slumping

It has been over 60 years since Eastern schools of meditation became widely known in the U.S. and Europe, and meditation became widely practiced, with over 14% of Americans having meditated at least once. If we include those practicing mindfulness techniques, using meditation apps, and attending yoga classes with a meditation component, this figure goes far higher.

The effects of sitting in meditation

The potential benefits of meditation are well known, and include a calmer, clearer mind, lower levels of stress, better sleep, improved relationships with others, and better mental health. 

From a posture perspective, whether you sit in meditation regularly or are just getting started, you want the experience to be as healthy for your body as it is for your mind. 

Tradition and seated meditation

This North Indian Buddha figure shows healthy form. He has a well-stacked spine, open shoulders, and an elongated neck. (Post Gupta period, 7th–8th century C.E..)

Westerners often try to be “authentic” in their meditation by sitting cross-legged on the floor, as is portrayed in most traditions. This is particularly difficult for people who have not grown up regularly sitting this way. It may be that practitioners manage to cross their legs, but then their pelvis is not able to tip forward. Their hip joints will not have developed in childhood and ossified in their teens for unaided cross-legged sitting to be a truly comfortable and biomechanically available option. 

Common problems in upright seated meditation

With the pelvis tucked, meditators have two options, both of them unhealthy:

1. Sitting on their tail bones in a relaxed but slumped position, which will put their spines into a C-shape that overstretches the ligaments of the SI joints and spine, and compresses the spinal discs and nerves. Such collapsed posture restricts the lungs, stomach, and other organs. It also deconditions the deep inner corset muscles that are there to regulate spinal alignment “in the background” during healthy sitting. 
2. Sitting tucked but holding themselves upright by tensing the back muscles. Many meditators and yoga practitioners are so familiar with this effortful solution to being upright that they don’t realize that they are doing it, or recognize it as poor posture. 

It takes freedom in the hip socket to allow the pelvis a good range of motion, rotating forward (anteverting) around the head of the femurs—then the spine can articulate at L5-S1 to stack upright and the back muscles can relax. You can read more about healthy pelvic anteversion here. 

The man’s notably tucked pelvis is sending his spine into a C-shape. Their upper backs are rounded, compressing the base of the neck and lifting the chin to face forward. Pexels

This man is holding himself up with tension in his back muscles. He can learn to antevert his pelvis to find its natural L5-S1 angle, allowing his back to be upright and relaxed. To get there we recommend a suitable wedge along with some posture know-how. Pexels

This woman is getting some anteverting benefit from the slope of the beach, but is used to swaying her lumbar area rather than having a healthy angle lower down at L5-S1. Unsplash

This Chinese Buddha figure shows surprisingly slumped posture. Note the forward head, absence of a stacked spine, and tucked pelvis. With a tucked pelvis slumping is the only relaxed option for sitting.

The hunched figure above is the oldest Chinese Buddha figure that has survived into modern times. The inscription on its base dates it to 338 C.E., 500 years after Buddhism came to China from India. Why does the hunched posture of the Chinese figure compare so poorly with the Indian figure (top)? It is reasonable to suppose that while crossed legged sitting was the norm in India, a warm country where much of the population sits on the floor to gather, eat, socialize, and more, in China, with its generally cooler climate, sitting crossed legged was consciously adopted for meditation but was not a widely used sitting position.   

Here I am stacksitting on the Gokhale™ Pain-Free Chair—my pelvis is anteverted so my spine stacks upright and relaxed, with a healthy angle at L5-S1. This way of sitting enables you to sit in meditation comfortably for prolonged periods if required, and to breathe well. Like all students on the path of postural improvement, I am a work in progress. . .

Appropriate furniture, props, and seating solutions

Most Zen and yoga centers in the West have become more enlightened about the difficulty many people have in sitting on the floor, providing chairs, meditation stools, and cushions for meditators’ comfort. Some more recently established schools, such as Transcendental Meditation, have always encouraged practitioners to use chairs and sofas rather than wrangle with the difficulties of sitting on the floor and working through the resultant aches and pains. 

That said, seeking comfort and back support from soft and poorly contoured modern furniture can also promote slumping, or lead to problematic remedies such as using lumbar cushions which sway the back. You can read more on finding a healthy back rest here, as well as about gentle traction from our Stretchsit® Cushion.

Traditional and potentially effective solutions to help meditators sit without a backrest include the Japanese Zafu cushion, a high, round cushion that can help the thighs and pelvis to angle down, and a low wooden meditation stool used in a kneeling position. The Gokhale™ Wedge is a modern solution to support stacksitting. In all cases, it is important that the practitioner knows how to anchor their rib cage to resist any tendency to sway, and how to find articulation at the lower L5-S1 junction. 

