Savasana (Corpse Pose). Mritasana

<h2> Savasana (Corpse Pose). Mritasana</h2>"Shava" or "mrita" means corpse. The purpose of Savasana is to imitate a corpse. When life has left the body, it lies in one position and no movement is possible. By keeping the body still and the mind quiet for a time, in full consciousness, you learn to relax. This conscious relaxation of body and mind removes all tension and gives fresh strength to the soul as well as to the body. The process is like recharging a battery.Although Savasana seems simple, it is the hardest of all to master. The body and the brain are connected. In the art of introspection they are inseparable. Savasana is the thread that binds body and soul; it joins asana and pranayama and leads a person towards the spiritual path. A brief description of Savasana 1. Spread a blanket on the floor and sit in Dandasana. Spread and flatten the buttocks so that the flesh in that part of the body is not squeezed, especially at the back.2. Lean the trunk back and begin to lower it - first place the elbows and forearms on the blanket; as you lower the spine, round it so that the vertebrae come down onto the floor one after another. During this movement do not move the buttocks or the legs. Both sides of the trunk should spread outwards, from the centre of the spine towards the sides of the body. The body will now lie flat on the blanket from the heels to the head. The muscles of the buttocks must not move towards the sacrum.3. Relax the chest, but do not let it become hollow.4. Now relax the legs and let the feet fall apart to the sides and drop towards the floor; do not disturb the position of the legs.The head5. With your hands, place the head on the floor on the middle of the back of the skull. Do not let the back of the ears move towards the neck. The ridge at the base of the back of the skull should be down. While there:(I) do not tense the neck and the throat; (II) do not press the chin against the throat.The eyes and ears7. Close the eyes. Lower the upper lids without disturbing the pupils.8. The ears and the eardrums should be relaxed. This can be achieved by relaxing the lower jaw.The arms9. Take the shoulder blades apart, but at the same time do not lift the shoulders - move them away from the neck. The shoulders must stay resting on the floor.10. Bend the elbows and lift the hands towards the chest.11. Stretch the upper arms away from the armpits and lay them on the floor without changing the position of the elbows. Straighten the forearms and lay them on the floor so that the arms are at an angle of 15-20° to the sides of the trunk. While there:(I) if the angle between the sides of the body and the arms is greater, the shoulders will lift off the floor and draw together - and that drawing together will also constrict the neck;(II) if the arms are too close to the sides of the trunk, the armpit area of the chest will stay in contact with the inner surface of the upper arms - this will prevent the chest from spreading and will disturb the relaxation.12. The fingers should be relaxed and the skin of the hands passive.The nose13. Keep the nose straight, do not tilt it to one side. The tip of the nose points towards the centre of the chest.14. The movement of the breath must disturb neither the trunk nor the brain.15. Stay in this final position of Savasana for at least 10-15 minutes. While there:(I) relax the skin of the forehead, the cheeks, the lips, the arms, the sides of the body, the buttocks, the thighs; (II) the skin should be soft everywhere; (III) relax all the muscles; (IV) let the edges of the sacrum settle onto the floor so as to relax the buttocks; (V) do not lift the lumbar vertebrae too far off the floor; (VI) both sides of the trunk beside the spinal column should rest equally on the floor; (VII) see that both sides of the body lie the same; (VIII) let the shoulder blades rest on the blanket, but do not press them down, since pressure tenses the brain; (IX) the hands should be soft;(X) the fingers relaxed; (XII) the skin over the muscles of the face should be relaxed, which in turn will relax the organs of perception; (XII) any disturbance of the calm of the sense organs will immediately show in the face and will spread along the nerves through the whole body, tensing the entire nervous system; the source of the disturbance must be found and released; (XIII) if the brain is not at rest but busy with thoughts, the front of the head moves up from the chin, as if the head were separated from the body; in Savasana one must learn to stop thinking; (XIV) if the brain is in an active state, the eyeballs become heavy and irritate the focal point of the eyes; (XV) direct the brain and the eyes towards the centre of the heart; (XVI) the connection between the eyes, the mind and the brain is very important; if the mind wanders, the brain moves upwards and the eyes become restless; that is why it is important to keep the eyes quiet; (XVII) draw the eyes and the ears in, turn them inwards and merge them into one at an inner point in the centre of the chest, where outside sounds cease to disturb; (XVIII) surrender yourself, your body and your mind to Mother Earth, so that you are calm and passive. That is complete relaxation.The breath16. Do not make the breathing deep. The breath in Savasana should be as light, smooth and quiet as the flow of water in a river, so that the mind remains undisturbed.    