The
Hardest (and Most Popular) Pose: Savasana
by Doug Keller
One
summer afternoon an athletic-looking young man entered the studio
where I was practicing yoga. I noticed him as he stood gazing about,
and before long his gaze came to rest upon me. I was doing a rather
unassuming hatha yoga posture at the time, which seemed to provoke a
question from him.
"What
do you think is one of the most difficult hatha yoga postures, if not
the most difficult?" he asked.
The
question, of course, carried a challenge. The pose I was doing was
difficult enough, but I described a more flamboyant pose to satisfy him
and demonstrated the motions for getting into it. He paused for a moment
to consider, then sat down, took his leg behind his head, lifted himself
up on his hands, and did the pose just as I had described it -- drawing
upon what seemed to be a very natural physical ability.
He
came down gracefully, eyeing me for some acknowledgement. I obliged him,
praising the beauty of his pose, and described to him another -- which
he also performed with the same ease. This time his look -- which seemed
to say, "So what's the big deal about yoga?" -- made me
realize that I had been doing neither the practice nor him much service.
"Would
you like to know the most difficult posture -- the one that is still
difficult even after you have mastered all the others?" I asked.
He
braced himself for a challenge worthy of his mettle and nodded with
expectation.
"Lie
down on your back, feet together, hands at your sides. Find the center
line of your body, from your head to your heels, and center yourself
upon that axis – and close your eyes." I said.
He
did so, but his brow darkened with the suspicion. "This isn't a
trick," I said. "Turn your attention inward toward your heart.
Follow your breath inside to the heart. Keep your focus inside, and let
go of the body."
"Oh,
like meditation" he said.
"No,
this isn't even meditation -- you're not even doing that. This is the
posture called savasana, the corpse posture. This is the posture of
being nothing at all. You don't do anything. You're nobody. Just relax
completely."
Then
I fell silent and sat back to watch. At first there was a hardness about
his face -- at the corners of his eyes and beneath his eyebrows -- which
I guessed to be a little confusion and irritation, since he was in
unfamiliar territory. At first he held his body apart from the floor, as
if unwilling to surrender to it. Yet almost in spite of himself, he
began to soften in stages as his breath became even and his limbs
lightly twitched as he dropped inward, past subtle inner barriers. His
face described an array of moods that shifted like the sky at sunset,
until all expression waned and he became still and quiet as twilight.
After
some time I softly told him to let his breath deepen, and I slowly
brought him out of Savasana. He was silent -- there was little to say.
His face was soft and glowed with a hint of tenderness.
"Nice." he said, trying to sound indifferent, but his eyes
betrayed him. He had emptied himself and found something unexpected --
something that didn't fit into his usual framework of experience.
I
just nodded.
More
than in any of the other scriptures of yoga, you'll find in the texts of
hatha yoga countless paradoxical references to how, through the practice
of hatha yoga, one may "conquer death" and, by the same token,
conquer time. I can hardly think of a more difficult or sobering
challenge. Yet I call these references paradoxical because none of the
writers of the texts are around to tell us what this means. And so their
meaning remains something of a mystery, one worth looking into.
Savasana,
more than any other pose in hatha yoga, is at the crux of the mystery,
and is really the culmination of a practice. This "corpse
pose," in which one lies still as if dead, is an act of profound
surrender. The yogi, rather than congratulating himself for the progress
made in his practice, instead lays back on the floor with open palms and
lets it all go, as if he relishes oblivion. The end of his striving is a
release, a death. Yet by this dying daily in his practice, he begins to
assimilate his practice and penetrate the meaning of his death -- and of
his life and his yoga.
This
assimilation takes place on a very practical level. A lot gets stirred
up in your system during a practice of hatha yoga; the tissues of the
muscles and digestive system in particular are cleansed of toxins.
Without a period of rest after the practice, the toxins can go right
back into the tissues from whence they came; rest is needed for some
time to allow the body to filter the toxins out and ready them for
disposal. This in itself rejuvenates the body, bringing freshness to it.
It stops and even reverses the wear and tear of the body by which toxins
build up and deplete the tissues, causing them to tire and age.
Hatha
yoga honors the practical wisdom of this practice as well as its
spiritual significance. Savasana refreshes the soul no less than the
body because it reverses our habit of expending energy for the sake of
accomplishment. This habit -- our life of striving for success -- is the
path of time and death that the scriptures mean to conquer. They teach
that the process of depletion that accompanies our striving is overcome,
not by abandoning work and activity, but by relinquishing its fruits.
This
seems to turn everything on its head -- and it does -- but it shows a
profound understanding of the burdens we really carry. In practice as in
life, completion comes with letting go -- not of the practice or the
will to practice, but of the fruits, the small victories wrung from our
efforts. Those victories, when clung to, really drain us. It takes a lot
of energy to keep polishing our trophies, and ultimately death takes
them from us anyway. So why not, the yogis ask, die before we are dead,
and see if death might then lose its sting?
Savasana
is precisely this practice, and it provides an experience of being
nourished by letting go. The texts of hatha yoga describe this practice
as a participation in the "inversion" of the whole process of
creation and manifestation of the cosmos. The world, having come forth
into its full glory, must also dissolve and resolve itself into the
elements from whence it came. Creation is complete when it resolves
itself back into its origin and is renewed.
Savasana
enacts this dissolution of the cosmos in our own body. It's practiced
with the understanding that by this act of dissolution we regain for
ourselves the perfection and completeness that was ours before all time
and all creation, before all activity. By this "death" we
return to our greater Self and experience the true completion of our
efforts as something that is anything but oblivion.
