Sit Up and Take Note

If you're having difficulty meditating because of back pain, you could be sitting incorrectly.

By Judith Lasater

"Stop fidgeting," is a phrase I heard repeatedly throughout my childhood from all the significant adults in my life—at school, in church, and during family dinners. I seemed constitutionally unable to sit still.

Now that I have a formal daily meditation or "sitting" practice, my fidgeting is usually more mental than physical, but I am still searching for a way to sit comfortably.

It's no wonder that when we begin to learn to meditate, most of us have trouble with back pain. We have developed poor sitting habits from years of sitting in improperly designed chairs. A quick look at the chairs which are offered to us in schools, cars, and airplanes reveals little understanding on the part of chair manufacturers as to how human anatomy functions in the seated position. But through education and vigilance, we can learn to sit with ease.

The key to sitting well is a harmoniously positioned pelvis. The pelvis, which literally means "basin" in Latin, not only holds and protects our abdominal organs but also serves as the anchor for the spinal column. I like to say that the pelvis is the pot out of which the spine grows. Because of this relationship to the spinal column, the position of the pelvis is crucial to sitting properly.

Try this experiment. Whatever position you are sitting in right now, move the pelvis an inch in any direction. When you do you will find that your spine moves with it. Unless the pelvis is in a neutral position, the spine is forced to move from its neutral position in order to remain upright. This is how it works: The vertebral column consists of a series of long curves anatomists call "normal curves." The lumbar curve at the back waist curves inward; the thoracic curve at the midback curves outward; and the cervical curve in the neck curves inward like the lower back. There is the least amount of strain on these curves when they are in their resting or neutral state.

In order to sit well in a chair or to meditate with reasonable comfort, you need to create and maintain these normal curves. If any one of these curves is out of alignment, it affects the entire spinal column. It's akin to stacking children's blocks; if the second, third, and subsequent blocks are not lined up with the blocks below them, the column soon tumbles.

While we do not tumble when sitting, increased muscular activity is needed in order to keep us upright. We experience this increased muscular activity as tension, which interferes with our ability to meditate or work in comfort.

In order to maintain the spinal curves in neutral, you must place the pelvis in a neutral position. This means that the top rim of the pelvis is neither rocked backward nor forward. To discover this relationship, sit in a chair and place your hands around the top edge of your pelvis with your fingers facing forward and your thumbs in back. Sitting as I commonly do, when I place my hands around my pelvic rim, my thumbs are much lower than the rest of my fingers. This means I am tilting backward, taking my spine out of the neutral position into flexion. This causes shifts all the way up my spinal column, which eventually can lead to pain and discomfort. On the other hand, if I sit in such a way that my fingers and thumbs are level and my pelvis is in a neutral position, then my lower back has its normal concave curve, and there is a greater chance that I will be comfortable.

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