On the inhalation (puraka):(I) do not jerk the head; (II) do not constrict the throat; (III) do not twitch the diaphragm; (IV) do not disturb the quiet of the muscles at the back of the trunk; (V) do not let the sternum drop and do not hollow the chest; (VI) do not push the abdomen out, and(VII) do not tense the hands during the inhalation.    On the exhalation (rechaka):(I) relax the brain during the exhalation; (II) do not let the air brush the walls of the throat - that causes irritation; (III) do not release the diaphragm suddenly; (IV) keep the mind passive; let it watch the flow of the exhalation and regulate it; (V) a correct exhalation gives a feeling of the quiet surrender of mind and body to Mother Earth, bringing a sense of peace and unity within.17. With a perfectly correct exhalation the mind remains undisturbed and an inner flow of energy is felt. A new state of consciousness arises - without movement and without expenditure of energy. There is a sensation that the body has grown a few centimetres longer. This is freedom of mind and body.18. Stay in the state of complete relaxation as long as you can. From this state of stillness return gradually to an active state. Do not disturb the quiet of the mind and do not jump up, suddenly breaking the quiet of the body.19. Gradually bring your mind, your consciousness and your sense organs out of the quiet, blessed state into which they were immersed, and restore your connection with the outer world.20. Raise the eyelids, but do not move the pupils either down or up. Look straight ahead and, as you restore your connection with the outer world, go on experiencing the state of calm.21. Now turn onto the right side and get up slowly. Notes: It may take some time for the mind to come to a halt and the body to fall silent. Through regular practice you will learn to release tension and to experience bliss. At first the sense of stillness may even send you to sleep, but later you will learn to experience the state of calm without falling asleep.At first the conscious arranging of the body and the deliberate adjusting of it may seem difficult, but gradually it will become easy to take everything in at once, so that the mind and the body rest more quickly.Later, when a person masters Savasana, he experiences a state in which body, mind and consciousness are not, and comes to an understanding of the Self and of Self-existence. The outer world stays where it is, but in this state it seems not to exist. Special instructions: (1) If you have a cold or a cough, or suffer from asthma, take a pillow or a folded blanket 8-10 cm thick on which the head and the back can rest; the chest is then raised and the diaphragm sits a little lower than the chest, which makes breathing easier.(2) If at first you find it hard to relax the eyes, wrap a soft black bandage or a piece of cloth around the head so as to cover the eyes, the ears and the back of the head. The cloth should be folded lengthwise into four. A detailed description of Savasana Savasana is the «dead body pose». It must be explained in the fullest possible detail, because doing it correctly accounts for a considerable part of the positive effect of the whole practice, while doing it wrongly can sometimes cause a good deal of harm.So the purpose of Savasana is rest and relaxation after the body has been worked through with asanas. But if we do the poses correctly the body does not get particularly tired - where, then, is the catch?Some fifteen years ago I happened to be teaching asanas to a Master of Sport in acrobatics. Once warmed up in particular, he could do very demanding forward and backward bends. The joints, however, need a specific kind of development for the work of yoga, and in that respect his capacities were no different from the average. The most interesting thing, though, was that the lad was unable to hold the shape of an asana even for a short while! Bending and immediately unbending - that he could just about manage, but when I asked him to stay in the position he had reached even briefly, he somehow gave out at once, and not physically. To my questions about the nature of this fatigue the acrobat answered rather vaguely: «It feels as if my head will burst, as if something inside were pushing it apart...»There was a deep sense in this strange answer. Since beginners in yoga do simple asanas, it might seem that this should not be tiring for the body, especially with a relaxed approach. But let us note several points: on beginning to learn Hatha yoga, everyone starts for the first