The
hatha yoga text called the Shiva Samhita describes this inverse process,
as witnessed by the yogis in meditation, in terms of the dissolution of
the elements: the element earth becomes subtle and dissolves in water;
water dissolves in fire, fire in air, air in ether, and so on until
everything is reabsorbed into the Great Brahman.
The
yogi practices this same reabsorption and resolution in savasana.
Savasana begins with careful placement of the body, so that we begin in
a very balanced state. We start with the feet together, checking to see
if the place where the heels touch is in line with the center of the
heart and the top of the head.
Carefully
balancing the body on its centerline, neither favoring one side nor the
other, brings the whole of our personality into balance. Often the body
tilts toward the more dominant and stronger side of the body. But
balance must include our more reticent side as well; otherwise attention
and energy swells the dominant side, feeding its aggressiveness and thus
our restlessness.
The
arms should be placed only fifteen to thirty degrees out from the sides
of the body, so that the diaphragm is relaxed and free to breathe. Bend
your elbows and gently press the backs of the upper arms into the floor;
then lift your collarbones slightly up toward your head and draw your
shoulderblades down your back, so that your upper back can settle down
flat on the floor. Then release your arms down to the floor, palms
facing up and relax. The sides of your upper chest, beneath the armpits,
should feel open and expanded; your neck should feel released. Soften
your fingers and thumbs, and allow them to gently curl.
Savasana
is a process of release and descent, as if you're sinking into the earth
-- or into yourself. Once the body is placed well, relaxation begins
with the neck and head. The senses need to turn inward -- and the
struggle to bring this about usually manifests in the face and throat.
Soften and lengthen the back of the neck, letting it extend toward the
crown of the head. The energy of your awareness then flows up and over
the crown of the head and down the forehead. With this, the bridge of
the nose -- where the eyebrows meet the nose -- turns parallel to the
floor, bringing a sense of balance. The chin should lift slightly
upwards to balance the descending motion of the head, so that the chin
does not press into the throat. The lengthening of the neck, descent of
the forehead, and subtle lift of the chin brings a sense of lightness in
the head and relaxation in the throat.
The
flow of energy throughout the body is felt as a lengthening and
broadening of the back of the body, even as the senses -- usually
experienced at the front of the body -- descend inward. The eyeballs
themselves should feel heavy and fall inwards, as if they are shrinking
and descending and you shift to a different way of seeing, as if you
were looking out through the center of your forehead without the use of
the eyes at all.
The
breath helps you in your descent. Keep the inhalation of normal length,
but allow the exhalation to draw out long and feel the skin soften and
melt with it. The inhalation is like a parachute that slows your
descent; the exhalation gives a sense of settling inward. You follow the
exhalation as it slowly fades like the peal of a bell into silence. As
you listen to the breath, you feel suspended on the thin line of your
awareness, as all else falls away.
At
this point the experience of the body often becomes more elemental. The
weight of the body is felt less as a 'body,' and more as the element of
earth itself; you release that weightiness and allow it to merge with
the earth. You begin to become aware of all of the elements present in
your body and release each back to its source, feeling this as a
dissolution and merging with your surroundings. You allow the element of
water, the fluidity of the body, to become calm and pool in the belly
like a quiet pond. Your breath merges with the air all about you, until
you lose the distinction between inside and outside. Your sense of space
expands to swallow any distinction between yourself and your
surroundings. You become aware of the landscape of your body as being
like the landscapes of the hills and meadows, of mountains and quiet
watery coves. You watch over this quietly, with a sense of calm.
A
number of students have told me how at this point of relaxation they
have an experience of light inside the head. I have had this experience
too -- sometimes as distinctly as a vision of the sun or the moon,
sometimes as an undifferentiated and bright yet soothing light.
Everything else seems to dissolve away into darkness as your attention
is drawn toward this light. After some time you come out of this state
of savasana feeling completely refreshed.
One
professional nurse shared with me how, after coming out of one such
savasana at the end of a hatha yoga session, she felt renewed even
though she had been feeling sick, and was able to be at her best during
an extraordinarily trying weekend at her hospital. She attributed it to
her experience of that light in her savasana.
The
yogi's quest, according to the texts of hatha yoga, is to conquer time
and death -- but not really by defying either. The yogi conquers death
by a surrender to something even greater than death. By that surrender,
death is not so much denied as put in its place; likewise, time is seen
to be but a limited point of reference for our present sense of self.
Savasana -- the practice of dying -- is a practice of putting everything
in its place and looking beyond the immediate to find the Truth.
Complete
surrender is the culmination of diligent practice, great faith and
tremendous devotion. This in itself seems daunting -- yet there is
always an element of grace that makes a taste of what lies beyond the
darkness available to us all. Each taste makes death -- which is really
the death of the ego, not of the Self -- a little easier, and so we
return to taste it again and again for nourishment to keep us going.
Savasana
is a practice that is integral to the spirit of yoga, for yoga is an
offering of ones efforts without regard for success or failure. It is
the most difficult 'pose' in hatha yoga because it is an act of setting
aside all posing -- of undoing our very sense of self, rather than
adding to it. Yet it is by this offering that through yoga we conquer
time and death by putting an end, once and for all, to our fear of both.
Doug is a celebrated
teacher and author whose works include: Anusara Yoga and Refining the
Breath: Pranayama in the Anusara Style of Yoga, The Heart of the
Yogi - all available to purchase on his website: www.doyoga.com.
Doug teaches in classes and workshops at his home base in Herndon,
Virginia and also travels both nationally and internationally offering
advanced workshops and teacher trainings.
Please visit his website at:
www.doyoga.com
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