Resting and restlessness

for hot days and nights, and for life more generally

It’s been hard to sleep during this heat…

I can recommend a little lie down in the daytime - to help both with night-time sleep and with bringing a more soothing tone to your nervous system during the day. Most especially if you feel hot and bothered. Lying quietly has a calming, cooling effect on the body and mind. This is fabulously useful on a hot day, when very little activity feels possible.

Shavasana and sleep
While it is a common experience to nod off and have a little nap at the end of a yoga class, or during the practice of yoga nidra - and I hold my hand up here too, I know how delicious it can be - rest and sleep are actually two physiologically distinct states. We need both. Rest helps us sleep better; sleep is essential for health.

Shavasana lies in the liminal space between sleep and normal waking consciousness.

Feeling restless or bored?
When we lie down, when we stop doing stuff, when we ask ourselves to rest and be still, we may experience an urgency around the tasks that still need to be done. The increasing volume on our to-do list may be hard to resist. We may cut our practice short, giving in to restlessness rather than rest.

We may feel the tedium of boredom. We may feel distracted by all of this.

But here’s the thing: these can be ways we resist slowing down and becoming still, ways we resist coming into the present moment, even if it’s a hot and uncomfortable moment.

The practice of Shavasana helps us rest, and in the process we learn about stillness and presence.

As Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, over and over again, this is the only moment we have, the only moment in which we can experience what’s here, now - the only moment in which we can be fully alive to the life we have.

And here’s something else too: a recent academic article, published in Frontiers in Public Health, explores the use of Shavasana as a profound practice, not just to rest and recuperate, or to become more familiar with being in the here and now - but to help reduce death anxiety.

In states of deep rest and stillness, we can learn to fully surrender the body. In this way, it becomes a powerful tool to explore, contemplate and experience the meaning of letting go, and of meeting the impermanence of life from a place of greater calm and compassion.

It’s a reminder that our yoga practice can support us in so many ways, not least how we inhabit our bodies, look after ourselves, and prepare for the final surrender.

Savasana: Corpse Pose
Marianne Murphy Zarzana

On the bonsai-green carpet, you stretch
your frame out flat up on a blue yoga mat,

and parallel, I lie down up on a purple one.
both of us becoming still, our bodies sinking

further into the floor with each slow, steady
breath. It’s night, and together we’re letting go.

Mollie, our old black lab mix, wanders in, licks
your open palm, sniffs my hair, snuffles, settles

by my head with labored breath. Soon, I know,
we’ll lose her. Someday, each other. This is

practice. We’re learning to dissolve, surrender
to earth, release thighs, hips, necks, skull, all

the bones, pay attention only to breath - let it
all become a ribbon, the texture of fine silk.