I ended my last post in this series on savasana with this:

Regardless of what happens in savasana - you sleep, you cry, you think your head off - doing it with awareness and the intention to practice conscious relaxation is the most important part.

Practice being the key word. 

The benefits of savasana are more pronounced when you commit to it, and do it with dedication...making it a practice, not just a mechanical pose you do. Like any pose, if it is practiced you will learn more about it. Think about the first time you did downward dog, or think about the intricacies it would take to learn headstand. The care and attention taken for any yoga pose, must be present for every yoga pose. Savasana should be given the same attention. 

Perhaps one of the biggest disservices we yoga teachers do to savasana is doing it without much instruction or guidance about how to BE in the pose. Often, savasana is done as a short pose at the end of a class, where it feels like an afterthought, or cool down period at the end of a workout. Even worse, some classes skip it entirely. And yet, savasana is the one pose that highlights and embodies the true heart and purpose of yoga, and therefore, arguably the most important pose.  

Scholastic knowledge about the pose isn't enough - it needs to be experienced. Experienced repeatedly, under many conditions, in many frames-of-mind and body and with an air of discipline. This practice will change your experience, until it becomes more than just another pose, and develops into a way of being. 

What is there to practice? 

Practice being still: In savasana the body is passive and still. Ensuring the body is comfortable, balanced, and stable is a good starting point. Then, notice any fidgeting and distractions that arise in the body. Practice managing these with awareness and focus, eventually the body will be silenced (effortless stillness that expands into the mind). From there,

Practice turning the senses inward:  This is the fifth of the eight limbs of yoga - pratyahara - the inward turning of the senses. Our senses are constantly stimulated. In savasana you practice softening the senses, so you are less distracted by your external environtment and more focused internally. For example, practice: closing your eyes by relaxing your eyelids over the eyeballs, keeping the ears quiet and receptive but not blocked, relaxing the jaw and resting the tongue as though you were sleeping, and relaxing the muscles and pores of the skin so the nerves held within are at rest. Soft senses mean less outer stimulation. 

Practice focusing the mind: The element that makes savasana savasana and not just lying there, or sleeping, is the focus of the mind and alertness of the intellect.  This takes HUGE amounts of practice because it's very normal and common  for the mind to waver, race and think. In savasana, you practice focusing and concentrating the mind, learning how to bring stillness and silence to it. You are practicing cognitive awareness and flexibility. 

Practice Emotional flexibility: It's common for emotion to arise in savasana. On your yoga mat is a relatively safe place to practice emotional awareness and release (instead of a room full of people at work, let's say), thereby developing emotional flexibility and resilience. Practicing on the mat, prepares you for practice off the mat, in real life when the going-gets-tough.  
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Practice not daydreaming or sleeping:  Practice not sleeping or mentally checking out. Savasana involves engagement of the mind through focused attention and alertness. At first, daydreaming, mentally checking out, and sleeping can happen quickly. With repeated practice of maintaining alert attention, while relaxing the body, sleep will happen less frequently. Coincidentally though, the more you practice savasana, and the more your relaxation response becomes used to being activated, actual sleep at bedtime may improve. 

Savasana may be uncomfortable at first. That is a good thing. Being taken out of your comfort zone when you have the time and space to dedicate to the moment is the best way to practice. Over time, you may become more aware of thought patterns, (eg. I'm stinking' thinking again...) or you may become more aware of how you embody emotion - your "tells" or signs of when you've reached an emotional limit, and you'll be able to slide into conscious relaxation more easily. With practice, these skills strengthen, are more easily accessible, and you can begin to use the skills in a wider variety of areas. ​

And to clarify - the goal of practicing savasana isn't to become "good at" it. The process of practicing prepares you to cultivate a sense of conscious relaxation, inner awareness, and alertness during difficult times and challenging states of mind/emotion. What you practice on the mat, is a tool for riding the waves off the mat. ​

If you need help learning how to drive your savasana car, consider my online program options...

My online yoga programs are an excellent way to experience and practice savasana. At the end of each video in the8-week online program, there is a long savasana with instruction about focusing the mind and dealing with emotion, followed by a period of silence. In fact, I start the classes with savasana as well...and often do it in between poses too. 

The Mindful Relaxation guided audio practice, can be a helpful way to practice focusing the mind. 

If you need some guidance and gentle, compassionate support in your own time and space, check them out. 

I started this post about savasana to be a short newsletter. Quickly, though, I realized that there is so much to this pose than it appears and my "short newsletter" has become multiple blog posts. How? You may ask. How can a pose that is 'just laying there' require so many words and explanations?

