Savasana Corpse Pose

Death is the reminder of the fragility of human life. It forces us to face our own vulnerability and lack of control. It is said that all phobias have their root in the fear of death.

Although people try to avoid entering such a helpless state, the yoga tradition encourages it as an essential part of a spiritual practice.

One of the ways this powerful meditation on death and transcendence appears is as Savasana, or the Corpse Pose.

As a natural part of life many people die each day around the world, very few deliberately prepare for it. Some spiritual traditions believe that the moment of death is more important than the moment of birth.

In the epic poem, the Mahabharata, King Yudhishthira is asked: “Of all the things in life, what is the most amazing?” To this, he replies, “That a man, while seeing others die around him, behaves as if he will never die.”

A denial of death, or fear of it, was interpreted as an undesirable state of being described in ancient Vedic literature as a tight flower bud refusing to blossom.

Modern explorer of consciousness, Carl Jung, viewed our general resistance to death as “something unhealthy and abnormal, which robs…life of its purpose.”

Connecting with purposeful living requires our letting go of our identification with temporary aspects of existence. Savasana honors the dying process as part of spiritual living. In this practice we anticipate dying, which helps us to appreciate our life and can put things into perspective.

Traditional yogasana routines will often begin and end with Savasana.

With the intent of bringing awareness to our cyclical nature of being, as it carries us through a symbolic cycle of death, birth, action, and death during a single yoga session. Similar to the rising and setting of the Sun, and the appearance of the Moon as day changes to night, or the seasons of Nature.

The corpse I am become lives in pure counter- poise, between weight and weightless tidal flow, its breath osmotic, its pulse subsumed.

Here is death beyond fear, without want of resurrection, unyoked from hate or any spur to forgive, where all the masks of God melt into irrelevant silences. 

Here the body surrenders all tethers to the past, its crowns and cups of woe, and hope's a stain absolved of any future, where the only present is presence, a nothing that is everything stillness yearns to inhabit, that lights no way to or fro. Dark bliss! 

Yet give me back, for now, my stuttering heart, staccato air, the buzzing contagions of the world. 

Richard Foerster