Are you able to sit cross-legged for more than 30 minutes, without moving your legs, without pain? Is there a trick to doing so that isn’t “sit cross-legged an hour every day for a year; by then the pain will stop”?
Personally, my leg goes to sleep and starts throbbing, and I hear this is pretty common.
It’s been a while since I regularly sat in cross-legged as I’m in a meditation tradition where we don’t meditate cross-legged. It’s comfortable enough to sit cross-legged that I sometimes do it without meditating.
I’m just writing from personal experience but my current hypothesis is that at the beginning having something on which you can lean your back is central.
I acquired the ability to sit how I sit from doing an Aikido breathing meditation I took out of a book that includes some movement and I did it back then with my back resting against a wall. In the meditation there was the goal to inhale really long and then exhale really long and move a bit forward and contract with the whole body and then give the lungs as much space as possible during the inhale.
The wall helps the body to organize in that position and then after having learned how to sit that way it isn’t needed anymore.
One thing I did back then was to have my feet directly in front of me with the wall in my back and push down the legs on both side during the exhale so that the knees go down and take the up during the inhale.
That’s what I did back then when I didn’t know much and just had book to guide me.
I still think that the basic principle of allowing your body to sync with a rhythm will having as much support as you need to sit comfortably in a cross-legged position is a good way to learn to sit.
There’s a oscillating rhythm that’s faster then the breathing rhythm that works to stabilize the body position but there seems to be little research for it and the people who taught me about it couldn’t give me any names. In it you basically move the minimum that’s possible to move forward and back in a really fast rhythm of maybe one second.
There’s a state where that rhythm happens automatically and where you aren’t moving back and forth through effort, the body gets upright and tensions relax.
I’m not sure whether my description is enough for you to work with that oscillating rhythm.
Are you able to sit cross-legged for more than 30 minutes, without moving your legs, without pain? Is there a trick to doing so that isn’t “sit cross-legged an hour every day for a year; by then the pain will stop”?
Personally, my leg goes to sleep and starts throbbing, and I hear this is pretty common.
It’s been a while since I regularly sat in cross-legged as I’m in a meditation tradition where we don’t meditate cross-legged. It’s comfortable enough to sit cross-legged that I sometimes do it without meditating.
I’m just writing from personal experience but my current hypothesis is that at the beginning having something on which you can lean your back is central.
I acquired the ability to sit how I sit from doing an Aikido breathing meditation I took out of a book that includes some movement and I did it back then with my back resting against a wall. In the meditation there was the goal to inhale really long and then exhale really long and move a bit forward and contract with the whole body and then give the lungs as much space as possible during the inhale.
The wall helps the body to organize in that position and then after having learned how to sit that way it isn’t needed anymore.
One thing I did back then was to have my feet directly in front of me with the wall in my back and push down the legs on both side during the exhale so that the knees go down and take the up during the inhale.
That’s what I did back then when I didn’t know much and just had book to guide me.
I still think that the basic principle of allowing your body to sync with a rhythm will having as much support as you need to sit comfortably in a cross-legged position is a good way to learn to sit.
There’s a oscillating rhythm that’s faster then the breathing rhythm that works to stabilize the body position but there seems to be little research for it and the people who taught me about it couldn’t give me any names. In it you basically move the minimum that’s possible to move forward and back in a really fast rhythm of maybe one second.
There’s a state where that rhythm happens automatically and where you aren’t moving back and forth through effort, the body gets upright and tensions relax.
I’m not sure whether my description is enough for you to work with that oscillating rhythm.
For me, being able to lean my back against something fixes the thing about legs going to sleep.
Should take about a week of stretching. Not a year of sitting.