How to Sit for Meditation (and Do You Have to Think of Nothing?)

There is no single right way to sit for meditation. Sit on a cushion, kneel, or use a chair, with your back upright and your body still. And no, you don’t have to think of nothing. You only have to keep coming back.

This guide is Week 1, Day 5 of 4 Weeks of Easy Bliss, the program in the Bliss app. Below you’ll find three easy ways to sit, what to do with each part of your body, what really happens with thoughts, and how to meet the feelings that come up.

Why posture matters

Posture changes how awake you feel. Try it now: slump for a few breaths, then lift your chest and let your spine grow tall. Most people notice the mind brightens a little. Body and mind move together. When one sags, the other tends to follow.

An upright back also lets you breathe more fully and stay alert without effort. That is what you want in meditation: relaxed, but not sleepy.

Stillness helps as well. Each time you shift, scratch or fidget, your attention goes outward again. A comfortable seat you can hold without moving gives the mind a chance to settle.

Three easy ways to sit

Pick the one that feels kind to your body today. You can change it any time.

• Cross-legged on a cushion. Sit on the front half of a firm cushion or a folded blanket, so your hips are a little higher than your knees. This tips your pelvis forward and lets your back stand up on its own. If your knees hover well above the floor, add a little more height.
• Kneeling. Kneel and sit back on a cushion or a small bench placed between your heels. This is gentle on the hips and keeps the back straight with little effort.
• On a chair. Sit near the front edge of a firm, straight-backed chair, feet flat on the floor, without leaning back. This is a perfectly good way to meditate, not a lesser one.

Advanced cross-legged poses are fine if they come easily to you, but they aren’t required. The best seat is simply the one you can stay still in for the whole sitting. There is no prize for sitting in pain.

Back, hands, eyes and chin

Once you’re seated, run through a few quick checks.

• Shoulders and face. Let your shoulders drop, and let your face go soft, especially around the jaw and between the eyebrows.
• Back. Let it rise straight up from the hips, the way a stack of blocks balances. Tall, but not stiff.
• Head. Let your chin dip slightly so the back of your neck feels long, with your head resting on top of the spine rather than pushed forward.
• Hands. Rest them wherever they feel easy, in your lap or on your thighs. They shouldn’t have to hold anything up.
• Eyes. Close them gently. If that feels strange at first, leave them half open, resting on the floor a little way ahead.

Put together, these small choices give you a quiet, steady shape to sit in. With less going on in the body, the mind has fewer reasons to wander off, and it’s easier to stay with what you chose to rest on.

Do you have to think of nothing?

This is the question almost every beginner asks, and the answer is a relief: no.

Try to force your mind empty and watch what happens. It gets louder. Telling yourself “don’t think” is itself a thought.

Meditation works a different way. You give the mind one simple thing to rest on, like the breath or a mantra, and you let everything else drift past. Thoughts will still come. That’s what minds do. You don’t fight them, and you don’t follow them. You notice, and you return.

Over time, the gaps between thoughts get longer on their own. You can’t make that happen by pushing. It comes from resting your attention, again and again, on the same quiet point.

You're not trying to empty the mind. You're giving it a better place to sit.

When feelings come up

Sometimes you sit down to relax and up comes sadness, worry or old anger. This surprises a lot of people, but it’s normal. When you finally stop and get quiet, feelings you’ve been too busy to notice have room to show up.

You don’t have to fix them, and you don’t have to push them away. Let the feeling be there, like weather passing through. Breathe a little more slowly. Then bring your attention back to its resting point.

A good resting point is the middle of your chest, the place people touch when they say “me”, or when they are moved. Yogis have long called it the heart center. Many people find that resting their attention there helps hard feelings soften, and over weeks of practice some notice a steady warmth there: kindness toward others, and toward themselves.

If a feeling is very strong, it’s fine to open your eyes, take a few breaths and stop for today. Meditation is meant to be gentle. If hard feelings keep coming, talking with a friend, a teacher or a counselor can help.

If you’d like a voice to guide you, the Bliss app has guided meditations by Dada Nabhaniilananda (The Monk Dude), the teacher of this program.

What comes next

Now you know how to sit. Next week we look at what stress does in the body, and how a short pause and a few minutes turned inward can help you respond instead of react. Read the next guide.