Eyes and Hands during meditation, what are they doing?

[thelerner]

How are your eyes during meditation?  Are they closed, open, half open.  Is your mental focus still going on through your eyes, ie eyes closed but focused on the third eye?  Or eyes half open focused on the floor or the tip of your nose? 

 

Hands, too?  How are you keeping them.  From relaxed on lap to formal 'Zen' bridge?  Any formal mudras.  Are they on your lap, your knees or against your tan tien?

 

What are you doing hand and eye wise and why?

 

 

 

These days I'm sitting half lotus, and switching from my normal eyes closed to half open focused loosely at the tip of my nose.  My hands are relaxed fingers together and against my dantien, ala Movement Stillness style gi gong.

[Spotless]

Eyes Closed

 

Attention rests center of head or general magnetic center extending from below 1st chakra to well above head.

 

 

Hands open and resting upon knees - back of hands to knees - palms up.

 

 

Full Lotus, Half Lotus or Sitting in chair or Standing.

 

(sometimes hands are in Zen bridge - particularly in public events)

Edited January 29, 2017 by Spotless

[C T]

The Bodhisattva posture (or some would call the half lotus). 

 

Spine straight but not rigid. Neck should align correctly and comfortably with the spine, shoulders untensed always. 

 

Palms on knees, eyes opened but held in a soft, relaxed, open gaze but not at anything in particular. 

 

Breathing from the abdomen. 

 

Some call this the mountain posture. 

 

Suzuki Roshi encouraged practitioners to sit as though supporting the sky with one's head, and a Tibetan master said when one sits, sit with the feel of being like a majestic mountain. Both of these are apt descriptors for getting to the optimum posture where sitting meditation is concerned. 

 

In truth, there is no one ideal posture or adoptive style of meditation conduct. Comfort and ease is the primary objective. If not, even the subtlest muscular tension will lock itself in, compress, and invariably find a way out. Because body and mind are conjoined, that tension will seek expression via the mind, taking the mental route. Each time there is sitting practice, its helpful to develop some awareness of this and gradually learn to diffuse any and all tenseness where noted. 

 

In Tibetan meditation practices, it is said that for some practitioners, being in the comfort zone for extended periods of time can sometimes lead to stupor. It becomes addictive. The advice given so as to avoid that unfortunate state is to suffuse the ease with keen awakeness - thats why, in that tradition, there is little encouragement to close the eyes. Also, its good to alternate sitting stretches with short breaks, yet without losing the continuum of meditative state of body-mind already achieved. 

 

Generally, any contrivance or force is a sign that some basic guideline has been neglected - and if the basics are ignored, it follows usually that there will be no positive yield.