Importance of Stillness

A few people, despite comfortable padded chairs & clear instructions to remain still during sitting meditation, keep adjusting their postures - as frequently as every 30 seconds! Surprisingly, I've even come across a couple of such folks who claimed to have been practicing meditation for years.

Learning to remain still during meditation is an essential, basic skill to master.

"If movement (during sitting meditation) becomes a habit, you will lose the chance to deepen your meditation practice. Calmness & tranquility of mind have their foundation in stillness of the body." Sayadaw U. Pandita

“If we resolve to keep still for a moment, finally to take a look, to no longer run away from the unpleasant and no longer to grasp at the pleasant – maybe for just one meditation session – we will have learned an enormous amount about ourselves. Watching the unpleasant feelings arise while sitting – and for most people this happens – is another way to insight into one’s own reactions. One wants to change the feeling, wants to get away from it. There is a spontaneous, impetuous reaction to the unpleasant feeling by moving to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

In daily living, we try to get rid of unpleasant feelings by getting rid of the people who trigger them in us, by trying to get rid of situations, by blaming others instead of looking at the feeling and saying, ‘So, it has arisen. It will stay awhile and it will pass again. Nothing remains the same. If I watch it closely enough I’m using mindfulness rather than reaction.’

This reaction of ours, trying to keep the pleasant and trying to get rid of the unpleasant, is the reason for our continual” running up and down on the riverbank http://www.johnlovas.com/2016/06/on-crossing-over.html unsatisfactoriness, dis-ease & suffering, “because there’s no direaction to it. It’s a circular movement. We can’t get out that way. It is a merry-go-round. It doesn’t have a doorway. We go around and around and around trying to keep the pleasant, trying to get rid of the unpleasant, a never-ending circle. The only opening leading out of that merry-go-round is to look at the feeling and not to react. If we learn that in meditation, even for one moment, we can repeat it in daily living to great advantage.”

Ayya Khema. “Being Nobody, Going Nowhere. Meditations on the Buddhist Path.” Wisdom Publications, 2016.