For Successful Meditation Get Comfortable

By Sally Kempton

The first principle for successful meditation is to make yourself physically comfortable enough to meditate for at least half an hour at a time. The one absolute rule for is that your spine be erect. As long as your spine is straight and your chest is open, comfort trumps form. This might sound radical if you've been trained in classical yoga or Zen, but trust me—at least in the beginning, it's more important that you are able to forget about your body while you're meditating than that you train yourself in postural perfection.

Use props to support your hips and knees and, if you need to, your back. If you're on the floor, make sure your hips are elevated at least three inches above your knees, so that your back doesn't round. If sitting on the floor is too uncomfortable, sit on a chair. If it's hard to sit upright, sit against a wall and stuff pillows behind your lower back. Use as many as you need to support your spine and push you into an upright posture. Your aim is not to create a perfect meditation asana, but to support your body so it will let you turn inside.

Next, choose a simple core practice and do it daily until it becomes a habit. Your core practice is your base, your foundation for turning the mind inward. Doing the same practice every day establishes a groove in your consciousness, and this groove becomes a pathway into the deeper layers of yourself. For a beginning meditator trying to establish a practice, this is imperative. But even experienced meditators benefit from having a clear protocol for signaling the mind that it's time to turn inward. From there, you can play with other practices, always with the knowledge that you can come back to home base. 

When you're beginning a meditation practice, start with 10 minutes and increase your meditation time 1 minute a day until you've reached 30 minutes. This will allow you to cut the basic groove of practice. If you want to go deep in meditation, you often need to sit for at least 45 to 60 minutes to get quiet enough to sink deeply inside. But, here's the good news: A daily 20-minute practice—especially if you do it twice a day—will improve your focus, stabilize your emotions, give you access to a deeper level of creativity, and treat you to more prolonged glimpses of your peaceful source.

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