The Soul Seat Journey in 7 Milestones
This is the first of three blog posts where I’ll outline our Reverse Hero’s Journey within three domains: Sitting Mastery, Systems Mastery, and Biome Culture Mastery. By age two, most of us had already mastered sitting (the best posture of our lives). We all had mastered the microbiome as a child (the healthiest gut culture of our lives), and by age four, we were mastering systems thinking as well (willing to ask ‘why’ multiple times). The focus of this first post is our origins as master sitters. I’ll detail the other two domains in subsequent posts.
Unlike the standard hero’s journey, the Soul Seat Journey we’ve observed runs in reverse.
The typical hero’s journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell and immortalized by filmmaker George Lucas, begins with our hero in familiar surroundings but possessing no remarkable abilities. Some event forces them to venture away from home. Here, our hero is challenged and transformed into a more masterful version of themselves. This journey concludes with the hero’s return home, highlighting the remarkable contrast to their modest beginnings.
When our customers begin their Soul Seat journey, they’ve drifted far from a mastery of sitting and are noticing the painful consequences. With some effort and camaraderie from other creative sitters, we can regain much of that original mastery once again.
Though we describe this as the Soul Seat Journey, it doesn’t even require the ownership of one of our products. A Soul Seat is one solution, but there are numerous paths to reclaiming your original master-of-sitting status.
Milestone 1: Meet the Master
You see, we all started our life as masters of sitting. Here’s a visual example of the mastery we all enjoyed like this toddler in a Swedish diaper commercial, effortlessly leading an advanced yoga class of adults. I see it every day in my two-year-old granddaughter as she commands the floor. She has the best posture of her life, as you did at that age.
Often the midpoint of the traditional hero’s journey is where an epiphany occurs and the hero realizes a major change she must undertake. We started noticing this moment in the Reverse Hero’s Journey when Ikaria Design was just a small startup sharing space with other artists at Orr Street Studios. Folks would come by and encounter this unusual chair for the first time. Most visitors were fully expecting to have an uncomfortable experience on this odd chair. We would often have to cajole people to try it out as they looked askance, projecting what they assumed would be a painful sit.
However, once they settled in and started to notice how balanced and comfy they felt, they would get this faraway look and would often let out an exhale of relaxation and recognition. We saw this phenomenon so often that we began dubbing it the “Soul Seat Sigh”). What we came to discover was that this relief and memory washing over their faces and relaxing their shoulders was a remembrance of what sitting felt like long long ago (on a reading rug far far away).
My first awareness that I was on this odyssey was decades before the Soul Seat was invented. I was a student teacher on my first day in a kindergarten class. I was shocked at how uncomfortable I was, sitting on the reading rug with the students. Here I was, in my early twenties, and already I couldn’t hold court with these five-year-olds. I, who had gone to state tournaments as a gymnast in high school, who did handsprings across the court at my college's basketball games. What had happened to me? Looking back now I see that this was my midpoint. I began to ask the questions that would eventually lead me back to enjoying a mastery I had lost.
We hope that the Soul Seat Journey framework helps you realize that it hasn’t been your fault. It took me quite some time to discover the true villain, that the culprit for my immobility is a culture-wide problem folks the world over are struggling with. Take a look at the copy-cats to the Soul Seat and all the alternative seating designs that have come before, and you’ll get a sense of how global this loss of sitting mastery has become.
Milestone 2: The Psoas is Compromised
The second milestone in the Soul Seat journey is when your sitting mastery starts to be gradually compromised through the wearing of diapers, hours spent confined in car seats, strollers, and high chairs. We’re so resilient we hardly notice, and our caregivers don’t notice the cost either. But our psoas is slowly getting shorter and shorter, and this network of three intelligent muscles is slowly fusing together with adhesions to become one mass of uncoordinated tightness.
Milestone 3: Graduation to the School Desk
The next milestone, number 3 is when we are “graduated” from the reading rug to the school desk. This is when the adults start to notice that our posture is sagging. But rather than alter the path that led to this, we get blamed and admonished to sit up straight. Those of us who refused to tolerate this early indoctrination into being sedentary were often punished for “not sitting still”. I had a conversation just the other day with a teacher who said they are still requiring students to sit with feet solidly on the floor, knees and hips at 90 degrees, and no criss-cross applesauce.
Milestone 4: Numb The Pain
This is where many of us have lost the trail, and begin searching for solutions that numb the pain or distract us, blaming ourselves for our painful, unfocused condition. Because the world around us has been built and organized around the chair, the couch, the bucket car and plane seats, it’s not surprising that we’ve concluded that the problem is us. It’s hard for us to see that a master skill has been gradually squeezed out of us. From age 8 to age 28 or beyond, this is where we conclude that floor sitting isn’t very comfortable, and at the same time begin the fruitless and perennial search for what will make chairs more comfortable and tolerable. We may collect lumbar bolsters, all types of pillows, and gadgets so we don’t wake in the morning with a crick in our neck. We’ll try various pain relievers and different versions of ergonomic chairs. All the while the solution has been right under our feet.