Four props for healthy sitting (top left to bottom right): a Japanese Zafu cushion, the Gokhale™ Wedge, a kneeling meditation stool, and the Gokhale Stretchsit® Cushion

Healthy sitting makes for healthy breathing

Given that controlled or mindful breathing is part of many meditation practices, it’s surprising how little attention is given to the link between breathing well and sitting well.

Some meditation traditions have mimicked teachers and icons with slumped posture, and teach that the associated abdominal breathing is part and parcel of spiritual practice. This type of breathing, however, results in a soft, expanded belly with low muscle tone, an underdeveloped chest, and inadequate use of the diaphragm and lungs.

Equally problematic is tensing the back to remain upright, which tightens the erector spinae muscles and restricts the diaphragm and ribs at the back. It takes stacksitting with a J-spine to let the breath work its magic—bringing a natural massage to your spine, better circulation, and length, strength, and flexibility to the musculoskeletal parts of the torso.

Chop wood, carry water, preserve your posture

There is a traditional Zen Buddhist koan (puzzle/story): 

The novice says to the master, "What does one do before enlightenment?"

"Chop wood. Carry water," replies the master.

The novice asks, "What, then, does one do after enlightenment?"

"Chop wood. Carry water."

Chopping wood and carrying is part of everyday life for millions of people in traditional communities—and it is done with healthy posture.

Of course there are various interpretations of this koan, including that the most pedestrian of activities are also the most sacred. From a posture teacher perspective, the koan reminds us that in the pursuit of spiritual (or mental) development, we should continue to engage with the physical foundations of life. Not only are the body, mind and spirit intertwined, but a healthy body can also help support our other endeavors.

Breaking free from old habits

Meditators often come to work with us because they are frustrated by their pain and struggle to be comfortable. In our experience, though meditators are extensively trained in matters of the mind, the training of the body lags behind. Our teachers have expertise in identifying and solving systemic postural errors in meditation and other activities, and are ready to support you on your meditation and life journey.  

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops.

In my experience, people are often unaware that their posture has greatly contributed to their muscular problems and damage. 

In this blog post I would like to talk about a frequently injured group of muscles that attach the arm to the torso at the shoulder blade—the rotator cuff. The rotator cuff helps rotate the arm and lift it sideways and is also responsible for stabilizing the shoulder joint.

The four muscles of the rotator cuff are supraspinatus, infraspinatus, and teres minor, which lie on the back of the shoulder blade, and subscapularis which lies on the front.

Why we get rotator cuff problems

It’s common for people to be rounded forward in modern times. Many of us habitually adopt a closed, slumped posture with tight muscles across the chest, while the muscles of the upper back and shoulders are often overstretched and lacking in tone. This front-to-back imbalance goes with holding the arms too closely to the body, and too far forward. The muscles of the rotator cuff are mechanically disadvantaged by such postural distortion, and put under undue stress. 

The slumped shoulder posture common in today’s culture leaves the muscles of the rotator cuff prone to injury.

This painting from 1881 shows both women using the rotator cuff while their shoulders maintain a healthy posterior position. Detail from Mending the Nets by Winslow Homer.

Traditional cultures preserve healthy posture for the shoulders. The shoulder and arm of this village carpenter in Burkina Faso align with the back half of his body, not the front. This posterior shoulder position arranges the bones and muscles optimally for rotator cuff health and mechanical advantage.

Of the four muscles in the rotator cuff group, the one that suffers most frequently from poor postural habits is supraspinatus. Supraspinatus is the uppermost rotator cuff muscle. It lies along the top of the shoulder blade and passes through a narrow passage to attach to the humeral head (ball of the shoulder joint). 

Tears can happen through sudden trauma—perhaps due to a fall or a vigorous shoulder movement in sport—or through more gradual wear and tear that leaves the far portion of the muscle like a frayed rug. Depending on the injury, surgical repair may be necessary, followed by physical therapy for up to a year. 

The narrow passage of supraspinatus can lead to wear and tear if the shoulder joint is misaligned due to poor posture.

How the Gokhale Method helps restore rotator cuff health

The good news about your rotator cuff is that it can be improved and often fully healed by adopting natural, healthy posture. 

The local solution is to learn how to do a shoulder roll. This technique will take each shoulder home to its natural position, where it lived when you were a young child. 

The shoulder roll picks up all the bones that make up the shoulder—the upper arm, the collar bone, and the shoulder blade—and allows them to reposition and settle in better alignment with one another. This creates appropriate space for all the soft tissues in the area, including the muscles, bursae, blood vessels, and nerves, so they can function well. 

Shoulder rolls are a more effective and sustainable solution than simply pulling your shoulders back or “sitting up straight.” These common measures tend to create additional problems such as inflamed rhomboids and a swayed lower back.

