This week's phrase comes to us from Buddhism:

行住坐臥
gyou ju(u) za ga
go stop sit recline

In modern Japanese, 住 normally refers to making one's home someplace (住む, 住所), but originally it meant simply "stop", "stay in one place", and that is the meaning here.

You hardly see 坐 at all these days -- 座 has replaced it in most contexts, although originally the two meant different things: 坐 was used for the action of sitting, and 座 indicated a place one sits. (In fact, it's more common to write this phrase 行住座臥 nowadays, but 行住坐臥 is the original.)

臥 comes from 臣 + 人. 臣 was originally a picture of an eye looking downwards, means (among other things) "to put something down"*. Add the 人, "person" radical and it means "to put one's person down", i.e. to lie down and/or sleep.

行 has pretty much always meant "go", but I will note that according to this wikipedia article the specific Sanskrit word being translated as 行 here is gamana (गम्मन). And yes, I did only mention that because I wanted to have Sanksrit on this page.

So, the idea is that these characters summarise every kind of action a person can take, and they are referred to as the 四威儀, "four dignities" -- yet another example of Buddhism's fondness for classification and listing things. Note also that the list is organised in descending order of difficulty.

(I seem to recall this list being used in the context of Zen as the basis for an argument that sitting zazen is the most ideal state for human beings, since "going" and "stopping" (standing) are too difficult to be prolonged forever but "reclining" (sleeping) is too easy to be worth doing for long.)

Nowadays, this compound is also used in non-religious contexts to mean simply "at all times", "whatever you're doing". There's even another version 日常坐臥, which replaces the first two characters with 日常, "everyday" or "regular" and uses "sitting and reclining" as shorthand for all four actions.