll or turn your pelvis forward on these wheels. Feel how you can roll your pelvis backwards on these wheels. Notice the upper half of your body. If you turn your pelvis backward on your wheels, you collapse. (See Figure at left. Rolling pelvis backward)
Now try turning your pelvis forward and backward on your wheels. Don’t worry about the position of your head, your neck, your chest, just roll your pelvis back and then slowly roll it forward. As you roll it forward you will notice that your chest immediately comes up. Do you feel that? Now roll it back, and notice how your chest collapses. Now roll it forward again. This time when you roll your pelvis forward on your wheels, notice again how your chest rises by itself, and then, in that posture, take a breath. Full breath... feel it...and now collapse.
Now forget what I just told you and go back to your old way of finding your best posture, what you did before I introduced rolling your pelvis forward and backward on your wheels. Now that you are in your version of the correct posture, take a full breath. Do you notice how your breath is more restricted in your best posture than it was when you rolled your pelvis forward on your wheels? Do you remember how if you just roll your pelvis forward on your wheels, your chest comes up to where it naturally belongs, you naturally create a curve in your low back, and your breathing is easy? Try that again, let go of your best posture. Now roll your pelvis forward on your wheels, take a full breath, and feel how much easier it is. A good indicator for determining if you are using too much effort to maintain your posture or if you are too collapsed is to notice how full breath feels. When you come up to the sitting position you think is right for you, take a full breath and notice whether it is restricted or easy.
So drop trying to manage your posture by pulling your chest up. Instead just collapse a bit, and then roll your pelvis forward again. By the way, for those of you who have trouble with the cross-legged position it is often helpful to get a thicker cushion under your butt. This is generally true for most people: the further away from the full lotus position you are the higher your cushions need to be, especially in the beginning. So if you are having trouble managing the cross-legged position, then experiment with putting some extra cushions under your butt, and then try rolling your pelvis forward.
Once you get your pelvis rolled forward like this, then let your eyes come to where the horizon would be if you were standing up. And that will give you sense of where your head belongs. Now just lower your eyes so you’re looking at the floor about three feet in front of you. In place of trying to put your head on straight, this eyes-on-the-horizon technique will help you sense more easily where your head belongs.
The other thing that’s useful to feel as you roll your pelvis forward is how your weight is distributed along the underside of your butt. You want to feel your weight is distributed equally. So try this - roll your pelvis forward to find your sitting position and then just lean forward. Just rock your whole body forward and then rock your whole body back...Now as you lean forward and back, feel how your weight distributes itself along the underside of your butt. As you lean forward, you will feel your weight in front of your sitting bones. As you lean backward, you will feel your weight behind your sitting bones. Continue rocking back and forth. Now make your rocking less and less and less until you find that place where the weight is distributed equally through your butt so you’re not back on your sitting bones or too forward of them. Just feel how your weight is equally distributed through the underside of your butt.
(Illustrations by Christina Kelley)
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Do you see how your thorax collapses and how you lose the curve in your low back? If you now turn forward on your wheels in the other direction, do you see how your chest rises and you gain more of a curve in your low back? (See Figure at right. Rolling pelvis forward)
More than likely, what some of you have been doing is actually hauling your chest up. So take a look at me for a second. When you’re finding your posture, probably what you’re doing is something like this (demonstrates pulling his sternum up.) Right? When you try to manage your posture by bringing your chest up your low back shortens, and the motion of your diaphragm gets restricted. (See Figure at left. Sternum up, back shortens).
When you simply roll your pelvis forward your chest arises naturally without you putting effort into bringing it up and your diaphragm works without restriction. That is why it’s easier for you to take a breath.