More Than Posture

The Posture of Meditation: A Practical Manual for Meditators of All Traditions.  Second Edition By Will Johnson.  Shambhala.  161 pp.  $15.95. *****

It’s hard to believe that any activity as fundamentally simple as zazen—all you do is sit there and breathe—could become complicated, but the human mind (my human mind, anyway) can complicate anything.  Though I’ve been doing this for thirty years, sometimes I approach the cushion in the morning and think, wait a minute, how do you do this again?  I’ll be in the middle of sitting with no idea what the hell I’m doing or why I’m doing it.  Could somebody give me a hand here?  (The answer, I’m afraid, is no.)

When that’s true, it’s good to have a book that brings you back to basics.  The Posture of Meditation is such a book for me.  I found it to be a seminal text when I first read it, a number of years ago, and corresponded for a while with the author, Will Johnson.  I followed it with his next book, Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfulness, but since then had lost track of him.

I was reminded of him recently when Tricycle advertised an online course he was doing.[1]  I’m sure that would be worthwhile, though as a bookish person I avoid online activities.  But that advertisement took me to his website, where I discovered he’s been a prolific writer for years, exploring his take on meditation with a number of books.[2]  He also leads workshops and does private consultations, heading an organization called the Institute for Embodiment Training.

The Posture of Meditation isn’t really about posture (a subject that sounds boring even to me).  You can find more persnickety instructions on posture elsewhere, including the famous book Zen Training by Katsuke Sekida.  Will Johnson’s book actually relates a whole take on meditation, that it is primarily an activity of the body, not the mind.  In that he echoes a host of teachers, Eihei Dogen for one (and Soto Zen in general), also Reginald Ray in the Tibetan tradition and various teachers in other traditions.  Most people have the feeling that meditation is something that you do with your mind once you’ve found a posture to settle into.  For Will Johnson, finding that posture is the whole thing.  Skip the mind and stay with the body.

His discussion of posture is simplicity itself.  Find some sitting posture in which you can comfortably get the hips above the knees, tilt the pelvis forward slightly, then gently stack your vertebrae as if you were building a tower out of building blocks.  You do that from the inside, not the outside.  Once you’ve done it correctly, there should be no strain.  Gravity doesn’t pull you down when you’re properly aligned.  It holds you up.[3]

Posture is one of the three vital ingredients in sitting meditation.  The next is relaxation: allowing yourself to feel the weight of gravity.  You give into that and don’t fight it, trusting that your alignment will hold you up.  In doing so, you profoundly relax.  Relaxation is at the heart of Zen sitting (and for Will Johnson, all sitting).

That, I would say, is the first paradox of Zen.  No one who sees that posture for the first time would ever call it relaxing, and early attempts tend not to be relaxing at all.  Mine certainly weren’t.  But over time—we’re talking about months, possibly years—you find that it is indeed relaxing.  It’s the most relaxing thing you can do (other than conking out completely).   Relaxation is at the heart of the posture.

The reason relaxation is so important is that we have spent our whole lives tensing against things, holding ourselves back from them, pushing them away.  In doing so we’ve created what Wilhelm Reich called body armor, the tension that most people carry around in their natural state.  When the body relaxes, past traumas come up (along with all kinds of other crap that for one reason or another we tightened against).  That’s why people are so startled at what comes up when they meditate.  The subconscious, according to Reich, isn’t a part of the brain.  It’s located in the soft tissue of the body.

You’re not analyzing your trauma when this happens.  You’re re-experiencing it, in a setting that is safe.  Once you finally do that, with no holding back, your body can untie the knots that have made you perpetually reactive.  Your reactivity isn’t primarily in your mind, though we think of it that way.  It’s in the body.

That’s why the third aspect of Johnson’s instruction, which in a way is the most controversial, is important.  When we take this posture, we’re basically sitting still.  But we allow the physical movements that arise.  We’re still, but not rigid.  Rigidity only makes the knots tighter.  Resiliency allows them to relax.  The fierce militaristic posture that some Zen students maintain is counterproductive.

A couple of years into my sitting practice, my physical reactivity was bizarre.  My arms flew all over the place.  My torso pivoted on its axis.  My head suddenly turned sideways.  I was also, at the same time, experiencing the deep ecstasy of sitting in a way that I’ve never felt it since.  But those things needed to happen on the way to a deeper relaxation.  As Johnson says, you hit plateaus when your sitting feels perfect, everything just right.  Then the process starts all over again.  Alignment allows a new relaxation, the relaxation brings new things up, and you welcome those things with resilience.  It’s a cycle that continues as long as you sit.

The first edition of this book was most important to me, but at this point you should definitely buy the second, even if you own the first, because Johnson has added a whole new section, which in some ways is summed up by one of his subtitles: The Path of Somatic Dharma.  Those words describe what this practice is all about.

I honestly can’t recommend this book too highly.  People often ask about foundational books, and to some extent it depends on what the student is looking for.  But for basic instruction in sitting practice, and an attitude toward it that will be fruitful as long as you live, you can’t do better than this one.

[1] https://learn.tricycle.org/?utm_source=trikehdr&_ga=2.94783706.736202088.1653416454-1976181431.1584393132

[2] https://www.embodiment.net/about

[3] In a video he made toward the end of his life, Sojun Mel Weitsman talks about tension and tenseness.  There’s a certain amount of tension necessary for the posture, just as there’s tension in the wires that hold up a bridge.  But elsewhere, ideally, there should not be tenseness in the muscles.  When there is, you don’t fight it, which would make you even tenser.  You just bring attention to it.  https://berkeleyzencenter.org/dharma-talk/sojun-roshi-zazen-refresher/