To practice the Gokhale Method shoulder roll:

1. Relax your shoulder girdle
2. Glide one shoulder forward
3. Rotate your shoulder upward
4. Continue to rotate it back as far as is comfortable. Let it relax down.

Tip: Make sure the movement occurs in your shoulder. Resist the tendency to wave your arms, sway your back, or twist your torso or neck.

This gentle sequence of movement restores a healthy position for your shoulder joint and rotator cuff—one roll at a time.

Students often report that learning the shoulder roll has brought additional benefits such as a more open chest, improved breathing, and improved blood flow to the arms and hands. Over time, performing shoulder rolls counters thoracic kyphosis, or rounding. Its gentle “massaging” action feels pleasant, can relieve knotted muscle tension in the area, and ease neck tension and headaches. You can make a start on your shoulder roll with our free video here.

Happy shoulders are part of healthy posture

Your new healthier shoulder position will always work best in the wider context of your posture as a whole. A change in one place facilitates shifts elsewhere, and vice versa. For example, your shoulder alignment is affected by your head position, your breathing, the angle of your ribcage and pelvis, and even how you stand. The position of your pelvis in particular affects your shoulders and upper body.

The principles and techniques that will help you to remodel your posture are taught in logical sequence and detail in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, and our online Elements course. If you have or are recovering from rotator cuff problems, the Gokhale Exercise program can help you to exercise in a way that is safe, therapeutic, and fun! 

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .

In this blog post I am excited to introduce a wedge for stacksitting to our students and readers. It’s possible to experience and take pleasure in sitting as you work at your desk, eat at your table, or play an instrument. If this is not the case for you, the Gokhale Wedge could make it so.

Upright sitting is necessary for many activities. The people shown above are sitting well with ease; most people in our culture no longer know how to do this.  

How a suitable wedge can transform your sitting

Does your back get tired and tense from trying to sit upright? To sit upright without tension in your back muscles, and without slumping to let tired muscles rest, your pelvis needs to be anteverted (tipped forward). A lot of people assume that tipping the pelvis forward will result in a sway, but are pleasantly surprised to find that this isn’t the case. Using a wedge enables you to tip your pelvis forward and find the natural position for your sacrum which allows an angled L5-S1 disc space that is a better fit for the wedge-shaped L5-S1 disc. From this base your vertebrae can stack vertically, giving you a healthy J-spine. Now your back muscles can relax, and your nerves, discs, muscles, and circulation can function well.

The pelvis is the foundation for the upper body. With the pelvis well positioned, the upper body can be upright and relaxed (a). With the pelvis poorly positioned, the upper body is either relaxed but slumped (b), or upright but tense (c).

A well-designed wedge helps you to rediscover sitting comfort. It helps create healthy muscle memory for standing and walking too.

Designing posture-friendly products

In general, we have chosen to be somewhat slow to market with products. We set a high bar for effectiveness and quality of design and manufacture, and don’t want to add to the glut of products that end up in landfill. 

But creating a wedge has been on my to do list for several years. One reason is that people often arrive at our courses having bought available wedges that don’t actually antevert the pelvis—and sometimes do the opposite in tucking the pelvis. 

In the past I hired professional designers to address this problem, but was not satisfied with the outcome. So until now we taught students how to make their own wedges by folding towels and blankets. However, we recognized that this isn’t always easy to get right, and rolled fabric does not keep its shape when transferred from place to place. 

A rolled towel or blanket can make a suitable wedge for stacksitting but it loses its shape easily if moved and takes frequent remodeling.

Determined to provide our students with a truly good wedge, we recently set about trialing a number of prototypes and getting extensive feedback from students and teachers. The result is a unique, simple design which finally ticks all the boxes.

The Gokhale Wedge took some time to get right.

What makes the Gokhale Wedge different

Most wedges are not informed by the J-spine philosophy that is at the core of the Gokhale Method®. Though commercial wedges are trying to respond to the discomfort that most people feel when sitting, and the observation that many seat pans slant backwards, they don’t go far enough in helping the pelvis antevert and supporting a J-spine. 

The majority of wedges on the market have an even, shallow slope, and are made of soft foam. Soft foam allows the sitz-bones to sink into the wedge, further reducing the angle of a slope which is already insufficient to help tip the pelvis. 

An example of a widely available, evenly-sloped shallow wedge. 

Gokhale Method teacher Julie Johnson shows how a soft, shallow wedge allows users to sit in a tucked pelvic position—not what you want, and not how Julie likes to sit!

The design of the Gokhale Wedge

The Gokhale Wedge is made from a durable foam that offers both sturdy support and enough cushioning to be comfortable for longer periods. We tested materials such as buckwheat and discovered them to be too hard for most people’s comfort. Topping the buckwheat with foam still left a loose filling that needed remodeling with each use.

