I'm here today to show you some ways that you can sit more comfortably for your meditation.

When you're not comfortable, sitting in meditation,

it's a lot harder to relax and bring your mind inward.

So our goal today is to show you some ways that you can have your spine upright and

yet the body be so relaxed and comfortable that you can just forget all about it.

We'll look at three basic ways of sitting comfortably.

Our first position is sitting cross-legged on the floor.

This is my friend Phouvang

and you can see that when Phouvang sits on the floor unaided

her back begins to sag at the bottom of the hips and goes all the way up through the top.

Her pelvis is tilted backwards.

So what we're going to do to solve that is give her some height under her hips.

This tips the pelvis forward and makes it very easy to hold the spine upright.

Phouvang has her hands palms upright, close to the trunk of the body. This also helps to elongate her spine.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor is a wonderful pose for feeling very stable and grounded in your meditation

The disadvantage is that many people find their knees begin to hurt or their hips begin to hurt.

So we're going to show you now a second way of sitting on the floor.

The second way of sitting on the floor is on a kneeling bench.

the kneeling bench offers the advantage of the stability of the floor and

the tip to the pelvis that helps to make holding the back upright very easy.

One disadvantage that people sometimes find is that it's hard on

The ankles — having the ankles flat on the floor.

So I'd like to show you a way that you can offer some support to the ankles.

Put a rolled-up towel underneath the ankles to offer support.

One other thing that's helpful for a person on a kneeling bench is for them to have a

blanket or pillow on which to rest their hands.

Having the blanket there as support for the hands helps to take pressure off the back and the shoulders.

When Yogananda came to this country in the 1920s,

he realized that most Americans were not at all prepared to sit on the floor whether

cross-legged or a kneeling bench and so he highly recommended that people do their meditation in a chair,

and that's what we'll show you next.

The third pose we're going to look at is sitting in a chair.

For many people that's all they need to do to feel perfectly comfortable.

But I'm going to show you just a few other things you can do to help yourself feel a little bit more comfortable.

The first thing we'll do is we'll look at the thighs and the angle of the thighs and the floor.

We want the thighs parallel to the floor. You can see that Phouvang's knees are a little lower than her hips.

This means that the chair is too tall for her, so in order to correct that I'm going to get some

blankets and put them under her feet.

Having her thighs parallel to the floor as they are now,

actually relieves pressure in her low back.

The next thing we'll look at is adding a little bit of height

under her hips in order to give a little bit of the forward tilt to the pelvis as we looked at in the other poses.

That forward tilt to the pelvis

makes it a lot easier for her to hold her spine upright.

And then there's one more thing that I like to often add, I use it myself, is

adding pressure to the low part of the spine. The pressure at the base of the spine

stops the pelvis from sagging backward and makes it very easy to hold the upper body upright.

Then there's one final tip that's very fun.

Sometimes people find that they have pain in their upper back or their shoulders and

it's almost a magical solution to give them some height underneath their palms.

As you can see Phouvang has her palms resting upright in her lap close to the trunk, which is a good position,

but just to take a little pressure off her shoulders and back. I'm going to put a blanket there.

This is surprising in how much it allows the spine to relax.

So you have here many different types of props.

As you meditate more your spine will get stronger and your needs may change.

So just experiment. Wherever you have discomfort, try some of these ideas and see if they can help you.

You'll find that when your body is comfortable and relaxed

you'll enjoy your meditation much more.

May your meditations bring you great joy.