As a practitioner of mindfulness meditation for 46 years, and a teacher of it for 25, I’ve followed the rise of the mindfulness movement over past two decades with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s been refreshing to see something I so value getting some airtime. On the other hand, its popularization, a.k.a. McMindfulness, has trivialized the practice beyond recognition, depicting it as a faddish skill you can pick up over a weekend. Mindfulness isn’t a new way to think or an attitude to adopt. It’s a practice, a way of being, diligently cultivated over time. It saddens me to see so many apostles of mindfulness, who clearly don’t practice it themselves, monetizing it.

People who truly practice mindfulness truly grow and change. Research shows that equanimity, emotional maturity, discernment, self-awareness and resilience are but a few dimensions of this growth. These attributes have been shown to correlate with personal effectiveness, wellbeing and even leadership. But such outcomes result from sustained practice, not flowery talk or one-off exercises. Given this distinction, I will be devoting several articles on my coaching blog to mindfulness practices you can undertake now.

Origins of Mindfulness Practice

Despite recent publicity, contemporary psychology and modern medicine didn’t discover mindfulness. Mindfulness has been around a long time and has a rich and distinguished legacy.

The tenets of mindfulness were expounded in the Buddhist Sutras, recordings of the historical Buddha’s sermons over 2500 years ago—specifically in the Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutra).¹ Mindfulness has always been part and parcel of yoga practice, as outlined in the Yoga Sutras of Putanjali, written between the 5th and 2nd centuries BCE.² Mindfulness practices also are featured in time-honored Taoist texts and in the teachings of their related movement system, Qigong, where the three adjustments are variously called the Three Intentful Corrections, Three Treasures, Three Regulations or Three Mindful Points of Focus.^3,4 And mindfulness is the heart of Chinese and Japanese Zen teaching, as elucidated in the writings of the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji (1200-1257).⁵

Though we may quibble over what to call the three mindful adjustments, there’s little disagreement as to what they are. Wherever you look, mindfulness is to be enacted by adjusting your body, breath and mind. These three adjustments are not only prime considerations for meditation practice. They are to be extended to every bodily position and human activity.

This article will focus on the application of the three mindful adjustments to the upright, seated position, where we sentient beings spend about 60% of our waking lives. A later post will explore how the adjustments apply to two other waking activities we do a lot, standing and walking.

Mindfully Adjusting the Body

The watchwords for adopting a mindful bodily orientation while seated are stability, alignment and ease.

Stability means you begin by making the body’s foundation strong and secure. To establish such conditions while seated in a chair, start by scooting slightly forward on the seat so your spine is self–supporting. Place both feet flat on the floor, hip width apart. There should be some weight on your soles, which can only be accomplished if the hips are higher than the knees and the thighs roughly parallel to the floor. This position is not possible in a low chair or on most sofas, which place your knees above your hips, throwing your torso backward. To remedy this, place a cushion or folded blanket on the seat until your knees are lower than your hips. Make sure your weight is distributed not only on your sitz bones, but on your feet as well. This four–point stance is critical to stability.

Our next watchword, alignment, means your spine is perfectly upright, your body balanced and symmetrical throughout its length. You accomplish this by making sure:

• Your nose is in line with your navel.
• Your shoulders are lowered, parallel to the floor.
• Your ears are in line with your shoulders.
• Your spine leans neither left, right, forward or back, but is perpendicular to the floor in all directions.

You want to elongate your spine, creating a sense of space between each vertebra. To do so, imagine a string attached to the crown of your head (the back part where your baby soft-spot once resided). As the string lifts your crown upward, the S shape of your spine straightens some. In this position, you feel a sense of balance, with little effort required to keep the spine in place.

Place your hands palms up or down on your thighs. Release all tension or pressure in the shoulders, arms and hands. Allow them to dangle loosely like wet spaghetti. It’s especially important that your hands and fingers are relaxed and open. When your hands are relaxed, your whole body tends to follow suit.

The position of the head and neck is paramount. Think of your head as an extension of your spine, effortlessly balanced atop the cervical vertebra. This presents a challenge for most Westerners because we tend to tilt our heads with the neck jutting forward and chin raised, hallmarks of hurry, anxiousness or aggressiveness. But for every degree that your head tilts forward, it effectively grows pounds heavier due to gravitational torque, meaning it takes far more effort to hold it up. Instead, pull your chin in and tilt it slightly down so the chin-line is parallel to the floor. This will have the effect of lengthening the back of your neck. It will also place the crown of your head at the zenith. In contrast, the Western head position tends to place the frontal region of the skull highest, reason for many a visit to the chiropractor.

