Meditation
Let’s figure out how to sit to help avoid spinal compression!
Although non-judgement and non-striving are helpful attitudes during meditation, it’s important to protect the joints that make up our spines from injury.
When we sit for a while with a flattened, rounded, or hyperextended lower back, we’re compressing our intervertebral disks, and these disks can be squeezed out of place. We call this a herniation. So it’s not just a car accident, a fall or another traumatic injury that can cause our disks to slip or rupture, but also prolonged sitting out of neutral.
When sitting in a slumped position – here our ASIS and pubic bone are not vertically aligned, but the pubic bone is forward of your anatomical neutral – those of us who tend to experience lower back pain, are more likely to experience discomfort.
That’s why it’s important to stop our non-judgement and non-striving at our alignment. We need to carefully examine how we’ve set our bones up if we intend to sit for a prolonged amount of time.
To find your neutral sitting posture, try palpitating your pelvic bones. We need to understand where these bones are in our bodies to line them up.
First find your ASIS. Then find your pubic bone (see tutorial below). Now try to line them up, give or take a few degrees, so you’re sitting smack on top of your sit bones. If you have trouble feeling your sit bones under your seat, you can pull your bum cheeks apart, and sit back down again, repeating this until you get an internal sense of where those important landmarks are.
It can be helpful to practice this against a wall. If, like many of us, you have tight hip flexors (front of the hip joint), you might want to swap sitting meditations for standing-against-a-wall meditations. Sitting meditations, dare I say, can promote tight hip flexors just like sitting at a desk in your office, so even if you don’t have hip, back and neck discomfort now, it would still be wise to opt for standing-against-a-wall meditations.
If you do try standing-against-a-wall meditations, you’d actually get great feedback as to the alignment of your thoracic spine / ribcage, cervical spine, and skull.
You could then try to bring your pelvis into neutral, then align the back of the sacrum, ribcage and skull.
When aligning your thoracic spine and rib cage, you want to watch for popping ribs. That’s when your lower thoracic spine is hyperextended, and your lower ribs are noticeably forward – not against the wall.
Then asses your skull. Check out that your chin isn’t tucking into your chest or stretching up to the ceiling. That can bring tension to the front or the back of the neck.
To find your neutral skull position, you can try nodding your head up and down, and finding a comfortable mid range. I find that many people think that a tucked chin in neutral, when they’re in fact contracting the muscles at the front of their necks.
It’s also important to hold our shoulders in a somewhat neutral position if we’re staying put without moving for meditations. If you hold your shoulders in a rounded forward position, you can shorten your pecs and chest muscles over time, and promote postural changes. That is, your spine can shift away from the alignment that you were designed to move through the world with (see buttons below).
Check out the Pilates tutorials below to figure out how to better align your bones during meditation! Let’s stay safe and protect our joints from injury with healthy alignment habits.