Sitting Meditation: How to Use Choiceless Awareness and Hara-Centered Breathing to Deepen Your Mindfulness
Most people think meditation requires hours of rigid, uncomfortable sitting. But here’s the truth: the most effective sitting meditation practices work with your body, not against it. In this guide, you’ll discover a scientific, body-friendly approach to sitting meditation that produces deeper awareness with less harm to your body. You’ll learn proven techniques including choiceless awareness meditation and hara-centered breathing—advanced practices that transform your practice from a daily routine into a gateway for cosmic consciousness.
Ready for something practical and powerful? Expect step-by-step guidance on simple setup and eye position, and the 49-minute session structure that prevents drowsiness. By the end you’ll have concrete techniques (timing, transitions, and short meaningful incantations) you can use today to make sitting meditation a sustainable doorway to lasting meditation experience.
Understanding the Modern Approach to Sitting Meditation
Classic sitting meditation is a vital part of all meditation traditions, yet some approaches have become unnecessarily harming. This creates a dynamic of spiritual masochism—the belief that profound truth can only be accessed through willingly endured suffering and physical punishment. However, masochism, in this context, is not an effective path to self-realization.
A more scientific approach to sitting meditation recognizes that physiology is your friend, not your enemy. When you work with your natural body rhythms rather than against them, you experience more intense meditation with significantly less effort and discomfort.
This modern framework incorporates foundational practices like hara-centered breathing—which naturally calms the thinking mind—allowing you to sustain deeper states of awareness without the struggle that traditional rigidity demands.
This shift transforms sitting meditation from an endurance test into a sustainable, daily practice that actually supports long-term consistency and genuine consciousness expansion.
Setting Up Your Space for Sitting Meditation
Choosing an Appropriate Environment
Begin by finding a relatively quiet place to meditate where you will not be disturbed. You may sit cross-legged on a meditation pillow on the floor or in a comfortable chair. Comfort should not be a distraction, but a requirement for sustained practice.
Lighting plays a crucial role in maintaining alertness during your sitting meditation sessions. Natural or soft artificial light helps keep your nervous system engaged, preventing the drowsy, disconnected state that many meditators mistake for deep meditation.
Eye Position and Physiological Stability
Here lies one of the most critical—and often misunderstood—aspects of sitting meditation: eye position.
When you sit quietly with your eyes fully closed in darkness, your brain interprets this as a signal to prepare for sleep. When your body gets ready for rest, it produces melatonin, a hormone that tells your brain, “It’s time to sleep.” This makes you feel drowsy and relaxed. At the same time, your heart slows down and blood flow drops, so your whole body starts to unwind. You feel swept away on a sea of quiet relaxation—but this is light-sleep hypnosis, not meditation.
True meditation means you are relaxed as if sleeping, yet your consciousness remains fully awake.
To achieve this balance, keep your eyes open at least slightly during sitting meditation. You might maintain half-open eyes, or simply let in two small slits of light. If you prefer fully closed eyes, ensure the room remains brightly lit so light passes through your eyelids. This small adjustment makes an enormous difference in maintaining alertness while preserving the profound relaxation that deepens awareness.
Structuring Your Meditation Sessions for Maximum Alertness
The 49-Minute Technique
The most practical solution for sustained, alert sitting meditation is the 49-minute technique. Break your meditation into three 15-minute sitting sessions, separated by brief 2-minute standing periods. This means: sit for 15 minutes, stand for 2 minutes, sit for 15 minutes, stand for 2 minutes, then sit for a final 15-minute session.
This approach largely eliminates physical problems like cramps, soreness, and numbness in the legs—issues that meditation begginers attempting to sit longer than the body can naturally tolerate. The standing breaks increase blood circulation, which directly supports wakefulness and prevents the light-sleep hypnosis problem outlined above.
You can practice this 49-minute technique once daily, twice daily, or three times daily for intense practice. Use meditation apps like insight and Calm or stopwatch timer to mark transitions. Remember that consistency matters far more than complicated practices.
The Meditative Transition Between Sitting and Standing
The moments when you stand up and sit down aren’t just breaks. They are a chance to practice keeping your meditative awareness going while you move. This helps you learn to be mindful all the time, not just when you’re sitting still.
Normally, our waking lives are spent in motion and activity. Real meditation isn’t something done only in a physically rigid state, removed from the world of work and play. The ultimate goal is to become meditative continuously, so your very being becomes cosmically conscious, permanently and irrevocably.