There are a few reasons for this:

1. There many misconceptions about savasana. It's importance is often skimmed over in a yoga class. By some savasana is seen as the boring part of a yoga class, by other's it's nap time. It's so much more than that. 
2. In savasana, the practitioner is required to pay close attention to the body and mind, which one could argue is present in every yoga pose, but in savasana with the body being still and passive, the mind is more apt to run amok. For some, savasana is anxiety producing due to the influx of emotion and racing thoughts once the body becomes still. 
3. Relaxation, on a broader scale, is elusive in our culture. In a society that won't stop talking and moving, we have become habitually tense and avoidant of situations that may cause an influx of emotion and racing thoughts.
4. Savasana is one pose that highlights and embodies the true heart and purpose of yoga. There is a lot to say about that...

I'll explore all of these reasons in this series, but I'll start with one of the primary misconceptions:

It's actually called Corpse Pose ​

This one may not be a misconception, but a misnomer. Calling savasana a relaxation pose is accurate, but 'relaxation' is not the direct translation of the word savasana and as such, it doesn’t really capture it’s entire meaning. 

I am guilty of side-stepping this actual translation and purposefully calling it "Relaxation Pose." I do this because I am sensitive to the fact that it might be a trigger for some people in the grief support group, especially without more context about the deeper meaning of the name.   

As with other aspects of grief and emotional awareness, authenticity and calling something what it actually is can be  helpful. So I explored it, which is how this post came to be.

I found what B.K.S. Iyengar says about savasana in Light on Pranayama to be enlightening: 

"Ending the heart-aches and shocks the the flesh is heir to."

I know that for myself, I was always oddly perplexed that I was doing 'corpse pose' when death was so front and centre in my life. The way I reconciled the name corpse pose with practicing it after a death, is that it was a practice of complete and total surrender (surrender: to cease resistant to).

I found it easy to cease resistance to the fatigue I felt in my body and to slip into the stillness and silence of savasana. Mentally surrendering to the reality that grief eradicated my life as I knew it felt congruent because so many parts of me died when Cam died. The hard part was the SURGE of emotion that would spontaneously arise, making the supposed-surrender all the more complex and at times seemingly impossible. It did not feel like 'relaxation' as suggested by the Iyengar in the quote above.

He says, "remaining in a state as in death and of ending the heart-aches and the shocks that the flesh is heir to." Before you can end the heart-aches and shocks (maybe 'live-well-with' is a better word than end?) you must experience them in a way that integrates the heart-ache and shock reality into our life. Feel it to heal it.

When Iyengar says "ending" the heart-aches and shocks" I don't think he means permanently ending. We are human after all, and of course, heart-aches and shocks will happen throughout life whether we want them to or not. I think he means that in between the surges of thought and emotions there are moments of complete and total stillness that are void of thought, emotion and suffering. It is in these moments that you can truly relax.

The practice of savasana is to cultivate the ability to stay conscious of everything that is going on within you so that you can learn how to extend those spaces of stillness a little longer each time. Becoming still in the body and witnessing the impermanence and  flow of thoughts and emotions is the doorway to conscious relaxation. More broadly, savasana teaches you how to manage life's ups and downs with less reactivity and more equanimity.

Another way to look at corpse pose is seeing it as the conscious awareness of death, and how parts of you and your life "die" everyday, especially after a major loss. Savasana, as a daily (or often) practice is quite literally, the practice of dying everyday;  letting go of what we can let go of (like the constant and sometimes unhelpful chatter of the mind, for example) and appreciating some of the deeper chords that link us to life (awareness of the preciousness and fragility of life and relationships).

​At the end of savasana when you slowly  begin to move your body and deepen your breath, you are symbolically "beginning again." This idea of continually re-opening or re-beginning is a major part of integrating your yoga practice into your life and feeling recuperated from it.  

Regardless of what happens in savasana - you sleep, you cry, you think your head off - doing it with awareness and the intention to practice conscious relaxation is the most important part.

I hope you've enjoyed my take on corpse pose and I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to comment below. 

Stay tuned for the next post where I will look more deeply at savasana as a practice.  
 

Through out this post I've referenced Light on Pranyama by B.K.S Iyengar. There is a wonderful chapter in the book on savasana and I recommend it as a resource. 

Another one of my favourite books which looks at relaxation in a broader, more practical "off the mat" sense is Sabbath by Wayne Muller.