time to deal regularly with the limits of their own flexibility - that is the first. Second: a person lingers for a while in the «vicinity» of those limits, something that has never happened before in their life. All of this produces a multitude of unprecedented effects in the musculoskeletal system, and information about them rushes in a powerful stream from the periphery into the motor structures of the brain, creating there a mosaic of excitation of an unfamiliar «configuration».The practice of asanas is an activity unfamiliar to the body and to its nervous and psychic structures, one to which a person is not adapted at all if they are a beginner in yoga. The patterns of motor excitation that arise in the brain reflect the unusual nature of asanas and have a specific positive effect - each time, they lower the current level of nervous excitability that the circumstances of ordinary life have built up in the central and the autonomic nervous systems. When this happens regularly, the tone of the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system itself goes down, and as a result a person is freed from the pressure of the problems that constantly weigh on them, even if those problems remain in their life!But when a beginner finishes a session, they must without fail create the conditions for the normal tone of those specifically loaded motor structures of the CNS to be restored, so that the over-excitation caused by the unusual motor influence of the asanas can die away. If this is not provided for, the «new» excitation can add itself to the previous one, increasing rather than removing the tensions that were there before.That is precisely the main point of Savasana: to remove the training excitation of the central motor structures so that, in dissolving, it leaves the CNS cleared both of itself and of the state that existed before the session began.As mastery in the practice of asanas grows, adaptation takes place and the asanas no longer affect the CNS as unfamiliarly as they do at the start, so the time spent in Savasana can be shortened and it becomes qualitatively different. Traditionally, though, it is held that after a session lasting more than an hour a final relaxation is always necessary.For beginners who neglect this specific rest or do it merely for form's sake, the negative consequences of such slapdash work can be quite noticeable, right up to insomnia and the worsening of problems they already have.So what happens to the body and the consciousness in Savasana, and what should on no account happen?If the course of events is such that you honestly suffer through all fifteen minutes with a body that is (as it seems to you) completely relaxed and a consciousness as clear as glass, one that involuntarily «chews over» outside impressions while you wait miserably for these accursed fifteen minutes to end at last - you are deeply mistaken. That is not «Savasana» but «the murder of the soul and the crushing of the heart», as Venichka Erofeev used to say.One of the sequences of Savasana - though there are in fact a great many - may be as follows. Having fulfilled all the preliminary conditions for the final relaxation, relax in turn: the neck, the throat, the lower jaw... The cheeks, the cheekbones, the lips... The muscle beneath the jaw, the chin, the upper lip... The corners of the mouth, the tongue, the lower lip, the nose... Feel that the skin of the nose seems to smooth out, that some hidden movement appears in it, a tingling, a sensation of pressure, of the weight of warmth flowing into the depths... Let the eyes go, inside...When the eyes are relaxed they find a comfortable position by themselves and become still; they stop twitching and trembling... When the eyes are relaxed they are comfortable and do not want to move... Relax the eyelids, the eyebrows... Heaviness and warmth appear in the skin of the eyebrows; they seem to «slide» towards the temples... Relax the forehead... Feel the skin of the forehead... Feel pressure in it, a tingling, warmth, as if someone had laid a hot palm on the forehead... Relax the temples... Feel the skin of the whole head and a pleasant light heaviness in it, an enveloping warmth... Relax the back of the head, the neck, the throat... (The circle «head-face-neck» is thus closed; now we move on to the trunk).Relax the hands, feel the warmth and heaviness in them... The arms grow heavy... Feel the skin of the palms, listen to the sensations in them... The moment you turn your attention to the palms, a vague, almost virtual movement arises at their centre, in the skin... Tingling... Heaviness... Hot pins and needles appear in the skin of the palms, a pleasant, pressing warmth... The palms are hot... The warmth spreads through them and begins to flow down to the wrists... Relax the wrists... The elbows... The forearms... Let go of the shoulders, the shoulder blades, the collarbones... Relax the back, the sides... Relax the abdomen, the lower back... The buttocks, the