Sitting Comfortably: Preparing the Mind and Body for Peaceful Meditation

Description

Sitting Comfortably is a guide to setting up your long-term healthy and enjoyable meditation practice. This is the only book offering a comprehensive approach to the preparation for sitting meditation without aches and pains. Meditation practice can be blocked by aches and pains felt while sitting. This allows the jittery mind to take up residence, and leads to the feeling of "not being good at meditation". Sitting Comfortably explores the physical issues that may arise while sitting, from painful knees to tight hamstrings. Swami Saradananda shows how yoga preparation, breathing and adapting postures can help to strengthen the body to be able to maintain a sitting meditation. She invites us to understand how the mind can easily be distracted, like a puppy, and that physical discomfort can often be this distraction in disguise. This is the only book to focus on the physicality of a formal meditation practice. Helping prepare the body for the mindful practice of meditation, so that mind and body are in synchronicity. It will be an invaluable reference guide for students of mindfulness, yoga, Buddhism, as well as New Age traditions. The book is broken down into 8 chapters, including- Overcoming obstacles to meditation; The art of sitting for meditation; Stretches/yoga poses that can help you sit comfortably; Breathing exercises (pranayama); Diet and lifestyle; Off your cushion and into the world. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this is the ultimate guide to preparing to meditate.

Swami Saradananda is an internationally renowned yoga and meditation teacher who has inspired thousands of people to practice. She has been teaching for almost forty years, and is the author of a number of books, including The Power of Breath, Chakra Meditation Relax and Unwind with Yoga, Yoga Mind and Body, The Essential Guide to Chakras and the upcoming Mudras for Modern Life. For 26 years, she worked with the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres and directed their facilities in New York, London, New Delhi and the Himalayas. After an extended period of personal practice in the Himalayas in 2001, she was author in residence at the Peacemaker Community in Western Massachusetts, and she then went on to direct yoga and meditation retreat Haus Yoga Vidya, just outside of Cologne, Germany. For the past few years, she has lived between London and New York but she spends several months each year teaching in Germany and several more in India. Swami Saradananda teaches yoga worldwide, leads pilgrimages to India and writes extensively. She is also a trustee of the Ganga Prem Hospice, a charity that is seeking to build a cancer hospice in Rishikesh, North India.