Soisci Porchetta spent years teaching movement, building range of motion, getting comfortable on the floor. She ditched chairs like the movement culture teaches—open up the hips, squat, elongate. Floor work became her default. Then she went to a meditation retreat and discovered that sitting in a chair for hours made every joint in her body ache.

“It’s really going full circle from: We ditched chairs and, open up the hips and the spine and the ankles and the knees and squat and elongate positions… And I do a lot of stuff on the floor. I’m most comfortable on the floor. But I think, like, if I can’t sit comfortably in a chair, something is not right as well!”

Wait. Movement practitioners pride themselves on rejecting chairs, on reclaiming natural positions, on being comfortable on the ground. But Porchetta’s saying if you can’t sit in a chair, that’s a problem. What happened to chairs being the enemy?

This reveals something important about the difference between capability and ideology. Movement culture often frames ditching chairs as liberation—you’re freeing yourself from furniture dependence, returning to positions humans evolved for. Squatting, sitting cross-legged on the floor, these become markers of proper development. The chair becomes a symbol of modern dysfunction.

But notice what happened to Porchetta at that retreat. Elderly practitioners sat comfortably for hours while she, the movement teacher with all her hip mobility and floor practice, squirmed in discomfort. She’d developed the capability to not use chairs, but she’d lost the capability to use them. That’s not freedom. That’s a different kind of limitation.

The distinction matters. Being able to sit on the floor but choosing a chair is capability. Not being able to sit in a chair because you’ve rejected them is ideology masquerading as ability. Real capacity means you can do both—floor and chair, squat and seated, ground and furniture—and choose based on context rather than conviction.

Think about what it means to specialize so completely in floor positions that you become uncomfortable in chairs. You haven’t transcended modern furniture. You’ve made yourself less adaptable. The person who can only be comfortable in chairs has a problem, yes. But the person who can only be comfortable on the floor also has a problem, even if the movement culture celebrates one and criticizes the other.

This connects to a broader pattern in movement practice: mistaking rejection for mastery. Ditching shoes doesn’t mean you’ve mastered foot strength—it might mean you’ve just avoided situations that require shoes. Refusing assistance doesn’t mean you’re independent—it might mean you’ve simply limited your activities to things you can do alone. Avoiding furniture doesn’t mean you’ve developed natural movement patterns—it might mean you’ve just narrowed your environmental range.

Porchetta’s “going full circle” insight is that maturity means reintegrating what you initially rejected. You start by using chairs unconsciously, the way everyone does. Then you discover floor work, ditch the chairs, develop hip mobility and comfort on the ground. But the full circle means coming back to chairs—not out of defeat or regression, but with the capability to use them comfortably when the situation calls for it.

This is harder than it sounds because movement culture creates identity around rejection. You’re the person who doesn’t need chairs, who sits on the floor at parties, who makes a point of squatting instead of using furniture. That becomes part of how you understand yourself as a practitioner. Admitting that you should also be able to sit comfortably in a chair feels like backsliding, like admitting you haven’t actually transcended modern dysfunction.

But Porchetta noticed something that challenged this: elderly meditation practitioners who could sit still for hours. They weren’t movement specialists. They probably weren’t doing daily hip mobility work. But they had something she’d lost—the ability to be comfortable in a basic seated position without requiring special accommodations or constant fidgeting.

The humbling part is recognizing that your elaborate movement practice might have made you less capable in some ways, not more. All that work opening your hips and improving your squat is valuable. But if it came at the cost of being able to sit normally in a chair, you’ve traded one limitation for another while telling yourself you’ve achieved freedom.

Going full circle means developing enough capacity that you’re not ideologically committed to floor or chair, squat or seated, shoes or barefoot. You can do all of them comfortably. The floor work isn’t about rejecting chairs—it’s about having the option. The squatting isn’t about proving chairs are bad—it’s about expanding your range of comfortable positions to include both.

This reframes what capability actually means. It’s not about what you can avoid or refuse. It’s about what you can access when needed. The truly capable practitioner isn’t the one who never uses chairs because they’ve transcended them. It’s the one who can sit comfortably in a chair when at a wedding, on the floor when playing with kids, in a squat when working in the garden—choosing based on context rather than ideology, comfortable in all of them because they’ve developed actual capacity instead of just rejecting options.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Faith – with Soisci Porchetta,” published November 15, 2023.