'Sitting Still' in Meditation
Series: Divergent Obstacles, Divergent Gifts
This series looks at some obstacles neurodivergent people1 face when it comes to meditation, as well as some of the strengths we bring to practice. I’m going to start here by looking in more detail at a common myth: the idea meditation is essentially about sitting still.
If you close your eyes and conjure an image that sums up meditation, what is it you see?2 For me, the archetypal image of a meditator is a figure (actually a male figure, but that’s a story for another day), seated in full lotus posture, hands in some kind of complicated mudra, spine straight. Probably, he’s been sitting this way for hours, sitting with equanimity and poise. I want to say he’s a kind of everyman, some sort of Platonic ideal representing meditators everywhere, but it isn’t true. In addition to being male he’s able bodied and almost certainly young, young enough at least to maintain that demanding posture without injury to hip or knee. And he has probably grown up sitting on the floor – no office job for him, no dinner table, no regulation plastic school chair. This ‘everyman’, on closer inspection, is unlike me and unlike almost everyone I know.
In reality, meditators are a motley crew of genders, ages, ethnicities and social backgrounds (and a neurodiverse bunch too, but I’ll come to that in a moment). Many of us, our postures schooled by environment or age, have to sit on benches or chairs, or lie down to meditate, while chronic health conditions and caring responsibilities mean some of us no longer make it to the meditation hall in the first place. I know all this and yet, despite it, the idealised image remains. I never even clocked it until now: that’s how much I believed it. And I only have to look at the stone Buddhas stacked up in garden centres, or line drawings of meditating figures used to advertise everything from beauty treatments to bank accounts, to know I’m not alone in this.
I have always been good at sitting still while meditating. Lately I’ve realised this might not be such a great thing. Like many neurodivergent people, I learned early to mask my difference using various (unconscious) strategies that included compliance and constant self-monitoring. Perhaps my body once wanted to move. Perhaps, deep down, it still does. But I learned to be careful with it, so as not to give myself away.
At least, I think I did. This process of education is not one I remember and uncovering it feels like a kind of archaeology, based on fragments. When I see other, less masked, autistic people – my son for example – engaging in spontaneous movement, my own body resonates, weeds shifting on the seabed of my experience, as if it remembers something I don’t.
When it comes to my son, I feel an unwelcome ambivalence. I’m proud of his vitality – life coursing through him and expressing itself physically as leaps and hand flaps – and yet, when it encroaches on others, there’s a part of me that wants to shush him, the way I suppose I must have shushed myself. This is an impulse I aim to ignore. To shut down the movement and the noise, I know, would be to shut down something vital in him. His life is fling and dash. He thinks in movement too: as if the bouncing and spinning are mechanisms for releasing ideas. To stop the movement, I believe, would be to stop the thought. It makes me wonder how much is bound up in my own cautious body and whether I might still learn to un-bind it.
The neurodivergent nervous system is a sensitive beast. Often, regulating it takes conscious thought. Without such thought, we might assume that meditation is a relaxing activity, that it would activate the parasympathetic or ‘rest and digest’ branch of the autonomic nervous system. But, for those of us who have grown up using stillness as a survival strategy, it’s possible that – when we require our bodies to stay still against their own (often buried) wishes – meditation might actually put us into a kind of ‘freeze’ state.
It is becoming better known that we neurodivergent people need repetitive movement in order to regulate ourselves. Commonly known as ‘stimming’, this kind of movement can be anything from walking to fidgeting with a fragment of cloth. In fact, stimming is not only kinetic. It also includes the experiencing of visible, tactile or audible patterns in the environment. We might become fascinated with the play of sunlight on a wall, or with a repeating sound. For those of us who have masked our autistic traits, these invisible forms of stimming might be all we have allowed ourselves. Yes, I was sitting still in meditation all those years, but there was often a repeating ear worm of music going round and round inside, or the click and grind of an obsessive thought. Sometimes we look calm when we’re not; sometimes we might even convince ourselves.
At Throssel Hole Buddhist Monastery they sometimes sing a text during morning service with a line in it that speaks to this:
If outwardly all calm we do appear and yet within disturbed should be / We are as if a tethered horse or as a mouse within a cage.3
The text goes on to say that, ‘pitying this plight’, the former sages offered teachings. This line always spoke to me as I recited it. Now I know why.
If the archetypal image of a meditating body creates a myth that idealises stillness and if, for us, stillness is often a form of compliance with the rules of a culture not aligned to our needs, it sometimes feels as if we are left with two choices: to comply or to rebel. When it comes to meditation, neither is helpful. We need to find a third choice, our own ‘middle way’, learning to recognise our needs and trust our sense of things. For those of us who learnt to mask without knowing we were doing it, this might take some work.