The Gokhale™Pain-Free Chair, which has a steep drop built into the front edge of the seat pan, encourages the pelvis to tip for stacksitting, and was one of the inspirations for our wedge. 

Our wedge is able to accommodate all shapes and sizes and works well on a variety of surfaces. It also accommodates changes in your L5-S1 angle as you progress on your posture journey. One side is slightly steeper than the other, allowing you to choose which slope you prefer. Its cover is washable and durable, so it stays looking elegant.

Top view

Base view
The Gokhale Wedge is distinct from the triangular wedges on the market.

Backing up the Gokhale Wedge with education

No matter how well-designed, a posture product is best supported by training. This is true of all of our products, but perhaps especially so for our wedge because stacksitting is a big departure from most people’s sitting form. You can learn about stacksitting in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, our online Elements course, plus our Gokhale Exercise program. These offerings, along with our DVD Secrets to Pain-Free Sitting, all teach the skills that enable you to integrate your wedge optimally into daily life. 

You can also integrate using the wedge with our wearable PostureTracker™, which has settings that can track the degree of your L5-S1 angle, and the stack of your spine. Consider the Gokhale Wedge a part of your toolkit as you improve your posture and musculoskeletal health. 

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. 

This is our third blog post in the series where we put popular exercises under scrutiny to examine how they stack up—or not—against the principles of healthy posture. Here we are looking at “Cat-Cow,” a common exercise for mobilizing the spine.

Cow is one of the “holy cows” of conventional exercise. Done on all fours, it puts the spine into extension (swaying). It is paired with Cat, which puts the spine into flexion (rounding). Alternating between these postures is widely considered to be a good or even necessary exercise for mobilizing the spine.

Cat-Cow is widely considered to be a good mobilizing exercise for the spine—but there is a big downside. Pixahive

Alternating between extreme extension and flexion stresses the joints of the spine, which then sustain wear and tear. It also results in the surrounding muscles stiffening to protect the spine. True, it can feel good to stretch out tight muscles in this way, but rather than relying exclusively on repeated extension and flexion, it’s better to address the underlying cause of the stiffness, which is usually poor posture. People with good posture are not compelled to do this sort of exercise. 

Arching the back (above) and slumping (below) are common but damaging postural habits 
that we do not want to reinforce in our exercises. Freepik

In addition to the real-time wear and tear in the spine, Cat-Cow reinforces the poor postural patterns of arching and slumping that are common in our culture. 

Many of us arch the lumbar spine to be “upright.” This compresses the discs, nerves, and soft tissues of the lower back which leads to degeneration, pain, and dysfunction. It is also common to slump the upper back when sitting or standing. This progressively overstretches the spinal ligaments, increasing kyphosis. Cat-Cow augments both these common characteristics of modern posture. 

Cow (above) can deepen and compress an already tight lumbar curve. Cat (below) will then overstretch an already rounded upper back.
Both movements compound common posture problems.

If the chin is lifted and the neck is swayed in Cow, this will additionally put pressure on the cervical joints.

Due to its horizontal orientation, without an awareness of healthy posture, this is an exercise that encourages the abdominal muscles to “switch off” rather than retain a healthy baseline tone. Hanging the abdomen from the lumbar area like a deadweight encourages exaggerated distortion of the lumbar spine.   

After compressing the lower back in Cow pose, most people then round into Cat to stretch it out. Training the upper back to hunch in Cat will then send the shoulders and head further forward in daily posture. Rather than mobilizing the spine, Cat-Cow can create a destructive spiral of a tight lower back and an overstretched upper back. 

Rather than encouraging even length throughout the spine, Cat-Cow pushes deeper into the existing curves. Freepik 

If you are concerned that the yoga or exercises you do could be exacerbating a habit of arching and/or slumping, we recommend exploring how to modify your regimen in an Initial Consultation. You can arrange an Online Initial Consultation or an in-person Initial Consultation if you have a Gokhale Method® Teacher near you.

The 1-2-3 program on Monday, August 9 will show you how to do a modified Cat-Cow. In Cat you will learn to stretch the upper back without overdoing it, and how and why not to round the lower back in the process. In Cow I will teach how to restrict the concave sway in the lower back while giving a satisfying stretch through the thoracic spine where it will do no harm. You will learn how to invite the right amount of movement in the right parts of your spine.

If you would like to join the Cat-Cow class but have not yet subscribed to the 1-2-3 program, sign up now for your 7-day Gokhale Exercise Free Trial.

1-2-3 Move happens daily with Esther at 9:45 a.m. (Pacific Time)
Gokhale Fitness with Eric runs Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays from 7–7:25 a.m.
(Pacific Time), and Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays from 3–3:25 p.m. (Pacific Time)