thighs... Let go of the knees, the calves... The ankles, the feet... Feel the skin of the soles of the feet... As in the palms, pressure, tingling and warmth appear in them... Match the soles of the feet to the palms in the sensation of warmth...This sequence can be prepared accordingly on an audio cassette and played for the duration of Savasana, so that the text sounds with pauses, unhurried, competently, with the necessary intonation. If you are the one listening, it is better that the voice should not be your own but that of someone you know well, with whom you have a fairly even and positive relationship.When following the instructions you should not repeat them to yourself or double them up; there must be no intermediate links between the sensations that follow and the words that precede them. Let it be that you hear from outside, or say to yourself mentally: «Relax the neck, the throat...», and as soon as the beam of attention has «lit up» that area, an «answer» must arise at once and directly in its skin and muscles: a sensation of heaviness, warmth, release, pressure and so on. No verbal intermediaries or intermediate links - the spontaneous response follows immediately, without any effort and without any wilful «colouring» of what is happening.In relaxing the body with the help of consciousness we act through attention which - as has already been said - is the active part of consciousness; but there is no need to operate it with such force, as though you were heaving stones about.As the area of relaxation and warmth expands, the body step by step disappears from perception (what has been relaxed remains only as a pleasant, warm and uniform background) and consciousness itself «melts», shrinking as it were to the «size» of the part of the body not yet covered by relaxation. Then, when the organism is entirely «flooded» with relaxation, only one fragment of consciousness remains - a «sentry post». Note that this is not at all a matter of consciousness going away completely and sleep setting in; that is exactly what must not happen! It simply stops being awake in the ordinary sense of the word, migrating periodically into a half-asleep state.At the very beginning of this chapter, in connection with the yoga of psychic sleep, the phase states of the cells of the cerebral cortex were mentioned, which characterise the various degrees of its inhibition. Savasana is essentially an abbreviated version of Yoga Nidra, in which through muscular relaxation you obtain mental relaxation, sink with an altered consciousness to the boundary between sleep and waking, and then return again. If Savasana passes in an unaltered state of consciousness, then it has not succeeded.For a person of the Western mould, mastering complete relaxation is far from simple. It is a serious task, and the effectiveness of the work in yoga, both at the start and later on, depends entirely on how successfully it is solved. It often happens that by mastering voluntary relaxation alone one can solve a number of significant problems in one's life.It should further be noted that, as a rule, anyone for whom Savasana «does not work» purely because of problems with consciousness most likely has (if there is no general overstrain) some problem point - a habitual contracture in the face or the body, hidden from perception, a place that «holds» everything and does not let them relax to the necessary degree. That place can be anything at all - the left eyebrow, for example. If the problem place can be identified and «let go», all will be as it should and the relaxation will begin to work. It is worth knowing that in the region of the head there are several muscles which, without taking part in the work of the body, greatly influence its degree of tension and must in any case be consciously relaxed. These are the two ligaments running from the back of the head down the back of the neck, and the submandibular and the frontal muscles. And the eyes as well. If they are not «let go» and twitch continuously, consciousness cannot be relaxed.The eyes are in general bound up with a host of problems that are hidden from the person themselves. Most people do not suspect that their existing level of inner tension is reflected in the behaviour of their eyeballs, although it is easy to establish. If, while asanas are being done with the lids closed, the eyeballs twitch constantly and without a break - that is exactly the case in point. This deserves the closest attention, and one should gradually learn to check these involuntary movements in the course of practising asanas. As soon as that begins to work, good-quality relaxation is most likely assured.Even with the standard scheme set out above, the final relaxation happens differently for each person. When someone falls asleep in it, they are either over-tired or the Savasana is not working properly. Sleep will never replace genuine deep relaxation, which is possible only in a waking, though considerably altered, state of