śavāsana
We rarely hear it translated from the Sanskrit. This is probably because “corpse pose” is not exactly music to the western ear.
Early in the morning, the day before St. Valentine’s, a ninety foot pine tree toppled over and came crashing down onto our front patio. It sounded as though the sky had shattered. The tree lay there for several days, as long and straight as the horizon in the distance. It was not her trunk that was responsible for the brunt of the damage done, but her branches.
vŗkșāsana
“tree pose”
I’d never taken any notice of this particular tree. We are surrounded by trees. It is easy not to notice one when it is standing tall and minding its own business. It is disconcerting to see a giantess when she has been suddenly uprooted. Had she been dead before she hit the ground?
adho mukha vŗkșāsana
“upside-down tree pose”
The day the arborist’s crew was set to arrive, I was practicing yoga in my usual spot in front of the fireplace in the bedroom. The handstands were not going well. I was all limbs and no tree. My legs were akimbo, my arms would not support me and I kept falling over onto the floor with a most ungraceful THWUMP. I gave up and went into the kitchen for some hot chocolate.
“He was dead before he hit the ground.” That’s the way my uncle explained the circumstances of my grandfather’s death to me. Were the words meant to be a comfort to a six-year-old? I loved my grandfather more than anything in the world.
From inside the house, the buzz of the chainsaws sounded much like the swarm of wasps that once chased me and my horse on the trail when we had unwittingly disturbed their underground nest. In a couple of hours the pine would be cut into nearly a hundred pieces. Although the tree had looked healthy, she was rotten at her core.
It is not advisable to fall into śavāsana. One should ease into the pose with mindfulness at the end of one’s practice. In yoga, we twist and stretch and invert and breathe, in the hope that by the time we lie quietly in the “corpse pose,” we have managed to silence the incessant drone of the mind and momentarily cut out what has been devouring our core.
After the chain saws had stopped and the crew had left, I stepped outside. My husband joined me. A stiff breeze was blowing in from the south and the air was saturated with the scent of pine. The massive kentia palm now sprouted from a mound of dirt, its beautiful turquoise glazed pot in fragments. The plaster angel head that had hung on the fence beside the kentia lay face down in the mud. When we turned the sculpture over, we found that only the tip of one outstretched wing was superficially cracked.
Splintered deck chairs and jagged shards of terra cotta and green marble from a broken side table were strewn across the patio in a sad, haphazard mosaic. The large, oval teak table had been chopped in two. Its unopened umbrella, still sheathed in its canvas cover, stood upright and unscathed like a lone sentinel.
My husband said he could cobble together four chairs from the usable sections of wood left and inlay a new centre for the teak table from the largest remaining piece of marble. He is good that way.
I went back to the kitchen and drank a second cup of hot chocolate. Then I returned to my practice in front of the fire. I rooted my palms to the floor. This time my arms held firm. My feet floated up effortlessly and felt the tug of the sky. All four limbs were straight and strong. I was the vertical and powerful “upside-down tree.” I relished the inversion for as long as I could. Now I was ready to dissolve into śavāsana, the easiest and most difficult pose of all.