When you stand and sit during these sessions, feel the inner flow of meditation continue unbroken. Observe that your body moves while your existential identity remains unchanged. This integration is where true transformation begins.
What to Do During Sitting Meditation
Relaxing Into Awareness
The most basic approach to sitting meditation is simple: relax, let go, and do nothing. Surrender to the moment and become a silent witness to your own experience.
When thoughts arise, observe them without involving your active participation. Don’t engage, judge, or follow them—simply watch as a detached observer. Feel your most basic, fundamental being. This inherently immense presence is what spiritual traditions respectfully call the ground of being.
Practicing Choiceless Awareness Meditation
Choiceless awareness meditation expands this foundational practice into a portal for unlimited consciousness. Think of your awareness as a glass ball floating in the depth of space. Light and sensory input flow into this field of consciousness from all directions.
In ordinary thinking, you focus attention on just one area of sensory input or create thoughts from stored memory. In choiceless awareness meditation, you abandon this selective process entirely. You simply float, allowing sensory input to flow through you from all directions without manipulating it through thought.
This state—sometimes called “one-object vision” by Zen masters—means you observe yourself, the sky, the trees, and the entire universe as a single unified object. You no longer perceive the world as fragmented, disconnected parts. Instead, you directly perceive the observer and observed as exactly the same thing, with no artificial separation blocking the limits of consciousness. This singular entity becomes acutely aware of itself in all its vastness.
Choiceless awareness meditation is the methodless method that liberates you from the exhausting work of mental control.
Introducing Hara-Centered Breathing for Mental Stillness
Locating the Hara (Energetic Center)
Just behind and below your navel lies the hara. The hara is your natural balancing point of your consciousness and the center of your subtle body. While no one definitively knows what the hara actually is, we can harness its remarkable power.
When your consciousness centers at the hara instead of in your head as usual, your thinking process naturally slows and can even stop. This shift creates space for the expanded world of pure being to emerge.
How Hara-Centered Breathing Changes the Mind
Trying to force distracting thoughts away often makes them stronger and more frequent, creating inner struggle and generating even more thoughts. Hara-centered breathing works differently: by transferring your center of awareness downward to the hara, intrusive thoughts gradually disappear on their own, without struggle or effort.
Trying to force distracting thoughts away often makes them stronger and more frequent, creating inner struggle and generating even more thoughts. Hara-centered breathing works differently: by transferring your center of awareness downward to the hara, intrusive thoughts gradually disappear on their own, without struggle or effort.
The prominent belly seen in many Buddha statues, as the below image shows, or the Laughing Buddha (Budai), symbolizes more than physical abundance—it represents the hara, or lower abdominal center, considered the seat of vital energy in East-Asian traditions. In meditation and martial arts, the hara is thought to collect, store, and radiate life force, grounding the practitioner and connecting them to universal energy.
This inward and outward flow of energy is believed to produce deep inner harmony, manifesting as the serene, blissful expressions on enlightened faces.
While modern science doesn’t validate “chi” or universal energy directly, practices that focus on the lower abdomen, like belly-centered breathing, have been shown to reduce stress, improve stability, and enhance feelings of contentment, reflecting the practical benefits underlying this esoteric symbolism. Learn more on our guide on respirotary physiology and how breathing creates energy and boost health.
Developing Sensitivity to the Hara
Sit quietly and focus on your belly as it moves in and out with each breath. Over time, the hara point becomes increasingly noticeable as your meditation deepens. You already know this feeling which is stimulated during sudden danger or intense emergencies. That shock when you almost drop something, instant panic when a car suddenly swerves near you: these “gut reactions” are hara activation. Learn more on how to conduct deep breathing for health on our article for personalized guides.
You can nourish this feeling through simple, passive attention. This relaxed concentration is close to doing nothing, yet it remains a subtle, powerful effort.
Preparing the Body for Hara-Centered Breathing
Drinking herb tea or hot water before meditation sessions relaxes the gut and facilitates hara awareness. Conversely, overeating and consuming cold drinks make hara sensitivity more difficult to access. Small preparations yield significant results. Learn more on our blog on how to improve gut health.
Avoiding Mantras and Using Meaningful Incantations Properly
Why Long Mantras Can Lead to Sleepiness
Avoid the repetitive chanting of mantras. Repeating the same words endlessly is a method of forgetfulness that bores the mind and leads directly to light-sleep hypnosis. Mantras—defined as repetition of usually meaningless words for two minutes or more—have been used for hours by students who become mentally calmed and dulled by the practice.
