{"id":10114,"date":"2022-12-30T19:09:10","date_gmt":"2022-12-30T19:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yogajournal.com\/?p=107895"},"modified":"2022-12-30T19:09:10","modified_gmt":"2022-12-30T19:09:10","slug":"why-were-declaring-2022-the-year-of-savasana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/30\/why-were-declaring-2022-the-year-of-savasana\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We\u2019re Declaring 2022 the Year of Savasana"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cRaise your hand if 2022 went the way you expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the sigh-inducing opening line of an email newsletter I recently received from yoga teacher Kimberlee Morrison<\/a>. She\u2019s not wrong. It\u2019s been a heck of year.<\/p>\n

Actually, it\u2019s been a heck of a few years. And we\u2019ve been navigating them with as much ease and humor and grace as we can muster. During the early weeks and the ennui of lockdown in 2020, memes of exhausted individuals collapsing into Child\u2019s Pose\u2014<\/a>and staying there indefinitely\u2014appeared everywhere from Instagram to the New Yorker.<\/em><\/a> Who couldn\u2019t relate to wanting more of the pose that gives us permission to fall into a heap and close ourselves off from any more sensory input? It was, unequivocally, the year of Child\u2019s Pose.<\/p>\n

We quietly tiptoed into 2021 with hushed expectations and cautious optimism. There seemed to be a collective holding of the breath, a we-dare-not-say-it-out-loud musing about how long things could remain intense. As it turned out, a long time. The year seemed to drag on and on and on, and each time we felt relief might be close, the world experienced otherwise. It felt like 365 days of Chair Pose.<\/p>\n

Early 2022, had to be better, we thought. But instead of the contemporary equivalent of the roaring 20s<\/a> that many pundits promised, we saw war. Continued racism. Appalling political actions and inactions. Insane work demands. More layoffs. More variants. Escalated gas prices. Escalated everything prices.<\/p>\n

To be fair, the year also brought acts of random beauty, such as strollers left on train platforms for refugees<\/a>, and moments of everyday silliness, like the stranger I witnessed dancing in the aisles of a grocery store to make others laugh on Christmas Eve. But the balance felt like it was slipping. We were tired. And it showed. It seemed like the world desperately needed a collective Savasana.<\/a><\/p>\n

More specifically, we needed the kind of profoundly restorative Savasana from which you emerge, dazed and confused and yoga stoned, wondering what day it is or who you are or what planet you\u2019re on. Instead, 2022 felt like the kind of fitful Savasana when the playlist reminds you of your ex, a car alarm blares incessantly, someone knocks over their water bottle, you have to pee, and existential angst or work dread loops incessantly through your thoughts.<\/p>\n

Why we needed Savasana in 2022<\/h2>\n

In 2022, research continued to reveal that we need less stress, more rest, and better sleep. Articles extolling the virtues of slowing down started to show up even in finance and business publications.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the year that the creators of the Calm app<\/a> paid millions to acquire a health platform that would allow it to integrate more mental self-care to its arsenal of meditation, sleep, and relaxation audio.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the year that we latched onto the term \u201cquiet quitting<\/a>\u201d to describe our collective response to feeling constantly overwhelmed, undercompensated, and just blah about our ability to show up to yet another insane day at work.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the year that activist and yoga teacher Octavia F. Raheem published Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change<\/em><\/a> and writer Tricia Hersey drew acclaim for her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto<\/em><\/a>. Madeline Dore, who spent years interviewing successful individuals in an array of careers, published her book I Didn\u2019t Do the Thing Today<\/em><\/a> in which she reminds us \u201crest isn\u2019t about making us more productive\u2014it has an inherent value.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the year that Vogue<\/em> described much of what we shopped for this year<\/a> as a return to \u201cbasics\u201d and \u201cessentials.\u201d Many of these embraced bland palettes that seemed to be barely there. Fashion, it seems, imitates life given that there was an undeniable barely there-ness in how many of us showed up to our days.<\/p>\n

Yoga challenges us to contort not just our bodies but our understanding of what it means to be human. It asks us to step back from our countless expectations and our attachment to how we want things to happen. It reminds us to bring our awareness back, again and again, to what\u2019s happening in the moment and to be okay with that.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not easy. And that\u2019s precisely why we refer to yoga as a \u201cpractice.\u201d And that\u2019s why, at the end of each practice, we succumb to the stillness of Savasana and surrender to some profoundly restorative force that was known by the ancients and is supported by contemporary research.<\/a><\/p>\n

Savasana affords us a small measure of the experience of rest that we so desperately need. Although it\u2019s also the pose that students are most likely to skip and teachers frequently skimp on when time is running short.<\/p>\n

Why we struggle with Savasana<\/h2>\n

Toward the end of a recent vinyasa class of challenging poses strung together with thoughtful cueing and brilliant sequencing, the teacher quipped, \u201cThere\u2019s a longstanding joke that Savasana is the hardest yoga pose. It\u2019s no joke.\u201d<\/p>\n

To sit still and do nothing? As much as we might say that\u2019s what we want, the actuality of not doing anything can be, well, intense. It asks us to be with ourselves and our uncertainty about life in a way that we can\u2019t escape.<\/p>\n

So we are left with a choice. We can resist rest and continue on as we have been, exhausting ourselves and diminishing our experience of life. Or we can surrender to the profoundly restorative, if indefinable, force of being still. Savasana is a respite from cognition, a quiet rebellion, a seeming nothing that is actually everything. It is the yoga equivalent of understated elegance, something that you typically understand is lacking only when you can\u2019t find it.<\/p>\n

Maybe we\u2019ll declare Savasana as our yoga pose for 2023 as well. Practice, after all, makes perfect. We can only hope that allowing ourselves moments of stillness will remind us how desperately we need it on a regular basis. And how lovely life can be when we come from a place of being our truest selves. In the words of NaJe`<\/a>, \u201cGo lay down<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n