7 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Soul Seat
Even if you don’t yet own a Soul Seat (perhaps you’re saving up for your first one), you can make good use of many of these. Tips 1-4, and 7 do not even require a Soul Seat at all.
We’ve outlined the Soul Seat journey elsewhere (scroll to the end to learn more), but in case you don’t know, you can travel the Soul Seat journey to sitting mastery even if you never own a Soul Seat. Even more exciting for us are the customers who utilized their Soul Seat to traverse that journey to sitting mastery completely and then sold their Soul Seat back to us through our BuyBack Program and then either purchased a Flow Desk or built their own.
Here are the 7 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Soul Seat:
1. Whenever possible take advantage of the leverage the floor provides. Aim for a minimum of 30 minutes of floor sitting each and every day.
2. Get educated about how plastic and reconfigurable our connective tissue is. Take some time observing how toddlers move around and ask yourself what happened in your past that may leave you with less of that mobility now.
3. Stretch before bedtime and in the morning before starting your day. Unless you’re sleeping on the floor like I do, and you’ve gotten a good 7-8 hours of sleep, you may not have moved much. If you stretch before bed and then again on waking, you’ve helped your body deal with the longest period of inactivity.
4. Don’t forget to squat. For some folks, this is the posture they turn to most when using their Soul Seat. You may need the Soul Seat’s perch (smaller cushion) a little higher when you first start. If you place your laptop on a Flow Desk or a low coffee table, this is a good opportunity to squat.
5. Keep experimenting with different configurations of your Soul Seat. Raise the perch, turn the Soul Seat around, and use it as a stool with your feet on the ground. In this way, it can function like an adjustable ball chair. As you find your hips opening up more and more, experiment with removing the perch entirely and sitting on the “raised floor” that the butterfly cushion provides. Are you changing the height of each cushion occasionally? We’ve had customers who forgot to experiment with different perch heights until after they had been sitting daily on their Soul Seat for months, and sometimes years.
6. Relocate your Soul Seat. Try it at the dining table. Have you used it for playing your favorite video games? Set it up at a kitchen island. Place it somewhere you tend to stand but would like to rest one knee and then the other knee on it. Take it out on a patio, deck, or porch - just remember to bring it back in (we don’t have the weather-resistant version, yet!).
7. Challenge conventional sitting culture wherever you can by choosing the floor in social settings and take note of how it makes you feel, both physically and emotionally. Notice the comments people make and get creative about your responses, like, “My physical therapist has prescribed the floor for me, I need to get in my dose of floor sitting for today, but thank you for offering me the chair,” etc. Who knows, if you are successful enough at this last tip, you may never need a Soul Seat and we can all meet together in a world of master sitters. If we can work together to change the culture of sitting, just think of all the follow-on effects that will have.
The Soul Seat Journey in a Nutshell:
We like to describe the Soul Seat Sigh, that moment when folks first sit on a Soul Seat and realize the familiar feelings of once having been a master of sitting. We see the recognition spread across people’s faces like a sunbeam as they settle in. You may have had a similar feeling at the end of a stretch or Yoga class when sitting on a bolster was so much more comfortable than when the class started. Or you may have noticed that sitting cross-legged on a grassy hill was somehow comfortable, but not when you try doing it in a chair.
These moments are revealing for most of us able-bodied folks. There was a time in our lives, roughly ages one until eight when we were masters of sitting anywhere. The Soul Seat chair and other products from Ikaria Design are crafted to help us make the journey back to the re-mastery of sitting. We’ve already accomplished it once in our life, and thousands of Soul Seaters can testify to being able to reclaim it again.
We are so confident in the reality of this journey that we promise to buy back any Soul Seat purchased. We have a number of customers who have done just that, having chosen to make the floor their home again.