... The teacher called this pose Savasana. He said it translated to “Corpse Pose.” A place where we die, we end, a place that promised rebirth and a new beginning. He also said it was the most important pose, or asana, in all of yoga. I was completely perplexed. I don’t remember much of what he said after that point because I couldn’t stop thinking about how it was possible to twist, turn, bend, and contort my body, to fight with my muscles and bones to make the “just right shape,” only to be told by my teacher that “lying on the ground and being still” is the most important thing you can do. ...
... I still would have been confused by the “non-doing” postures, as I’d come to associate yoga with movement and doing. Despite making the connection that it is, in fact, the one pose included in every class, it took years for me to become curious enough to return to my first teacher’s words about Savasana: “It’s the most important. . . . It’s challenging.” It was then that I actually became a student of this posture and journeyed into the heart of this way of ending. ...
... I lie down and breathe. Savasana. I knew I couldn’t physically practice, and I also knew I needed to be in a room with other people. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t move one muscle, yet the first moments in Savasana were a mental and emotional fight. I wanted to move. I wanted to do something. I needed to fix it. Fix me. Fix my body. Fix the part I perceived was so broken that I couldn’t even hold a pregnancy, a hope, a dream.
... And then it happened—my body stopped gripping. I cried. I surrendered to the earth beneath me. I allowed myself to feel the end, the end of that excitement, the end of that expectation ...
... Ultimately, I have come to understand Savasana as the practice of death, and every ending, big or small, is some kind of death. In Savasana, we practice the death of the ego, death of grasping, and death of all aversion to reality as it is. ...