Back in the day, meditation was synonymous with sitting. 

This is because people spent their lives on their feet and moving around, so the best time for rest would be when they stopped and sat on the ground.

Nowadays most of us sit for a living, distracted by our tasks and our technology, so we have these associations with the act of sitting itself. Consequently when we sit even if we are trying to meditate, our mind is constantly on the move.

In many ways it would be more appropriate for us to use standing as a meditation, because no one just stands still.

One of the reasons for that is that they can’t. Because their very method of standing is not a relaxed one, it is full of tension.

It is all a question of balance.

Or rather it’s a choice – balance or tension. 

Balance for two legged creatures is a tricky business. We are 5-6 ft tall, with the main weight on the upper half of our body, perched on two poles with two very small platforms.

If you were designing a structure to stay upright, you wouldn’t come up with one like this. For it to stand up and stay up, a considerable amount of attention is required simply to stop us falling over.

For human beings the very act of standing requires a great deal more consciousness than for animals.

Evolutionists would say that bipedalism happened because walking on two legs made it easier to forage and travel on the ground. Which is a simple way of saying that they don’t really understand how or why it happened.

Travel would obviously be much faster with four legs, just watch a cheetah. And monkeys are quite capable of using their arms for both travel and foraging.

Standing on two legs both resulted from a greater level of consciousness. But it also needed that awareness to maintain it.

Since we evolved however, the act of standing for most people has become more and more habitual and less conscious.

Try this. Just stand in your normal way, the way that feels right to you.

Ask yourself where on your feet do you feel the main weight.

As an Alexander teacher for 30 years I have asked thousands of people this question.

About 80% of them would say mostly on the balls of their feet. 

But if you think about it, the design of the body is such that the weight is evenly distributed through the legs and comes down over the back half of the foot, the heel bone is designed to take it.

So if our weight is mostly on the balls of our feet, by rights we should fall over.

How come we haven’t? Because balance has been replaced by muscle tension, to try and pull us back to avoid toppling.

Now our balance might be only out by a few degrees, but the further up the body we go, the more compensatory tension we need just to stay upright.

The calf muscles tighten a bit, the hip and lower back muscles tighten more and the ones that do much completely unnecessary work are the neck and shoulder muscles.

Why does this happen? How is it that we have reached the point where we are constantly out of balance and requiring complex patterns of tension just to remain upright.

We weren’t born that way. When we started learning to walk, we had to deal with a much more complex situation because the relative weight of our head to our body was much greater as a 1 year old than it is now.

And back then we did not have tension as a possibility. Holding contracted muscle tension would be an anathema for babies. For them the choice is stark, it is balance or floor.

This is why they fall over so much in those early attempts. It also explains why it takes a human a whole year to manage what most animals do within a few hours of being born.

But once they have the balance, they are up and running.

Why do they lose it? Because unlike animals they are taught and conditioned to consider the future.

This happens slowly and imperceptibly, but gradually increasing with age.

We think that mind and body are separate, but they absolutely aren’t. The brain and body are connected.

If we are thinking about the future, we are very imperceptibly drawn forward physically. A consequence of this is that we have to compensate by pulling back, particularly around the head and neck area.

This retraction creates a spiral effect, it tends to push the lower body forward a bit more, with the consequent need to pull the head back even more to maintain some sort of balance.

This retraction of the head is not just a physical thing, it massages our fear reflexes. We become apprehensive and afraid about the very future that we are striving towards. While going forward we are at the same time pulling back to the past.

This might not seem like much on its own, but if we think of millions of movements over many years, executed in this way, this gradually creates a situation where our bodies are carrying many thousands of times more muscle tension than is actually needed to perform our daily tasks. And our brains hold onto the past because it gives us the delusion of security.

All of this builds so slowly that it seems perfectly natural to us.

Our brains are a great computer, every single act that we have ever performed is recorded there.

When we get the idea to walk to the shops, the brain looks in the file marked how to do it, sees a whole load of information there and sends that through the nervous system to the muscles.

But this information is no longer accurate, it is based on experience rather than an objective assessment of what is required.

The brain will give much greater consideration to the more recent information on the files, rather than the more accurate stuff that was there when we were young children.

So even though we are using literally thousands of times more muscle and mental tension than we actually need for each task, we are convinced that it is absolutely required because that is what has accumulated slowly over the years on the files in our brains. So it feels right to us to do so.

This might seem like bad news, but it does offer us a way out. It is possible to consciously update and improve the information stored on those files.

And even though we are attempting to do something that will impact our whole balance, the easiest and most responsive place to work would be at ground level, because tiny adjustments there would have a huge knock on effect as the body compensates.

Try standing still for a short while. It’s best if possible to do it barefoot on a natural surface like grass or sand.

Think about the underneath of your feet, put your consciousness there and feel your contact with the ground.

The more you spread your feet onto the ground, the better and more secure your balance will be.

This may feel difficult to do at first, because as part of our shifting weight forward over the years, the balls of our feet and the base of our toes have become harder and stiffer. But if you practice it for a few minutes each day, it will gradually become easier.

Allow your weight to come back a little towards your heels, not so much that your toes raise up, it’s important to maintain as much wide contact with the ground as we can.

At first this may feel very wrong, because your brain will tell you that this is not what standing feels like. You may feel that your head moves forward giving you the impression you are about to fall, but as long as you keep your feet very spread out, you won’t topple over.

With repetition, slowly over time your brain will adjust to include this new way of standing because it will acknowledge that it is more efficient and stable than what you have been doing in the past.

You will also find that gradually it allows your mind to become quieter and more present as well. You will become more secure and grounded, simply by making the tiniest change.

It is all a question of balance.