Practice Savasana

Sounds silly, right? Savasana, corpse pose, is just laying down, what's the big deal? It's possibly the most important and most difficult pose there is. I listed it on the Pose Breakdown page for that very reason. Physically, yes, it's just laying down. When you lay in your bed at night, do you pay attention to the alignment of your body? So often I see students lay down on the mat completely crooked and I'm not really sure they even realize that they're not truly aligned. That's the "easy" part. Take the time to find a neutral spine. Feel even across your hips and shoulders. Let your arms feel equally long, the same for your legs. Rest the weight of your head and release every muscle in your body, including ones you don't think of. Your fingers, your eyes, your jaw. But to truly rest in savasana, it's not just your body that rests, the mind gets to rest too. Even as I write this post, random thoughts are trying to shove their way in to distract from what I'm doing. When we lay down, they body isn't moving, we don't have to control our breath anymore, the mind wants to "go to work", thinking about that pose that was too difficult, how my legs shook as I was holding an "easy" pose, the class that I took last week that was so much "better". It's extremely difficult to turn that off! My best advice, is to turn it down, instead focusing on something that keeps you present. Try your breath if you can let it flow naturally, if not, maybe use an image, or a mantra. Your mantra can just be a word, or a phrase, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. Quieting the random thoughts and give yourself a few moments to simply be. It's a practice, and it's totally worth it!