Introducing Ecology of Sitting
Support and encouragement for your sitting practice.
We welcome you to the Ecology of Sitting, a series of brief posts designed to support your regular sitting practice and encourage your deepening path as a sitting practitioner.
Ecology of Sitting is not a curriculum, a program, or a technique. Instead, we view it as a means to publicly begin reimagining the practice of meditation in ways that make it more vital, relevant, and beneficial for our time.
With short, daily offerings, we aim to humbly, creatively, and organically share our thoughts on how to seed the emergence of something vital and transformative—with the hope of enabling more people to live with a deeper sense of presence, connection, compassion, coherence, and care—for themselves, for their communities, and for all living beings.
Each entry in this series is designed to serve as a daily companion for those of us who are recognizing and reorienting to a world that is no longer sustainable—both within and around us. The series is envisioned as a hybrid of unfolding, emergent experiences, decentralized intuitive learning, deepening practice accelerators, and daily inspirational messages.
The posts are designed to support your personal practice journey while inviting you into a collective field of practice that essentially has no rules, no limitations, and no boundaries. It's a daily encouragement to open up to the possibilities of how a sitting practice might change your life. Not with more effort but with a sense of gentle release and caring permission to explore, to not-know, to experiment, and to find your unique way forward.
Each entry is a call to participate in something larger than yourself, to learn, to unlearn, and to relearn. This is not a framework to help us solve life’s problems but an invitation you might get from a friend to touch life more deeply and slowly begin to create the conditions in our life for deep, adaptive transformation.
Each day brings a weird hand-drawn image of a human being sitting, a short reflection on how we might reimagine meditation as more tailored and relevant for our contemporary meta-crisis landscape, and a verbatim, lightly edited transcript of a talk given at Sitting Lab that guides people into silent practice. The format is short and straightforward. The depth is up to each of us to find.
Each post is an actual human record of why and how the practice of sitting looks and feels like it does. They are not deliberately mysterious, but they may be difficult to understand or resonate with if you do not have a regular sitting practice. That’s why we also encourage you to join us at Sitting Lab for regular daily practice.
We envision three essential qualities to the posts we offer here at Ecology of Sitting. These qualities are more like an aesthetic, or “vibe.” Our intention is not so much to teach or to define, as to give you a felt sense of different ways we might think about the practice of sitting.
These qualities are:
Suggestively Organic.
Not being too obvious. Practicing restraint in terms of explanation and instruction. Suggesting rather than trying to reveal everything. Presenting a picture of practice as an organic, unfolding, emergent process—in soft, muted colors, the poetry of unfinished lines, and images that invite our imagination to play.
Irregularly Creative.
If we were a product, perfection would be an appealing quality. However, since we are discussing an emergent process and a relational system of practice engaged in by human beings, perfection is not only unappealing, but counterproductive. Irregularity encourages participation and attention. An uneven—yet safe and supportive—imperfection invites everyone into a field of acceptance.
Slowly Feeling Our Way.
At Sitting Lab, we want to do as little as possible. The ultimate goal of our sitting practice is to do nothing. We present things in plain words that feel basic, fundamental, and comes directly from our own experience—no fancy theories or philosophies. We’re weaving a simple, plain fabric. As if walking together in an open dirt field. This doesn’t mean a lack of depth. It means feeling our way to new paths of possibility.
The daily Ecology of Sitting posts are for those who:
Are tired of struggling to maintain a meditation practice alone and curious about practicing together with others in community.
Have a sense that there’s more to meditation than trying to control the mind, or counting breaths, or swatting away thoughts.
Feel the pull toward a form of practice that emphasizes exploration, experimentation, and self-discovery and doesn’t require buying into a closed traditional system or Buddhist lineage.
Throughout this ongoing series, you’ll be able to:
Learn more about how, at Sitting Lab, we practice every day with simple yet powerful guidance of humble, dedicated spiritual mentors.
Learn what makes the practice of sitting different from both traditional meditation and contemporary mindfulness.
See new ways of using a meditation practice to sense, feel, and relate to the actual circumstances and challenges of your life.
Develop depth in your practice through a regular experience of embodied awareness, poetic inquiry, and relational, caring support.
Move toward a way of being in the world that brings more joy, kindness, wisdom, and compassion to every moment of your life.
What we will explore at Ecology of Sitting is not meant for your self-improvement. It’s not designed to help you master an ability to meditate or attain complete enlightenment. It’s also not encouragement for you to retreat from the responsibilities and engagement with everyday life.
It’s much bigger than that. It’s wide, in terms of boundaries (interbeing), and long, in terms of time (interbecoming). Our belief is that the way to the other side is through, not around. It’s in meeting this moment, fully. It’s about showing up, for ourselves and each other, ready to help, with kindness and compassion.
We hope that what we offer—at Ecology of Sitting and Sitting Lab—inspires more people to stop and turn inward. To give ourselves permission to pause each day and take a long and loving look at the worlds inside us, so that we can more deeply understand ourselves. And to explore, with joy and tenderness, so that we might come stumble upon new paths that enable radically different perspectives, patterns of meaning, and ways of being in our lives—ways of being that serve us better and serve life better.
Ecology of Sitting is an encouragement to you and others with their antennas up, to settle into a deeper, more grounded space of awareness, together. To individually and collectively align with our deeper intentions. To develop a more intimately connected, deeply felt sense of safety, support, and belonging in our lives. And to become the fullest, biggest, baddest version of ourselves—beyond what we can currently even imagine.
That’s why we want to help you practice. Because the only way to become more fully present and awake in our lives is to practice being fully present and awake.
This is reimagining meditation practice. It is bringing us together to uncover, one breath at a time, how we can grow into our fullest, best version, inspire and encourage each other, and create the conditions for a transforming world.
We hope that you enjoy the Ecology of Sitting and we wholeheartedly invite your contributions to the ongoing conversation.
The Sitting Lab team.
Each weekday a small group of us sit quietly together, four times a day, using Sitting Lab’s community platform. We invite you to check it out and join us if you think having a regular, deepening sitting practice might help you become the best and fullest version of yourself.