Tara Bray's Articles on Lions Roar

Tara Bray sets out to uncover the origin and meaning of savasana--corpse pose--and meditates on her life as a young Southern girl who lost her mother too early. Savasana. Which translates into "corpse pose." Dead still. This is the final posture. Practice your yoga, then lie flat on the floor and die to what you've done, feet falling open, hands turned palms up. B.K.S. Iyengar, the founder of the Iyengar system of yoga, says to place a black cloth folded four times over across the eyes. I say the body should grow long and still. The body should become weightless. The bones should sink to the ground as the torn heart opens so the sky dwellers may look down and see this world as it is, bloody and rhythmic. The breath should move without effort. The skin should open its tiny, hidden mouths and let the air stream through in small, silent gasps. Southern women were made for savasana. This year I turned thirty-six, which was not just any year, but the year I've been warned about. The dreaded year. Thirty-six, the age my mother was at the time of her death in 1978, a sudden death in the stagnant July heat of Donalsonville, Georgia. From this year on, my mother will be a woman growing younger than myself. We've come together in the only way possible after a death-a sort of merging by time-and now we will go through another departure, as I watch us both disappearing into some cold silvery stream behind me. There will be no path for me to follow into the future, nor one to depart from, no model to tell me what is to come, nor anything for me to swear against becoming. As my hair grays and grows unruly, my mother's thirty-six years will seem like youth. Her hair will forever be the same black she insisted on calling dark brown, and her feet will be veinless and narrow, never lengthening and flattening out with time and wear. I did not want to turn thirty-six. In her book, Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman says a woman whose mother dies young often fears she will not live beyond the age her mother was at her death; therefore, surpassing that age brings sighs of relief. But that has not been my experience: I have always believed I will live a long life. My fear is that my mother will become an image of youth to me, and no longer fill the role of guide and protector. Last night I was in my bed reading. I glanced in the mirror in front of me and tucked my hair behind my head so it would resemble the shorter style my mother always wore. I shut my eyes just enough so that they appeared closed, and through the thin cracks of light, I scrutinized the reflection of my stilled body, trying to halt the rise and fall of my belly in order to appear corpselike. I wondered if this was what she looked like in her casket, wondered if we looked alike at all. I never saw my mother in her casket. I refused to go into the room where her body was laid out. And then, just as I began to draw up courage and moved forward towards the door, my cousin Frank stopped me. I was thirteen. He was fourteen. "You don't want to go in there," he said. "Nana's really upset. It's bad." And so I stayed in the foyer, a dark and formal room, I'm sure, but I remember little of it. Only the bodies in dark Sunday school clothes, the stiff mahogany furniture, the deep maroon carpeting. Only that my great aunt, Loons, took me into the corner and told me that I never had to be my mother. For years I've wondered if it was the right thing for me to do-to stay out of that room, to avoid seeing my mother's face in death. At the time I convinced myself my choice was a good one, because if I had that image in my mind, I might return to it, again and again; it might accompany every memory of her existence, or worse, stomp each one out. And so I told myself I'd remember her in life-which wasn't quite true. My family lived the rest of its time together trying to forget. We lugged our forgetting around. It grew heavy as a coffin. Soon it seemed we'd made a deal to bear her death alone and only in the dark where no one could see. I walked through my youth trying to stuff my mother deep into the cracks of sleep: forgetting is tiresome. Daddy never spoke her name again, and we kids followed suit. Nothing seems so unnatural, and even frightening, to me now as the word "Mama" on my tongue. Daddy packed her pictures away and her Sunday dishes and her crystal. Years later, while rummaging through some old boxes, my brother came across what he'd been looking for, our mother's things. He lifted a piece of her crystal to the light and admired it-whistling at it in the way a college boy of his time might have whistled at a young woman. He was going back to her-in his own way. But you can't push every memory down forever. And so there I was last night, staring into my own sleepy face, searching it for traces of my mother, trying to catch glimpses of her death as if it would lead me to myself-a thirty-six-year-old woman lying there empty-handed, slightly horrified, slightly