A few other fine points regarding your head and face. The lips and teeth should be lightly touching. This gives your jaw an easy, unclenched feeling, loosening your neck muscles and reducing tension in your temples. Relax your brow completely, making your forehead smooth as silk. Release those lines. Similarly, let the muscles surrounding your eyes completely relax. As you do, let your gaze—but not your head—naturally drop to a 45° angle. Your eyes have a soft focus, looking at nothing in particular and nothing in general.

Every aspect of this mindful body disposition is conducive to health and wellness. The straightness of the spine lifts the anterior rib cage, increasing lung capacity and freeing your diaphragm’s range of motion. This motion is the reason for expansion of your abdomen, sides and lower back and also gives your internal organs a gentle massage, releasing pleasurable hormones and supporting deeper, easier breathing. You feel good all over. Simply adopting this seated bodily orientation cultivates a sense of wellbeing and calm. Your journey into mindfulness is well underway.

Mindfully Adjusting the Breath

When your body is mindfully oriented, you’ve established ideal conditions for mindful breathing. Every bone and muscle in the respiratory train is aligned and relaxed. Our watchwords now are to breathe naturally. Natural breathing, however, is not to be confused with normal breathing. What you’re going for is something you don’t need to learn per se. You were born with it. Just watch newborn babies in action. They breathe slowly and easily, all the way down to the bottom of their bellies. Chest, diaphragm, back and abdomen all expand and contract smoothly and rhythmically. Unfortunately, time, socialization and anxiety all erode this intrinsic capacity we each had. Instead, we take normal breaths—short, shallow and at a rate so rapid as to border on panting.

The challenge therefore is less about learning how to breathe right than unlearning how to breathe wrong. The first step forward results naturally from having your mouth closed: breathe through your nostrils. This will immediately slow your breath rate and eliminate gasping and gulping of air, which induce stress. Step two is to allow the breath to fill your entire upper body—not just the chest, not just the diaphragm, not just the lower back, not just the obliques, not just the abdomen—but all of the above. When you are breathing like a baby, your entire torso will increase in volume like a balloon expanding. Often this is called abdominal breathing, something of a misnomer. During mindful breathing, not only do the front ribs, diaphragm and belly expand, so do the rear ribs, obliques and lower back in the region of the kidneys. I prefer to call it whole body breathing.

Breathing in this way is like becoming one with the tidal flow at the seashore. The tide slowly and steadily roles in, slowly and steadily rolls out, all with a gentle, calming sensation. At each cycle’s end or turning point, there is a slight pause, a sort of bounce, where the breath hovers before turning around. This subtle turnaround point is pivotal in mindful breathing, because it tends to be the point where our minds drift.

The physiological benefits of mindful breathing cannot be overstated. Practicing in this manner will literally change your life, and for plenty of good reasons. Figure 1 depicts the typical Western breath cycle, a.k.a. normal breathing. The breath rate is high, between 12 and 20 breaths per minute for most adults. As a function of this high rate, the amplitude of inhalations and exhalations is meager. In laymen’s terms, normal breathing is fast and shallow. Many of us habitually breathe in this way, and it physiologically induces anxiety. Note also that during normal breathing your lungs never empty. A large residual volume of gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO₂) and nitrogen, sits in the lungs interminably. The faster and shallower you breathe, the greater grows this residual volume of gases you’d be better off eliminating.

Mindful breathing reverses all of these conditions, as depicted in Figure 2. First off, the breath rate slows down dramatically, typically to a rate one–half to one–forth of normal breathing. Experienced meditators breathe only once or twice a minute, so deep are their breath cycles. As your breath slows, it naturally tends to deepen, expanding your entire torso, as mentioned. This depth applies not only to inhalations, but to exhalations as well. You thereby have cultivated a situation where more oxygen is coming in, and present in the lungs longer, for friendly red blood cells to pick up. You begin to feel more alive and energized. Meanwhile, deeper exhalations slash into your residual lung volume. That means fewer stagnant gas molecules will be hanging around. The effect of expelling more CO₂ is especially salient, since CO₂ is a major culprit in lactic acid production, the stuff that tightens your muscles and makes endurance athletes “hit the wall.”

