How to Practice the Shavasana (Corpse Pose) Meditation
Although shavasana—also known as the corpse pose—looks easy, it’s actually more complicated than just lying down. While lying on your back on the floor, you have to relax, slow your thinking through meditation, and become able to transcend your body and your mind to commune with your true self. But practicing shavasana definitely worth the effort, for many reasons. Here’s how you do it.
Taking Root in the Earth
During pure shavasana, your thought slows and, ultimately, thought will be suspended. But to get to that point, it sometimes helps to engage in thought that moves you in the right direction. Shavasana can be effectively visualized in many ways, but we recommend these two: as the body merging with earth, and as the body merging with sky. The total suspension of thought for any length of time only occurs in the advanced stages of samadhi, but you might experience a slowing down or momentary suspension of thought early on in your meditation practice.
For the first option, try the following visualization to ease you into shavasana:
Lie down on your back on the floor, arms slightly out from your body, legs slightly apart. Shift your body until you find a comfortable position. Close your eyes and breathe deeply.
With each breath, imagine you are inhaling peace, which feels cool, soft, and light. This peace gathers up the body’s chaos, chatter, and distraction. On the exhalation, all is exhaled as peaceful, positive energy. In with peace, chaos transformed, out with joy. In with peace, chatter transformed, out with calm.
With each inhalation, feel your muscles relaxing and your bones becoming heavier. Imagine your spine is falling with the weight of gravity. Feel your foot bones, leg bones, hip bones, shoulders, neck, and head growing heavier, melting, joining with and rooting into the earth. Relax into the arms of Mother Earth. Breathe in peace; breathe out peace.
Soon, your muscles, bones, and entire body have sunk gently into the earth and you feel cool and relaxed. Your breath is easy and soothing. You are completely supported, nurtured, and rocked by the planet. You feel complete comfort and ease. All your thoughts have given way to the flow of your exhalations. Stay in this position for 10 to 20 minutes, then slowly offer a blessing to the earth. Feel yourself becoming lighter. Feel your thoughts returning, relaxed and easy now. Slowly sit, then stand. Carry your awareness of your communion with the earth throughout the rest of your day.
Floating Like a Cloud in the Sky
This second visualization option can help you to ease into shavasana by imagining your body going up instead of down. Try this one:
Lie down on your back on the floor, arms slightly out from your body, legs slightly apart. Shift your body until you find a comfortable position. Close your eyes and breathe deeply.
With each inhalation, imagine you are breathing in pure, white, playful light. Imagine the light gathers up and soothes all the heaviness, stress, pain, negative emotions, and darkness lingering in your body and mind. With each exhalation, the transformed energy leaves your body as pure joy. In, white light. Out, heaviness and pain.
As you continue to inhale the light, imagine it filling your body as helium fills a balloon. First, the light fills your toes, your feet, and your legs. Imagine it cleansing your body, dancing inside you. Imagine it is airy, joyful, laughing light as it fills your torso, your arms, your neck, and your head.
Imagine the last of the negativity purified to flow out with your breath as healing, positive energy. The white light is taking up all the space now, it begins to glow, and you begin to glow with it. Imagine the lightness radiating from your body, from around your head like a halo, from out of the tips of your fingers and toes, encircling your body so you feel safe, calm, happy, and completely at home.
Now, the light is becoming even lighter. It washes over your arms with a rush like a spring zephyr, and you feel your arms begin to lift. It rushes over your legs and feet, and your legs and feet feel as if they are rising in the breeze, too. The light wraps your body with its comforting arms and cradles your head. Gravity no longer has any effect on you. Up you go, floating, flying, hardly able to keep from laughing with joy.
Imagine floating up as the space in your ceiling opens. You drift into the open sky, surrounded by light. The blue of the sky surrounds you. Then you feel the cool mist of a cloud wrapping you in its airy mist. You realize you are resting in a cloud, and no place could be safer or more beautiful. The cloud sparkles with gold light and rocks you gently, softly. You recognize that you are pure spirit. Your old, clunky body is waiting for you far below, but for this moment you can fly. Rocked in light, embraced by peace, you are serenely safe in the sky.
Stay here for 10 to 20 minutes, basking in pure, unhindered awareness. Then, slowly offer a blessing to the cloud and feel gravity, bit by bit, slowly coax you downward. Float gently earthward through the heavens, through the roof of your home, and back into your waiting body. In your absence, you notice, your body has become relaxed. Your thoughts have stopped chattering around the ceiling and have floated back into you, slower, quieter, and relaxed. Open your eyes and slowly, mindfully aware of your body, sit up, then stand. Carry your awareness of your communion with the sky throughout the rest of your day.
Joan takes a break to prepare for meditation at home in supported shavasana. People with lower-back problems will find it uncomfortable to lie flat on the floor. Place a pillow or rolled blanket under your knees to take pressure off that sensitive lower back. You can also support your head and neck with a small pillow.
Breathe to the Center of Peace and Tranquility
You might have noticed that most of the space in the preceding exercises has been taken up with the visualizations used to get into the state of shavasana, but not much space is spent describing the state of shavasana. That’s because, for the most part, shavasana is an indescribable state. It is the soul communing with the universe, the true nature of the self revealed. These things can hardly be described in ordinary language.
But when you are in shavasana, it may not always match this ideal. Your thoughts will probably keep trying to infringe on your peace. What business does a thought about whether the pest-control guy is coming today have to do with the true nature of you? No business at all, but thoughts are notorious for going places that aren’t any of their business! To keep them at bay, as well as the intrusive body sensations you’ll probably also experience (the familiar itching, twitching, cramping, and aching), keep in mind one thought. Return to it whenever your mind or body behaves out of turn: Breathe to the center. (And if itches are a real problem, give yourself a break and scratch them, then return to your thought. If you think you can’t scratch, you’ll itch even more!)
Imagine that each breath comes and goes from the very center of your being, where only peace and tranquility live. Breathe in peace; breathe out peace. Your breath will be deep and long and full because each breath comes from so far inside you. Imagine that the center of yourself is a planet all its own, the planet you, and your body and mind are its galaxy. Come back to the image again and again, and breathe, breathe, breathe.
Keep practicing shavasana and before long, your body and your thoughts will get the hint and learn to behave. Prana, or life-force energy, will move through you and in and out of you more freely, revitalizing your physical, astral, and causal bodies. You’ll have more physical energy as you move through life, but you’ll also have more energy on the other, more subtle levels that are also you. Namaste!
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Meditation, Second Edition, by Joan Budilovsky and Eve Adamson