amazed. Savasana is a position we know well, stretched out and lying on our backs as if sleeping, but it is said to be one of the most difficult of the poses. B.K.S. Iyengar says that "a perfect savasana needs perfect discipline. It is not only very uncomfortable to the brain, but it makes the body feel like a piece of dry dead wood." There is just so much to understand. When I turned thirty-six, I grew fascinated with this pose. I wanted to know its historical context. Why would the ancient yogis name one of the most important poses after a corpse? Why not call it "sleep pose"? I was curious why an asana that is supposed to destroy fatigue and bring life is an imitation of death. I wanted to know the reasoning of those who might possibly share my curiosity about death. What makes me want to get so near to it? What makes me want to flee it? What, if anything, does my experience have in common with the ancient yogis' reasons for creating this asana? I decided to begin my search for understanding, unaware at the time that I was beginning to step a little closer to my mother's death. I emailed Tim Miller, one of the senior American ashtanga teachers. I emailed Shiva Rea, a woman who has practiced yoga since age fourteen, vowing as a young girl to explore the meaning of the Hindu name her father gave her at birth. I emailed Godfrey Devereux, the yoga teacher who offers the apprenticeships in Ibiza, Spain I've dreamed of applying for. I emailed yogis with strange Indian names I'd never heard of. I even emailed an ayurvedic doctor. I entered search engine after search engine, wanting to find any information on the history of savasana. For days I heard nothing. Disgrace-that's what it was, being Methodist in Donalsonville, Georgia. We were Methodists, with our tight-lipped preachers and our silent congregation and our dead hidden away in closed caskets. Oh, to be a member of the Church of God, where the children were allowed to run barefoot up and down the aisles as the preacher danced across the vestibule and the congregation shouted out and the Lord shivered all over their old, bent bodies; a congregation that broke out into applause and fell out into the aisles as if playing dead. Mt. Zion Church of God was the place my seventh-grade teacher, Ms. Hale, stood before the Lord and talked about being drunk and tottering out on a pier at Lake Seminole, ready to end her own life, until she heard the voice of Satan, and the demons coming on with their sharp, noisy toenails clicking across the old wood, coming to take her away. And then the Lord cracked his whip on their backsides, destroying her every sin and sparing Ms. Hale-making the way for her to return to life as a new woman. She'd become born again, and I heard she'd begun to speak the slippery tongues before the congregation, a congregation I was not allowed to be a part of. "No," my father barked when I asked to go watch all of the excitement. I had to get my information secondhand from Staci Miller, the most careless girl in my class. But that's not the worst thing I missed out on. The members of the Church of God got to touch their dead, caress their faces, kiss their cold lips, and wail into the heavens as they were torn from each body the moment before it was lowered into the dirt. I had neglected to take that chance. I had been too afraid. Consider some of the guidelines for entering savasana: Imagine a straight line running from your chin to your sternum to your pubic bone. Allow your bottom teeth to drop away from the top ones. When each toe grows limp, quiet your sacrum. Make each nostril wide. Let your head be the last thing to plunge like a stone. Remember, a stone is mute. The path downward can feel like a perfect dream. It is not real until everything shuts down into nothingness. The ground is a friend to the spine. Be there. I moved around a lot during those early years after my mother died, living in one small southern town after another. There is not a lot to do in those towns, so cars, motorcycles and three-wheelers become great methods to pass the slow, sleepy hours. A lot of children die riding these motorized vehicles, and I've known quite a few of them. Ten of my classmates over the years died in car accidents. Three were killed on motorcycles. Craig Brooks was the first one to go that way. Carol, my mother's third-grade student, made number two. And then there was Kayla. Kayla died the summer I moved to Washington, Georgia, a year after my mama's death. Within hours of meeting the local kids I was shown her photo by a tall lanky boy. She was perched on top of a brand new spit-shined motorcycle. She was tiny, with that shiny, white-blond hair that seemed to want to take flight. Everything about her was thin and pale, even the skin that stretched over her petite features, across her arms and her delicate wrists. Everything about her said lightness. The ancient yogis worshiped lightness. There are stories of them becoming so light that when they ran...

Savasana

TEACHINGS

LIFE

EXPLORE BUDDHISM

NEWS