When we teach people zazen meditation, we teach them posture first. And the traditional instruction is to observe breathing at the hara (the diaphragm). The theory is that this regulates attention by regulating the whole nervous system by getting everything in sync with breathing.
Bad posture makes it harder for people to meditate, and the usual prescription for various problems like sleepiness or daydreaming is postural changes (as in, fix your posture to conform to the norm).
There are patterns of muscle tension and slackness that fairly reliably create changes in the brain and the rest of the nervous system.
For example, if you’re slumped too much, you’ll tend to get sleepy easier. If you’re sitting too upright and stiffly by creating tension to hold yourself up, it blocks the nervous system from getting in sync with breathing.
We teach people to sit in an upright, relaxed posture, and traditionally this involves sitting on a cushion cross-legged because it forces the hips into a position that makes sitting upright require relatively little effort (most possible postures heavily engage the core, requiring a lot of tension to sit upright, while we sit in a way that is designed to minimize that effort by “locking” the torso into a position where it doesn’t have to work very hard to maintain posture).
Noticing confusion: My lineage teaches the Hara as being two inches below the navel in the body, just like TCM’s lower Dantian.
Makes sense to me: Practices actuall full-belly breath rather than breathing into the upper belly but keeping the lower belly tight as you’d do in pilates.
I’ve started saying it’s at the diaphragm because I find more people find the hara with that instruction than the two inches one. The diaphragm is not quite the hara, of course, but it gets them paying attention to the right part of the body to eventually find it.
When we teach people zazen meditation, we teach them posture first. And the traditional instruction is to observe breathing at the hara (the diaphragm). The theory is that this regulates attention by regulating the whole nervous system by getting everything in sync with breathing.
Bad posture makes it harder for people to meditate, and the usual prescription for various problems like sleepiness or daydreaming is postural changes (as in, fix your posture to conform to the norm).
Fascinating, but I’m slightly confused about the link here. Any chance you could make the connection more explicit?
There are patterns of muscle tension and slackness that fairly reliably create changes in the brain and the rest of the nervous system.
For example, if you’re slumped too much, you’ll tend to get sleepy easier. If you’re sitting too upright and stiffly by creating tension to hold yourself up, it blocks the nervous system from getting in sync with breathing.
We teach people to sit in an upright, relaxed posture, and traditionally this involves sitting on a cushion cross-legged because it forces the hips into a position that makes sitting upright require relatively little effort (most possible postures heavily engage the core, requiring a lot of tension to sit upright, while we sit in a way that is designed to minimize that effort by “locking” the torso into a position where it doesn’t have to work very hard to maintain posture).
Noticing confusion: My lineage teaches the Hara as being two inches below the navel in the body, just like TCM’s lower Dantian.
Makes sense to me: Practices actuall full-belly breath rather than breathing into the upper belly but keeping the lower belly tight as you’d do in pilates.
I’ve started saying it’s at the diaphragm because I find more people find the hara with that instruction than the two inches one. The diaphragm is not quite the hara, of course, but it gets them paying attention to the right part of the body to eventually find it.