consciousness.As consciousness periodically and partially fades in Savasana, phenomena well known from Schultz's autogenic training may arise - a feeling of floating, of flight, of separate parts of the body growing larger, of its shape changing, and so on; all of this is quite permissible and should not puzzle you. Often, when a person has already mastered deep relaxation, consciousness during it now disappears, now clears, and the depth of the relaxation varies, having a wavelike, oscillating character - this is a normal phenomenon.If you have listened to the standard verbal formulation of Savasana in some definite form for long enough, in time it is memorised and can be carried out on your own - not so much by saying it to yourself as simply by moving your attention over the body in the remembered sequence. As with listening to the relaxation algorithm from outside, extraneous thoughts do not arise; there is simply no room for them in consciousness, and if visual images come, they do not touch you - at least, that is how it should be.And finally, the external requirements for Savasana, which must be listed here. They are as follows: the position is lying on the back. The legs - shoulder-width apart. The arms are taken away from the body so that they do not touch the sides and the armpits are open. The hands are turned palms up as far as is possible; usually they lie at an angle rather than facing the ceiling with their surface. In the daytime something like a bandage or a scarf should be placed over the eyes so that light does not pass through the lids.Clothing should not restrict, and preferably not be synthetic. Watch, glasses, rings, brooches, necklaces, chains, metal, plastic, glass - all of this is taken off the body for the time of the relaxation. Only wooden ornaments may be left on, as indeed for the practice of asanas, and even they must not get in the way of the asanas. Silence must be ensured all around: no sharp sounds; the telephone, for example, is best switched off altogether.Another problem, a very difficult one in Russia, is the air temperature in the room. Just as it is forbidden to do asanas and other yoga practices without extra clothing at a temperature below +20° C, so the requirements for the final relaxation are the same. You should not lie down in «Savasana» on a cold surface, nor on anything soft - the back must be straight. On no account should you be cold during practice, and still less during relaxation; cover yourself with a light, warm blanket, put on socks and so on - that is, act according to the temperature.In time each practitioner will spontaneously arrive at their own individual duration for Savasana. People with low blood pressure may feel a chill when the relaxation ends; they can then move about energetically for a minute or two - but not too much.Let me say once more: Savasana is not sleep! Of course, in the middle of the first day's sequence it is impossible to go through the standard relaxation sequence in full in the five minutes indicated; you should confine yourself to some fragment of it. The technique described should be used when a complete final rest is possible. (V. Boyko, YIK) The effects of practising Savasana Verse 32 of the first chapter of the "Hatha Yoga Pradipika" says: "Lying on the back, stretched out at full length on the ground like a corpse, is called Savasana. It removes the fatigue caused by the other asanas and brings calm to the mind".Verse 11 of the second chapter of the "Gheranda Samhita" describes Mritasana thus: "To lie flat on the ground (on the back), like a corpse. This pose kills fatigue and quiets the agitation of the mind". "The mind is the lord of the indriyas (the sense organs); Prana (the breath of life) is the lord of the mind". "When the mind is absorbed, that is called Moksha (the final liberation of the soul). When Prana and Manas (the mind) are absorbed, boundless joy arises" ("Hatha Yoga Pradipika", ch. IV, verses 29-30).In Savasana all the parts of the body, the skin, the muscles and the nerves are relaxed. The stream of energy flowing out of the body turns inward. In this way energy is gathered rather than dispersed. Savasana is like experiencing death while still alive. For a short time the body, the mind and the speech become still. This asana is also called Mritasana, because one feels the gross and the subtle body as a corpse. But the soul remains - it exists in its pure form.Savasana gives fresh strength and refreshes. It helps to restore the body and the mind after long and serious illness. This asana is of enormous benefit to asthmatics and to those suffering from other diseases of the respiratory tract; it is useful in disorders of the heart, in nervous tension and in insomnia, because it calms the nerves and the mind. The practice of Savasana gives deep, refreshing, dreamless sleep. It is not simply sprawling on the floor. It is a state of meditation. Savasana is control over the inner world and surrender to the Highest.