There is a moment at the end of a yoga practice that I love. We’ve flowed and moved and breathed, held hard poses longer than we wanted to, twisted, backbended, chanted, moved through breathwork, listened to all the great songs, and experienced the gloriousness of being fully inside our bodies. And then, after all that movement and effort, we lie down. Savasana.
Savasana is traditionally the final resting pose of a yoga practice, a few precious minutes when we allow the body to become completely still and simply rest. This is where we practice doing nothing. On a good day, Savasana feels like nothing else out there- it’s quite sublime. There is something about the quiet and the stillness, the softness that arrives when I finally stop trying, that feels like settling back into myself.
When I think about what it means to be cozy, I think that feeling is actually what I’m searching for. Peace.
Fall has a way of inviting us toward it. We pull out the sweaters and blankets, light candles, make soup, build fires, and create spaces around us that feel warm and safe. I love all of those things so much. Those things make us feel the embrace of fall and the nudge toward coziness, much like the quiet and serenity of savasana.
Savasana asks us to consider: What does it look like to create that same sense of warmth, safety, and belonging within ourselves?
Yoga was one of the first places where I experienced the possibility and permission to be kind to myself, to listen to myself and, eventually, to love myself. All of this felt incredibly foreign at first, and honestly, I’m still figuring it out. But yoga gave me little tastes of it—moments when I understood myself more deeply, offered myself grace or forgiveness, or stopped trying so hard to become someone worthy of love and simply allowed myself to be who I already was. There is a teaching in yoga philosophy called aparigraha, or non-grasping, that speaks beautifully to this. Aparigraha asks us to loosen our grip on the constant pushing and pulling of life—to stop reaching so desperately for what we believe will finally make us whole and stop running so quickly from the things we don’t want to feel. Instead, we practice being present with what is here, as it is.
There is such tenderness in that kind of being, and yet it isn’t a state that our outside world particularly celebrates. We are encouraged to keep moving, achieving, improving, producing and fixing, staying full steam ahead on the crazy train. We are rarely encouraged to become quiet enough to ask ourselves what we actually need, what we are feeling, or whether we can simply be here without needing to change anything.
Maybe that is part of what we are practicing in Savasana. After all the effort, we let go. We stop performing and striving and simply rest in the awareness that remains.
So this fall, as you create warmth and comfort around you, perhaps there is also an invitation to create some within—to make your own body a safe place to land, your own heart a place you belong, and your own presence a place where you can finally exhale.
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