A mantra is a word or sound that is repeated over and over to help focus the mind during meditation. Its purpose is to calm mental chatter by giving the brain a simple, repetitive task.
While mantras may provide temporary medical benefits by releasing calming hormones, they remain fundamentally different from true meditation, which relies on the purifying fire of self-observation.
Using Short, Meaningful Incantations
Meaningful incantations differ profoundly from mantras and can bring consciousness to greater clarity. The human brain is a word machine that processes symbols. Repeating powerful phrases like “I am the space…I am the space…I have always been the space” for up to two minutes focuses consciousness on the infinite. Done longer, the words lose meaning and degrade into a mantra.
As the research article on how advanced meditation alters conciousness outlines, real meditation produces a naturally calm and expanded state of consciousness—not just an artificially silenced mind that remains fundamentally shallow.
Understanding Self-Inquiry Incantations
Self-inquiry incantations form strategic questioning, not repetitive mantras. Speak these phrases aloud with total intensity before or during formal sitting meditation. By the term “total intensity” I mean the same level of intensity you would feel if you were just told that you had only one hour left to live. Be emotional, be Italian, use your hands and body language if it helps. The phrases are:
- “What is this ball of consciousness?…What is this ball of consciousness?…What is this ball of consciousness?”
- “I am not this!…I am not this!…I am not this!”
- “I am the space…I am the space…I have always been the space.”
Invoke these questions from the hara center, not from your head. Resonate the words deep inside yourself without intellectual analysis. Over time, these words become triggers that allow you to instantly drop all trival concerns and return home to your true cosmic being.
Integrating These Practices Into Your Daily Life
Becoming Meditative in Action
Real meditation doesn’t end when you stand up. Meditation continues in movement, speech, work, and the transitions between activities. Choiceless awareness meditation becomes a state you carry throughout daily experiences, transforming ordinary life into sacred practice.
Developing a Continuous State of Expanded Being
Consistent sitting meditation combined with hara-centered breathing creates long-term transformation. The small “I”—your limited ego identity—gradually dissolves. The big “I”—your cosmic, universal nature—emerges as your permanent reality.
Final Thoughts on Building a Personal Practice
As your awareness grows, your methods will evolve. Some techniques that feel foreign now may become essential later. Follow what resonates while returning to the essentials—sitting meditation, choiceless awareness meditation, and hara-centered breathing—as your foundational tools.
Your methods may change with time. If you try them and feel nothing then concentrate on other methods first. As you slowly change, your methods will change with you. A method that is unusable now may be of great help to you in the future. However, your commitment to deep, awakened presence remains constant. This is the path to a naturally calm, expanded, and liberated life. You can learn more on the benefits of meditation for mind, body and spirit on our article.
FAQ Section for Sitting Meditation
Why is sitting meditation better with eyes slightly open rather than fully closed?
When you sit with your eyes fully closed in a dark room, your brain receives a signal to prepare for sleep. This triggers the release of melatonin and other sleep-inducing hormones while reducing circulation and heart rate. The result feels like deep relaxation, but it’s actually light-sleep hypnosis—not true meditation. In genuine sitting meditation, your consciousness remains fully awake while your body is deeply relaxed. Keeping your eyes slightly open or half-open maintains physiological alertness, allowing you to access profound awareness without drifting into sleep. This is why experienced practitioners understand that sitting meditation with proper eye positioning is far more effective than traditional closed-eye approaches.
Why do I feel sleepy during sitting meditation, and how can I stay alert?
Many people become drowsy during sitting meditation because the brain interprets closed eyes and darkness as a signal for sleep. Keeping the room bright or allowing a sliver of light through partially open eyes prevents this. Using structured timing—like the 49-minute method with short standing breaks—keeps the body alert while deepening awareness. This approach supports wakefulness, especially when practicing techniques like choiceless awareness meditation.
Can beginners practice choiceless awareness meditation, or is it too advanced?
Yes, beginners can practice choiceless awareness meditation, but it’s helpful to start with simple observation first. Instead of trying to focus on a single object, choiceless awareness allows all sensations and thoughts to arise without preference. When combined with relaxed posture and hara-centered breathing, this method becomes accessible and deeply effective—even for those new to sitting meditation.
How does hara-centered breathing improve my meditation experience?
Hara-centered breathing shifts attention to the lower belly, which naturally quiets mental chatter and stabilizes the nervous system. This grounding brings the mind out of the head and into the body, making sitting meditation calmer and more focused. By breathing from the hara, you reduce overthinking and enhance awareness without forcing control—ideal for both beginners and experienced practitioners