Savasana (Corpse Pose)

Savasana means the corpse pose, from sava, a corpse. The name is deliberately blunt. You lie on your back and do nothing at all, arranged so completely that no muscle is holding anything, and the stillness is meant to be total.

It is the last pose of almost every practice and, in the judgement of most teachers I have known, the most difficult one in the whole system. Not because the shape is hard, since anybody can lie down, but because doing nothing is a skill that modern adults have almost entirely lost. Students who can hold a headstand for two minutes will fidget through eight minutes of lying still, check the time, plan their evening, and get up feeling they have wasted the interval.

What makes it worth learning is that this is where the practice lands. The asanas stir things up: circulation, breath, attention, tension. The rest at the end is when the nervous system settles back down and something is retained. Leave before it and you have had exercise. Stay and you have had a practice.

Most people who cannot relax in this pose are not failing at relaxation. They are lying in an uncomfortable position and trying to overcome it with effort.

Five things, and they take ninety seconds to arrange:

1. A folded blanket under the head, so the forehead is very slightly higher than the chin. Without it the chin tips up, the throat tightens, and the breath stays high in the chest.
2. Support under the knees. A bolster or a rolled blanket. It lets the lower back release onto the floor instead of arching away from it.
3. A blanket over the body, including the feet. Temperature drops in stillness and a cold body tenses without telling you.
4. Palms up, arms about thirty degrees from the body. Palms down closes the chest and rounds the shoulders forward.
5. Something over the eyes if the room is bright: a folded cloth or a small towel. The weight on the eyelids settles people remarkably.

Arrange all five and the pose does most of its own work. Arrange none of them and you will spend ten minutes negotiating with your own body, which is not rest.

The instruction to empty the mind is useless and I have stopped giving it. A mind that is told to be blank produces more thoughts, not fewer.

What works, in my experience of watching a great many people lie on a floor, is to give the mind one small, dull, physical job.

• Notice the exhale. Not the whole breath, just the out breath, and only the fact of it. When you find you have gone away, come back to the next one.
• Travel the body. Move attention slowly from the toes to the crown, pausing briefly at each part and letting it be heavy. Twice through is about eight minutes.
• Count backwards from twenty seven on each exhale, starting again if you lose count. Losing count is guaranteed and is not a problem.

Thoughts will keep arriving. That is what a mind does, and their arrival is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. The practice is the returning, not the staying. A student who wanders off and comes back forty times has practised returning forty times, which is precisely the point.

If you want a longer, guided version of this, that is essentially what Yoga Nidra is: Savasana with a voice giving the mind a structured job for twenty or thirty minutes.

Two things are reasonably supported and worth stating carefully.

Anxiety in the moment. A controlled study comparing two yoga based relaxation techniques found that supine rest in shavasana significantly reduced state anxiety and improved digit span forward scores by around sixteen percent. Cyclic meditation, an active technique, produced larger gains, so this is not the strongest relaxation practice available, but the effect was real and measured.

Blood pressure, as part of a programme. A systematic review and meta analysis of randomised trials of yoga for hypertension found shavasana among the practices appearing most often in the interventions that worked, with a pooled reduction of about 6.5 mmHg systolic and 2.8 mmHg diastolic. That review is careful to say that no single component can be credited, and I repeat that caution here.

What is not established is the long list of specific claims that circulate about this pose, about detoxification, cellular repair and so on. They are not measured, and I would rather say so. What I can tell you from the hall is narrower and, I think, more useful: students who stay for the full rest leave calmer than students who do not, they say so unprompted, and after four decades I have stopped treating that as a coincidence.

Five minutes is the minimum after any practice worth the name. Ten minutes is the usual. Fifteen is a practice in itself and is a genuinely good use of an afternoon.

The rough guide I use: about one minute of Savasana for every five or six minutes of practice. A thirty minute morning routine wants five or six minutes at the end. A ninety minute class wants fifteen.

It also works entirely on its own, without any asana before it. Ten minutes on the floor in the middle of a hard day, with the knees supported and something over the eyes, is one of the most useful things I know, and it needs no mat, no clothes change and no skill. Anyone whose reason for practising is anxiety will find it does more, more reliably, than any pose, and the yoga for anxiety page sets out how to build a routine around it.

Not straight after a heavy meal, when lying flat is uncomfortable. Not in a cold room. And, if you are past the halfway point of a pregnancy, on your left side rather than your back.

The exit is part of the pose and it is almost always rushed.

After ten minutes of stillness, blood pressure and heart rate have settled, and standing straight up out of that is both jarring and a common cause of feeling briefly grey and swimmy. It also throws away the state you have just spent ten minutes arriving at.

Take a full minute:

1. Let the breath deepen by itself for three or four rounds.
2. Move the fingers and toes. Small movements first.
3. Stretch the arms overhead and lengthen the whole body once.
4. Bend the knees and roll onto the right side, and stay there for three or four breaths with the head on the arm.
5. Press up to sitting with the hands, letting the head come up last.
6. Sit for a few breaths with the eyes closed before opening them.

Then sit quietly for a minute, in Vajrasana or a simple cross legged seat, before you get up and go back to the day. That minute is what carries the practice out of the room with you.

The rule is roughly one minute of rest for every five minutes of practice, with five minutes as the floor after anything at all.

Cover yourself. Body temperature drops within a few minutes of stopping, and being cold is the commonest reason people cut this short.

Savasana is recommended on seven of the nine condition pages here, and it is the only pose on this site that nobody is ever told to leave out. What varies is the set up, not whether to do it.

• Yoga for back pain asks for eight minutes with the calves on a chair seat, which is the position a painful lower back can actually stay in.
• Yoga for neck and shoulder pain asks for a thin support under the head so the chin does not tip up.
• Yoga for PCOS and yoga for thyroid use it as the close of every session, because both pages are built around doing less rather than more.
• Yoga for diabetes keeps it in even on the days when nothing else is practised.

It closes the seven day beginner plan and the bedtime routine, and a two minute seated version of it is the last thing in the desk sequence.