Where might we start with this? I’m going to suggest some ideas here, in the hope that you will run them through the mill of your own intuition before trying them: use anything that resonates and discard the rest. Many people find it supportive to learn and practise meditation with a teacher, as part of a sangha. These ideas are offered in the hope they will support that in-person practice:
Move then sit
When I posted on a Facebook group for autistic women to say I was running this series, someone got in touch to say she always does qigong before meditating. Similarly, the physical stretches and postures practiced in modern yoga classes were historically understood to be only the first stage of yoga, and were meant to prepare the body for practices like breathwork, concentration, and meditation. Might your body want to stretch or move in preparation for sitting still?
Meditate while moving
As I understand it, one ‘goal’ of meditation is that it slowly begins to infiltrate every aspect of your life. Meditating in activity is still meditation. While experienced meditators find (I’m told) they can meditate in the midst of a difficult conversation or while approaching a stressful deadline, I still find it easier to meditate while I’m doing something simple and repetitive. For me walking alone in nature works well, as do non-stressful kitchen jobs like carrot chopping, and while doing gentle yoga stretches. For others it might be the repeating patterns of a crochet project or Lego build that offer opportunities to practice.
Practice acceptance
Sometimes, when we first come to practice, it can feel like everything gets worse, but it’s possible that what’s happening is we’re bringing conscious attention to what was already there. So perhaps, at times, there might be a place for ‘sitting with’ the physical tension that can show up during meditation. In acknowledging and accepting how things are, we’re creating the conditions for change. For example, before I started to meditate I don’t think I would have been able to articulate the physical tension I carried in my body – the shallow breath and fixed armouring that came from being in a constant state of vigilance. I thought the way my body felt was just how bodies were. Recognising this experience during meditation over the years has created some space around it: a loosening, a shift.
Redefine ‘stillness’
This is harder to articulate. Spiritual teacher Helen Hamilton suggests that meditation involves focusing on what she calls ‘contextual field’: the space between objects rather than the objects themselves.4 This is corrective: we are so used to focusing on ‘things’ that we miss the formless space and silence that’s here all the time. There is that which has never moved, that which does not come into being and does not die, and we encounter it all the time without realising its significance. Though the physical stillness of a body in meditation represents this greater truth, stillness itself does not rely on any body. In other words, we are free to move as much as we like: stillness itself remains.
The idealised meditation posture has power because of what it stands for – a bright energy, peace, equanimity, and a certain kind of effort. It has nothing to do with self-denial or with physical perfection. Right now, looking at the Buddha statue sitting on my fireplace, I feel a corresponding something within me, even though I’m sitting in a pile on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, laptop balanced on my knees. The image speaks. But it doesn’t, in the end, speak of any particular physical posture, nor of staying still.
So I want to end this essay with an alternative image. It is a person walking on a beach, walking along the shoreline. That’s what I see when I close my eyes. It might even be you: coat flapping, hair flying, joints creaking. You’re drawn in ink. You’re indigo. You walk and the weather walks with you, clouds forming and fleeing like giants above your head, the body turning itself over like a wave. Everything within and around you is moving, the sea and sky a wash of blues and greys, as if painted by a single brush. It’s impossible to know where sky starts and sea stops; there’s no horizon, no edges, except the ones we imagine. You just keep walking, pacing out a repeating pattern. You never pause, not even for a moment.
And this is meditation too. And there is stillness even here, in the breathing, shifting, rush of life. Can you feel it, now, where you are?
The essays in this series, though partly places where I can clarify my own thoughts, are shared in the hope they might resonate with other people exploring neurodivergence and meditation for themselves. That said, we’re all different. What’s true for me might not be true for you. Feel free to take what’s helpful and leave the rest.
If you are looking for more practical support to establish or deepen a meditation practice, I’m currently writing a workbook to accompany this series. It will contain bite-sized information, practices and space to reflect, to help you craft a personalised meditation plan based on your own needs and gifts. More on this soon.
When I use the term ‘neurodivergent’ here, I’m predominantly referring to autistic people and ADHDers. In fact, because this is a reflective essay based on my own experience, I’m mostly referring to this particular AuDHDer. (AuDHD is a term coined by the neurodivergent community and is used to refer to the coexistence of autism and ADHD, the experience of which I recently heard described, quite accurately in my opinion, as being like ‘two cats fighting in a sack’.)
Apologies to any aphantasics reading this!
The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity, second edition. (Shasta Abbey, 1990.)
Such an interesting exploration Sarah. "weeds shifting on the seabed of my experience" what a fantastic lyric!
'my own body resonates, weeds shifting on the seabed of my experience, as if it remembers something I don’t.' Gorgeous writing, as ever...