The bottom line is that the deeper and easier you breathe, the more a relaxation response wells up in your entire body, a virtuous cycle. Some people feel a “buzz,” only without harmful side effects, a feeling of being lighter, calmer, more at peace. In Buddhism this state is known as samadhi, dhyãna or jhãna, states of tranquility you extend into your everyday life and precursors to wisdom.

Mindfully Adjusting the Mind

Great news. If your body and breath are mindfully adjusted, chances are your mind will be right where it needs to be. The watchwords for your mindful mind–state are simple: let go. Consider the words of 13th–century Zen Master Dogen in the Fukan Zazen-gi on this way of mind:

“Drop all relationships, set aside all activities.
Do not think about what is good or evil,
And do not try to judge right from wrong.
Do not try to control perceptions or conscious awareness,
Or attempt to figure out your feelings, ideas, or viewpoints.
Let go of the idea of trying to become a Buddha as well.”⁶

Sounds like the ideal activity of the thinking mind when it comes to mindfulness is no activity at all. Indeed Dogen goes on to describe this state as not thinking, which can only be achieved through—you guessed it—nonthinking. Some texts compare this nonthinking state of mind to the spaciousness of a blue sky on a cloudless day. If a thought happens to fly by, just like a bird or cloud, no problem. You simply watch it come and watch it go. The fact that you see it means you’re not clinging to it, so you won’t get taken for a ride.

Another mindfulness metaphor compares the still mind to water in a pond or brook. If you drop something onto the bottom and want to retrieve it, you don’t go thrashing about, stirring up the sandy bottom. Better to be still, let the cloudy water settle and clarify. Then you can gently reach down and find what you need.

Even so, sometimes thoughts creep in and grab hold of your mind when you’re not paying attention. Next thing you know, you’re off to the races on some fantasy wild–goose–chase, theoretical machination or problem–solving expedition you didn’t actually choose. That’s what the thinking mind likes to do—wander. Some say it just wants to be helpful, others suspect it just wants to be busy. But mindful sitting is your chance to give your thinking mind a break. Why not invite it to go on vacation while you’re sitting there mindfully? It certainly could use some well–deserved rest and recovery.

Mindfulness is Always at Hand

Again and again, when mindfully sitting, come back to your body, back to your breath, back to letting all thoughts go free from your mind. In other words, chill. And every time you come back, you return to your natural state of being, free from your thinking mind’s obsession with doing. The way of mindfulness is like opening your hands to let birds fly free and clouds disperse in the wind. Ultimately, every time you foster stability, alignment and ease in your body and create deep, sigh–like breaths in easy rhythm, your mind will settle down. Fun fact: a tense mind cannot exist in a relaxed body.

And the beauty of mindful sitting is, you can practice it almost anywhere. Try it in your office before a big meeting or presentation. Test it out while waiting for the church service to begin. You can sit mindfully while waiting in the airport or for the bus or subway. You can even sit mindfully while waiting for your friend in a coffeehouse or cafe. Not only will you feel the difference. People you meet will intuit your greater centeredness and calm and sense that you’re listening more attentively and receptively. Indeed you are.

And mindfulness really matters to your quality of life. Your clear, open mind, like a perfect panoramic mirror, is ultimately the field where your whole life experience plays out. To practice mindfulness is to cultivate a richer life, a life more appreciated, savored and valued. And best of all, the three adjustments—body, breath and mind—never leave you. No one can steal them from you. Wherever you are, however you feel, whatever you’re doing, they’re right at hand. The three mindful adjustments are now, and shall always be, your lifelong best friends.

1. Analayo. (2003). Satipatthana: The direct path to realization. Cambridge, UK: Windhorse.
2. Bryant, E. F. [Transl.}. (2009). The yoga sutras of Patanjali. New York: North Point Press.
3. Cohen, K. S. The way of qigong: The art and science of Chinese energy healing. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.
4. Jahnke, R. The healing promise of qi: Creating extraordinary wellness through qigong and tai chi. New York: Contemporary Books, 2002.
5. The art of just sitting: essential writings on the zen practice of shikantaza, 2nd ed. John Diado Loori, Ed. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications.
6. Dogen, Z. M. & Uchiyama, K. (1983). From the Zen kitchen to enlightenment: refining your life. [Thomas Wright trans]. New York: Weatherhill.