Shavasana-Lite: Dying to the Stories We Tell About Ourselves
Death is a touchy topic. Or maybe it is a welcome one.
I can never quite decide whether I am being depressing or strangely uplifting when I say:
None of us gets out of this alive.
I actually find a certain relief in knowing that everything comes to an end.
Don’t let me sound too lofty. I am completely attached to my daughter, my boyfriend, and all the people and things I like to delude myself into believing are permanent. But somewhere deep in my heart, I know this is a temporary ride for all of us.
We don’t deal particularly well with death in our Western culture. We generally keep our distance from it and, if we can help it, keep our children away from it too.
As though death were somehow separate from life.
It is too scary. Too permanent. Too “negative.”
Which brings me, naturally, to yoga.
The Hardest Pose?
If you have ever taken a yoga class, and honestly, who hasn’t these days, you have probably heard a teacher say:
“Shavasana is the hardest pose.”
Not one of those beautiful, pretzel-like postures that makes you wonder whether the person has bones.
Corpse Pose.
That is the hard one.
Why?
Because ultimately Shavasana asks us to die to who we think we are.
The ego identification. The stories. The roles. All that stuff we are constantly being told to “let go of” in yoga.
In Shavasana, we practice dropping it.
At least temporarily.
Of course, we yoga teachers usually take you to what I like to call Shavasana-lite.
We guide you through a lovely relaxation. Soften your jaw. Relax your shoulders. Feel your body getting heavy.
It feels wonderful.
But that isn’t really the whole thing.
That is the colloquial version. The beginner practice.
Maybe even the marketing ploy to get you to come back to class.
Am I revealing too much?
But we have to start somewhere.
We Embody Our Stories
It is all there in Shavasana.
We embody our stories.
I remember Nancy Gilgoff, a longtime Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga teacher, talking about people’s stories and how they are held in their bodies. It was almost as if she could read them while helping students into yoga postures.
I understood what she meant.
After decades of teaching yoga, I have seen it too.
And perhaps my background in theatre makes me particularly aware of it.
A theatre artist knows that the body tells the story.
You can say all the right words onstage, but if the audience cannot read the character in your body, the show is going to suck.
The way we stand, walk, brace, collapse, protect ourselves, reach out, pull away, and take up space communicates something.
We project our stories to the audience.
And we do the same thing in life.
We make up stories about who we are, and then we tell those stories to ourselves and to everyone around us.
So what is your story?
What are you telling the world about yourself?
What Remains When the Body Is Gone?
Have you ever sat with someone who was dying?
Held their hand?
Watched someone take their last breath?
It is profound.
As difficult as it may be, there can also be something extraordinary about witnessing the passage of a life into the unknown.
The body ends.
And yet the story remains.
We carry people in our memories, in our families, in our habits, in the things they taught us and sometimes in the things we spend years trying to unlearn.
Someone dies, but in another sense they are never completely gone.
Their story continues.
Other Ways of Being With Death
Not every culture keeps death at quite the distance we often do.
Along the Ganges in India, bodies are carried to cremation ghats, accompanied by family and ritual, and cremated in public view. Death is not hidden behind the doors of a funeral home. Life and death exist alongside one another.
And no pictures, please.
Have a little decency.
You will not need one anyway. Some images live in you without the assistance of a camera.
In Madagascar, the Malagasy tradition of famadihana, sometimes translated as “turning of the bones” or “turning of the dead,” reflects another relationship with ancestors and mortality. Families may exhume the remains of relatives, rewrap them in fresh cloth, celebrate, dance, and reconnect the living with those who came before them.
These traditions arise from cultures and beliefs very different from our own, but I find something compelling in the willingness to remain in relationship with death rather than pretending it does not exist.
The dead are not simply erased.
They remain part of the story.
Exhuming Our Own Skeletons
We are not separate from our past or from our collective history.
And we all have a few skeletons.
Maybe part of practice is becoming willing to exhume them.
To look.
To acknowledge.
To hold them close enough to understand what they have been asking of us.
Perhaps, if we can bring some attention to those old stories, we can finally put a few of them to rest.
In Shavasana, we are asked to do something similar.
We temporarily and consciously die to our stories.
For a few moments, we stop maintaining the identity.
The parent.
The partner.
The successful person.
The failure.
The flexible yogi.
The person with the bad back.
The responsible one.
The wounded one.
The person everybody needs.
We lie down.
We stop performing.
And we see what remains.
Our experiences are real. Our losses are real. Our relationships are real.
But the stories we create around those experiences are also being filtered through a mind that is constantly interpreting sensory information, memory, fear, expectation, and identity.
Yoga asks us to notice that.
Shavasana Is Not About Trying to Relax
This is important.
You do not have to try to relax in Shavasana.
Trying is more doing.
Shavasana is the practice of not doing.
The thoughts may continue.
Let them.
Memories may appear.
Let them.
You may suddenly remember that you need milk, that you forgot to answer an email, or that embarrassing thing you said in 1997.
Fine.
The mind is doing what minds do.
You do not have to wrestle it into submission.
With practice, the waves may settle.
Or perhaps you simply become less interested in chasing every wave.
That is enough.
There can be a kind of mental and emotional digestion happening in stillness.
And, like any digestion, there may occasionally be a little indigestion.
Stay anyway.
Dying So We Can Get Up Again
This is why I love Shavasana.
We practice death.
Then we get up.
We deliberately release the story, the effort, the identity, and the need to make anything happen.
And then, after a few minutes, the teacher begins calling us back.
Move your fingers.
Move your toes.
Take a deeper breath.
Roll onto your side.
Sit up.
We are, in a sense, reborn.
Of course, we immediately pick most of our stories back up.
We have lives to live.
People we love.
Responsibilities.
Bills.
Appointments.
Dinner.
But perhaps we do not have to pick every story back up with quite the same grip.
Perhaps that is part of the practice.
How to Practice Shavasana-Lite
Lie down, get comfortable, and be still. Use whatever support your body needs.
Don’t try to relax. Notice how different that is from making relaxation another task.
Do nothing.
Let your breath gradually slow. See whether the mind begins to follow.
Imagine that you have nothing left to do. Nothing to fix. Nothing to change about yourself or anyone else.
Notice what remains. What arises from the stillness? Let it come. You do not need to control the waves of thought.
Let the old movies play without climbing into the screen. Thoughts, memories, and stories may pass through awareness. Watch them without automatically giving yourself back to the drama.
Allow some digestion. Mental or emotional “indigestion” may arise. You do not have to solve it in this moment.
Stay still for at least five minutes, preferably closer to ten. Then return slowly. Notice what it feels like to get up again.
Shavasana is not simply a reward for getting through the rest of yoga class.
It is a practice.
A rehearsal.
A temporary death to the stories we carry around about who we are.
And perhaps, every once in a while, we get up carrying one of those stories a little more lightly.