The most crucial yoga pose right now?
The Earth is telling us.
The Earth is telling us.
I’ve been doing yoga for 20 years and I’m a trained Ashaya Yoga teacher, so you’d think I’d know what my body needed and give it to myself, yoga-wise.
Nope.
Up until this last week, my version of “doing” yoga every day was to barrel through a predictable set of shortcut poses in 20 minutes, already looking ahead to what was next on my daily docket.
I’d do some lunges, down dogs, chaturangas (push-up things), boat (ab work), twists, yada yada yada. A high-speed, intense panoply of scant attention paid to the basic muscle groups, with some sporadic breathing thrown in. (I should be breathing right now! Inhale, exhale.)
When people suggested that yoga is a potent stress reliever, I’d smugly check the box: Yep! Do it every day.
And then last week, the founder of Ashaya Yoga, Todd Norian, offered to do a daily class on FaceBook for a week, free of charge and available to all. It was his offering to a fearful, stressed-out world.
On the first day, I sat on my mat in front of the computer, thrilled to study with my beloved teacher once more. I happily followed his precise instructions, basking in his heart-opening philosophy and working harder on my mat than I had in years. And longer: a whole fifty minutes. (Insert eye-rolling emoji here.)
At the fifty-minute mark, Todd led us into the final pose, the pose that every yoga practice ends with, the pose that every yoga student is grateful for, the culmination of all the exertion and output, the pose that I had studiously and successfully avoided for years: Savasana.
Yes, Savasana. Corpse pose. Lying on one’s back and imitating a dead person. The one pose that requires no exertion, no hard work, no pain.
No wonder I’d been avoiding it.
How can something that doesn’t produce anything be valuable?
We find ourselves in the midst of singular times. I’d use the word “unprecedented,” but my 20-year-old daughter says it’s now officially her least favorite word. So I’ll use some other words: extraordinary. Aberrant. Surreal.
These times are also uncertain, scary, and confusing. Everything we have built around us — our habits and routines, the places we go, even the work we do every day — has either disappeared completely or changed mightily. We build those things to keep us safe, literally and psychologically, so when those structures crumble, we are left exposed and vulnerable.
We don’t like to feel exposed and vulnerable. In fact, we don’t really like to feel much of anything at all, except productive. Our culture is addicted to productivity; just take a spin through the thousands upon thousands of Medium blog posts that exhort us to GET UP EARLIER and GET MORE DONE.
This Protestant-Work-Ethic-on-Steroids pushes us to believe that unless we are producing something, we are valueless. It makes sense, given the Calvinist belief that worldly success can be interpreted as a sign of eternal salvation. By that yardstick, Jeff Bezos’s soul has breezed through the pearly gates a bazillion times over.
So we work harder. We even play harder. Everything we do is aimed at some material gain from our activities — and that doesn’t necessarily mean financial gain. We just want to see the tangible result of our actions: calories burned, pages written, emails sent, bills paid.
It’s understandable. In this country, many of us are subsumed by financial obligations (college debt, medical bills, insurance premiums) and are working more for less pay. Much of our mania for productivity stems from the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; we’re just trying to survive.
Yet even though I’ve been fortunate enough to somehow break even at the end of every fiscal year, I still feel a constant nagging pull to be productive, all the time. I talk on the phone while I drive. I check emails while I eat lunch. I fold laundry while I watch a video.
My daily truncated yoga practice fits in perfectly with the To-Do List ethic; I pared the poses down to just the essentials, and Savasana didn’t make the cut. How could it? It’s just an extended practice of nothing. Zip. Nada.
How does all of this relate to the planet and our pandemic? I draw a parallel between our own mania for productivity, and what we expect from this beautiful spinning orb we call home. We are constantly, relentlessly pushing planet Earth to produce, produce, produce.
She is exhausted, burned out, and her resources are fast becoming depleted. She is reaching the end of her rope. We’ve all known it, but we’ve just kept pushing her— just like we push ourselves. What planet Earth needs is what she has forced us to give her right now: Savasana. A time of complete and utter nothingness. A time to sink into healing inertia. A time to rest.
To be clear, this time also comes at a cost. We are all aware of the very real trauma and loss this pandemic is causing individuals and nations, and I do not want to minimize those realities. I simply want to find a different, perhaps more hopeful and empowering, perspective.
Savasana is a pose designed to allow the body to integrate all of the poses that came before it. It’s like an awake version of deep sleep, which assimilates all of the activities of the day and clears out toxins in the brain. It’s been scientifically proven that without sleep, we make mistakes, can’t think clearly, forget stuff, and lose creative functioning.
Not every animal sleeps in the way humans do, (apparently bullfrogs don’t sleep; who knew?) but every animal rests. Every creature self-regulates, maintaining a balance between energetic output and what I like to call lounging (which cats have perfected.) That balance is essential for health.
The Earth is not an inanimate object. She is a ginormous organism that lives and breathes. What is the result of an Earth that never rests? Is it climate change? I don’t know. But I do know that during this global crisis, the air is cleaner than it has been in years. Dolphins have returned to the canals in Venice. Sea turtles are hatching on deserted Brazilian beaches.
I lay on my mat and closed my eyes, listening to Todd’s voice as he guided us into the deep relaxation of Savasana. Within minutes, I had melted into the floor. Why have you been avoiding this? asked my inner self, annoyingly observant as ever. I sighed. I won’t anymore, I told her.
I traveled deeper into relaxation, let go more and more, until I landed in that place of total surrender, total vulnerability. I came home to that place where all the things we’re avoiding reside. And from that place, up bubbled all of the fear that this virus has engendered in me, fear that I had disavowed and unwittingly repressed. It flowed in the form of tears, sliding down my temples and into my ears — which made me smile.
The fear dissipated quickly — as do all feelings when we give them our full attention. I spent the next few moments hibernating in stillness, at home inside myself and within the embrace of the Earth. She and I rested, together.
I’ve been doing Savasana every day since then. Granted, it hasn’t been that long, but I’m committed to it in a way I’ve never been. It feels important, in an epic, global way now. Each time I lie down, stretch out, let go, and breathe, I believe I’m not only bringing balance to myself, I also believe I’m bringing it to the Earth.
My mom used to say, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” As with most things, I think she was right. So here’s my amended version: Don’t just do something.
Lie there.
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Thank you. Be well.
Mary