to rest/not rest: a savasana post

Tell me that it wasn’t savasana that ignited your initial love affair with yoga asana… I mean, you can try. Or, it is ok if you say no, that wasn’t it and I will put some effort toward believing you. As someone who has always loved, but mostly hated, being high, savasana after the first class I ever took catapulted me into a state of being that I had no sense that I could really access without some plant or chemical assistance. I mean, it is this amazing thing that we just never do. Or, I had never done. Structured rest. Communal, quiet, nothingness. Conscious letting go. Every altered state that I had ever found myself in up to that point was like a random crap shoot. Even now, when I experiment with that just right amount of edibles looking for a relaxation that doesn’t tip over into stoned, I am far too uncomfortable with the unpredictability of it. I mean, yes please but probably, no thank you.

It is profoundly organized in its simplicity. If you can stay and be still and relax your control: body, mind, breath; then right around the 6 or 7-minute mark, the nervous system switches from sympathetic to parasympathetic and the deep rest, reset, renew, takes over. It is so good. Clear and crisp yet also diffuse enough to get a true sense of the expansiveness, or emptiness, of consciousness.

And yet. How many times when I am practicing on my own do I skip this opportunity for a deep reset? (ahem, most, cough, cough). Or how many times, in the more modern shorty-short classes do we get completely short-changed on savasana? I think again, the answer is most. Ok yeah unless the class is something like “yin” or “slow flow” but maybe not even. And, it probably goes without saying, but the draw for me to an “easy” practice is not very strong. I need my body-mind to be throttled a little bit in order to deactivate the constant thrum of noise between my ears. I like to work my body hard so that my mind gets too tired and has to shut the fuck up for a bit. And please don’t come at me about it. I know it is good to rest. But sometimes rest without any inherent expenditure of physical effort looks a lot like me spinning my wheels and building anxiety where I had hoped to build ease. It took a really long time for me to understand- in fact, it really took watching my own family and their tendencies for the past 17 years- that I am the sort of person who could work my body hard for 2+ hours every day and be better for it. I have never really been one to go after extreme athleticism; like really, at all; but I have it in me I think. Not speed and power perse, but a whole lot of endurance and strength.

Also, can we talk for a minute about the actual name of the pose to begin with? It is The Corpse, after all. The only moment ever where we are invited to invoke the practice of death and decay. Of retreating back into the earth and into the all that is. Beyond the body, beyond the mind. That seems maybe like it is the heart of practice, doesn’t it? As in, the part of practice that I will carry with me for as long as I carry anything at all. To the very end, whatever that is. And isn’t rest always better and deeper and more profound when we are tired and worn out? I hope to be tired and worn out at the end of my life like I left nothing on the table and played all I had with my whole heart and my whole mind, and my whole body. For as long as any of it lasts.

None of this is to say that I am not interested in practices like Yoga Nidra. I definitely am, I just don’t have the surplus of available time or wherewithal to prioritize such practices at this moment in my life. I gotta worked first I guess. That sounds funny and maybe came out wrong but I think you get the gist. I’m just trying to get myself to meditate 10-20 minutes a day, and after that, I need to move. And breath. And hopefully sweat some too, ya know? BUT! I am committed to securing time and space at the end of my asana practices for a decent savasana, and at the close of my classes as well. Enough time to go there if you can. To practice dying, or at the very least to practice resting.

In the very early days of my indoctrination to practice, I was living in Prescott Arizona and working at the Coffee Roasters for Christina and Kelly, and practicing and dipping my toes into teaching at Prescott Yoga. On Sundays for some period of months in there, I would hop on my bike, cruise across town and up a massive hill to Casa de Sell, and Christina and I would practice for roughly 4 or 5 hours. We would do all the poses. But at the end, we always did this super-supported savasana. Christina called it “a Cadilac savasana” and we’d be there for at least 20 minutes, astral projecting and having Shaktipat visions and revelations. It was its own sort of training and edification. The whole thing was a whole lot of wow. My boyfriend at the time (hi James!) was totally grossed out that I wanted to practice for such a long stretch of time. Like, why? Bahahahaha.

Fast forward to about a year of the pandemic and once again practicing with Christina (via the zooms of course: love em/hate em) for hours upon hours every week. It was both incredible after 20 years to still share this connection with her as well as profoundly unsustainable. It was an era too it turns out. But I love to work hard like that. To travel out onto the skinny branches of some curiosity or fixation for a period of time. Besides, I am old enough to know well enough that nothing lasts forever and it is extra fun and maybe extraordinarily necessary to get it while the getting is good. Make hay while the sun shines. And so on. For me, movement is the prerequisite to every creative act, mandatory or otherwise. I try to, at least for some moments of every day, give thanks for this body that breathes and moves and for the most part feels good. It is a wonder and it is a gift and may I never take any of it for granted.

I think this entire savasana riff is really born out of the stirring of this kind of focused attention to fitness or physical pursuits beginning to roil inside of me again. Maybe because of the shift in our home rhythm coming this fall, like what do I want to do with all of the time that I won’t be spending being solely responsible for my 13-year-olds education? I’m gonna move my body, is one thing. In some big ways, I think. And write. I’m gonna write. And hopefully, I am going to work so well and so hard at all of it that I am gonna rest. Real deep.