key points sitting

7.2. Key Points: Sitting — Transcript (English)

Summary:

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Transcript

Hi, in this key points lesson, we’re going to review how we sit during Ignitions when we do seated breathing practice.

So here you can see what you will see during the practice and me and Satoko are taking different positions here.

I’m sitting on my heels and Satoko is sitting cross-legged.

If neither of these positions are comfortable, you’re welcome to sit on a chair because the most important part of this is that you need to be able to sit for a few minutes with your spine completely straight.

And improper position of your legs, if you try to persevere, it may just result in slouching and losing the straightness of the spine, which we want to avoid at all costs.

Okay, so if neither of these work for you, just sit on a chair, it’s completely fine.

But if we were to about what’s important here in this seated position, it’s that in both cases you can see that the ribcage is above the pelvis.

The pelvis is not falling backward and in fact here, unlike the actual Baseworks practice, where we really emphasize that the ribcage and the pelvis are completely stacked, for seated practice maybe you want your pelvis to be leaning slightly slightly forward.

Because if it can lean slightly forward, it allows a natural S-shaped curve and it allows you to be able to sit effortlessly, right?

Because here we are not drawing the shoulders down, we’re not actually actively contracting anything.

We want to find the most relaxed stillness where our spine is still straight.

So if you look at Satoko, she is sitting cross-legged and her knees are almost and the height of her hips.

Sometimes if the hips are tight, when people try to sit with their legs crossed, their knees are too high.

So if the knees are too high, the weight of the legs and also the tightness in the hips is pushing the pelvis backward.

And if you attempt to sit like that for a long time, what will happen is that as the pelvis falls back, you’re going to slouch and then you’re going to lose the straight spine position.

So this is what we want to avoid.

So sometimes when the hips are very tight, maybe what Satoko is doing will not be comfortable, then you can try to do what I’m doing, sitting on the ankles.

But this position, again for some people, may result in the legs falling asleep very, very soon.

And this is also what we want to avoid.

So if either of these positions is comfortable for you and you’re able to sit for a few minutes with your spine completely straight.

That’s great, you can choose either one of them, or you can sit on a chair.

Okay.

And also as you go through the actual practice lab of this Assimilation, you will be also given other cues about sitting.

So you will be told that pelvis need to be slightly, slightly tilted forward, so that we can have the natural S shape curve.

At the beginning, in order to establish that position with a completely straight spine and open chest so that we can breathe comfortably, what we normally do is that we bring the shoulders up, back, so we arch the chest and open the chest and then we allow the arms to drop and then we relax.

Usually if you do that movement, if you were just like a little bit slouching, but you are not really noticing at the beginning, by doing this movement, this allows you to open your chest more and it allows more volume for your lungs and you can breathe more freely during the breathing exercises.

And when we actually do the breathing exercises, as much as possible, we want to remain still.

Sometimes when people are not used to stillness, you close your eyes, you try to be still and then you feel a lot of things in your body and you want to scratch yourself and touch yourself.

Of course, if it’s unbearable, please feel free to do so, but the goal is try to remain still.

So if it’s possible to remain still, please try to maintain stillness.

And your hands can be anywhere, maybe somewhere on your knees.

The position of the hands is really not that important, whichever feels comfortable.

So that’s it for the seated position.

And in the next key points lesson, we’re going to look at the details of the breathing pattern in the Expand Cycle.

See you there.