From Ron Crouch's Aloha Dharma website:
"One thing that beginning meditators often get confused about is the importance of posture. It simply isn’t as important as it is often made out to be. Forget what you may have been told about sitting in full lotus and becoming like a Buddha statue – you don’t need any of that. There is nothing magical about difficult sitting poses, and if they are painful for you please don’t use them. They are the product of a particular culture and time, and have very little to do with waking up itself. If you find that sitting on a meditation cushion gets you in the right frame of mind, then go for it, but please don’t think that the cushion or the particular posture does anything special to wake you up. It doesn’t.
What is needed for productive meditation is to simply strike a balance between being comfortable and alert. You should not be in pain and you should not be too comfy. You don’t want to spend the whole meditation session gritting your teeth and wishing it were over, and you also don’t want to be so relaxed that you fall asleep. I prefer to meditate on a folding beach chair that is not very cushy. It is comfortable enough that I can sit for extended periods of time, without being so comfortable that I snooze."
