The benefits of Savasana, or corpse pose, are endless: it allows your nervous system to balance out and calms your sympathetic nervous system (responsible for your body’s “fight or flight” response); encourages your heart rate, blood flow and breath to normalize; helps to prevent injury, and gently settles the mind and body.
Savasana also gives you a chance to practice both ahimsa (“non-harming”), and aparigraha (“non-grasping) by offering the precious opportunity to let go of any judgment of your physical practice and not think about whether or not you nailed that headstand.
Savasana may seem like an easy pose, but like all poses, it takes much, much more than just following a set of alignment cues. It’s a challenging pose to truly master, as many of us (myself included) find it difficult to fully relax and often hold tension in our bodies and minds without even realizing it.
The art of Savasana is to consciously surrender and remain aware whilst simultaneously being at ease: it is not simply a pose designed to fill the time until the end of class. So how exactly do you “do” Savasana and fully embrace and savor everything it has to offer?