Milestone 5: The Soul Seat Sigh
You might get an inkling of this epiphany at the end of a yoga class when you notice that sitting on the bolster felt completely different than at the beginning, or you're sitting on a downhill slope at an outdoor event and notice how much easier it is to keep your back straight. And then you decide, “I’ve got to do something about this!” You may find yourself thinking, “I used to be able to sit as easily as that toddler over there.” And instead of saying “What’s wrong with me” you instead ask “What was done to me?” You’ve now externalized the villain and can start to make some real progress.
Milestone 6: The Turning Point
This is the turning point when you decide to recommit to daily stretching, or try a yoga class for the first time. Over time, you become convinced that you aren’t the villain. The villain is this worship of the easy chair and sitting with knees and hips at 90 degrees all day long. You may hack together a standup desk. You start standing up at meetings, you start choosing the floor when you can. You start working on your capacity for deep squats.
One of the folks who came by our place at Orr Street Studios was a lab technician at the University of Missouri. She never became a customer, because she didn’t really need to. She proudly showed me her oversized coffee table she and her friends built so they could play board games and stay sitting on the floor. Her experience on the Soul Seat was a moment of permission to bring floor sitting back into her life.
Another visitor dropped by our studio, took off one of his shoes and beamed at me as he showed off the bendy sole. After he noticed I didn’t get it, he said, “Look at these shoes, I had been wearing orthotics for the last few years, and now after squatting and doing those stretches you showed me, I’m also back to running. I’ve been able to throw away the orthotics that made me feel so decrepit!”
Milestone 7: Return to Mastery
The last milestone is marked by when you first notice that you’ve been sitting comfortably on the floor for five minutes or more. You develop a preference for certain sorts of chairs (or no chairs at all). You become aware that many chairs tilt backwards and you find that very odd. You begin noticing how deep a bench needs to be for you to fold up an ankle or both.
You know you’ve arrived at this milestone when you receive the following comment for the first of many times, “Here, let me get you a chair”, or “What, isn’t my furniture good enough for you?” And you realize the deep cultural roots of your previous pain. My wife, Rebecca, and I had a layover at the airport in Charleston, South Carolina. As usual, we found an open spot on the terminal floor to camp out. A woman approached us after a bit and said, “I’ve been watching you two and am curious how you’re going to get up off the floor.”
One of our own customers showed us a whole new trajectory for our products. She had so successfully rehabbed her hips and psoas that she asked to sell her Soul Seat back to us and purchase a Flow Desk. Now our Buy Back Promise helps facilitate this milestone for anyone. If you’ve never owned a Soul Seat, it’s certainly possible that you’ve reached this stage by other means. You may have created your own floor desk, thrown out the overstuffed couch long ago. You may have gradually acquired firmer and firmer mattresses until you now sleep on a tatami mat, or right on the floor. You have embraced the leverage that the floor provides so much that you want to provide it to your body all night long as you sleep. Here are some YouTubers who have documented their return to the floor and away from unneeded furniture. You can search “Furniture Free” as well to find other examples. Please share with us any resources you find.
Bonus Milestone: The Guide
One of the main characters of every hero’s journey is The Guide. And in this reverse hero’s journey, we’ve enjoyed playing the role of guide to customers and fans throughout the years. Once you’ve seen the journey, you’ll begin seeing the cultural and physical artifacts of it everywhere. The role of guide is open to us all. You can start to notice all the toddlers in your life, be inspired by their mastery, and decide to be the relative or friend that plops down on the floor with them, making a significant contribution to the trajectory of their journey. You can hold your tongue when tempted to offer a chair to someone who has chosen the floor. You can advocate for a colleague who may be the target of some snark simply because they are choosing to sit weird.
Simply focusing on your own recovery of sitting mastery will not only transform you, but as folks notice you making healthy choices, it will transform your community. You become the local guide for those in your circle of influence. The bit of wisdom, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears”, works in both directions. Your job will be to start noticing when the learners are showing up for inspiration. A couple of years ago, I was visiting a restored Frank Lloyd Wright house in nearby Arkansas. I chose a spot on the heated floor. As I was taking in the beauty, several other tourists joined me there. A little permission is often all we need.
Help us make this Reverse Hero’s Journey shorter and shorter until no one has to give up a master skill they worked hard to achieve by age two.