***Finding Your Perfect Meditation Cushion

Finding the right meditation supplies, especially the perfect meditation cushion, can feel lot like looking for the Holy Grail.

I started meditating in 1970 and since then, I've tried almost every kind of meditation cushion ever created. I've spent so much time on this I even tried to design the ideal meditation cushion myself, contemplating how to make something that would hold my spine perfectly straight, let my knees be comfortable and my back to be free of pain. I figured that just by sitting on the perfect cushion, my Kundalini would awaken and I would achieve complete enlightenment.

I know that sounds silly, but I was just certain that I had to have the right meditation cushion or my progress upon the spiritual path would be hindered in some way.

I tried different kinds of zafu, some filled with buckwheat, others with cotton. But that made no difference. I tried the zabuton, a square cushion developed by Trungpa Rinpoche, but that also didn’t appear to be getting me where I wanted to go any faster than the others.

I tried the Japanese seiza bench. No speed-up there. I even tried that bundle of straps called a Nada chair, which supposedly holds up your knees and gives support to the lower back. It was more like meditation bondage, and of course, it offered no improvement.

Ultimately, it didn't matter what I tried; none of these fancy meditation products helped my practice at all. I had knee pains sometimes, sometimes I didn’t; I sat up straight sometimes; at other times I slouched; I was alert sometimes, sometimes I fell asleep.

Eventually, I noticed a fact that had been staring me in the face almost since the beginning. My teachers were not using any special meditation supplies!

On a trip to Nepal, I meditated with a hundred Nepalese students, and saw that none of them had a meditation cushion. They simply sat on the floor. I doubt they had ever browsed through catalogues filled with the various meditation products and cushions I’d thought were so important.

Actually, a high proportion of my teachers were sitting on a particularly unusual device. They called it a chair.

Yep, a good old-fashioned chair.

They weren't even sitting on it in any specific way. They just sat there, on the chair, leaning against the back of it, without even particularly good posture. They just sat on the chair.

I pointed this out to some of my fellow meditators, and they said that the teacher had achieved such a high level of spiritual awareness that they could let go of the fancy meditation supplies. Other students claimed that the teachers were in a chair due to the fact that their bodies couldn't sit properly now, and that this was actually hurting their spiritual advancement.

So, of course, I had to test this out for myself and see what my own experience would be in a simple chair.

Here are the two things I discovered from many years of very careful observations: First, when I sat in a chair, my body was no longer in pain. Second, practice became much easier, and this was at least partly because my body was not in pain.

Yes, sometimes I would doze off because I was a little bit too comfortable, but hey, part of the reaso
I was meditating in the first place was to relax, right?

Since then, I’ve come to realize that very deep meditation states are possible without fancy cushions, meditation shawls or any kind of meditation supplies at all. You don’t need any specially designed stools, winches or pulleys. Any old chair is fine. Quite often a hot tub is even better.