Originally published September 29 2013
How to unleash your body's own healing power without supplements
by Paul Fassa
(NaturalNews) The corpse pose, or savasana, is the last posture, or asana, in any Hatha Yoga routine. It's apparently the easiest, because one lies flat on one's back without moving. But it's actually the most difficult to master, because it's so internal.
It's powerful enough that anyone can benefit from it without practicing other yoga postures. It's not for just getting a breather or having a moment to take it easy. It's much deeper than that.
But it's not fully appreciated for what it does, even among many yoga students and teachers.
What It Does for You
As you gain more control over your body's different muscles by relaxing them, you are slipping away from the more manic pursuits of our diseased culture. After gaining success with the corpse pose, you will find it easier to be calmly in a witness state, despite what is going on around you.
The corpse pose aligns your subtle body with your physical. Without that, you won't benefit fully from yoga's health benefits. The subtle body is more like your energy field or astral body. It remains even after the physical body expires. It is what you will be taking with you after bodily death.
Letting Go is What it's All About
Ultimately, your experience is the final judge of how well you do the corpse pose. You should practice on a firm surface with minimal padding without the creature comforts that encourage napping.
Lay flat on your back, legs apart slightly and arms slightly apart from your body with palms up. Palms up helps you stay awake.
Avoid falling asleep. You want more consciousness, not less. But a mind racing or drifting is distracting. When your mind does this, bring it back gently to one of two physical areas: focus on breathing and/or relaxing tense muscles.
The standard technique of releasing tension in sequence from the feet up or from the head, neck and shoulders down takes time. So you may have to be satisfied with partial relaxation sessions as you progress toward total relaxation.
As you progress, sometimes relaxed muscles tense up again. Go back to that section and continue until you feel the tension release.
If the orderly sequence of conscious relaxation in different muscle sections is too difficult, then simply focus on your breathing in a relaxed manner. Allow your awareness to discover an obvious area of tension. Stay with it until it you've relaxed the tension completely.
Then shift your awareness to another part that is tense and work on relaxing that area. As you do this, progress is indicated by feeling that you're wide awake and melting into the floor with no desire to move. Eventually, you'll realize the bliss of total mind and muscle relaxation.
Tensions previously unknown may be discovered. Those tensions are unconscious. By releasing them, you are releasing consciousness. Tensions also indicate subtle or chi energy blockages that cause bad health. Releasing them promotes good health and strengthens the immune system.
The corpse pose can be practiced often, even without practicing other yoga postures. At first, you may feel dull and tired, or restless and wanting to move about. The corpse pose is so simple that it's hard, at first. But these conditions resolve with patient practice.
Stress is the source of many health problems. The only hormone that increases with age is health-harming, stress-produced cortisol. Eventually, one can do the corpse pose to totally relax and rejuvenate in 5 to 20 minutes or so anytime, anywhere.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.myyogaonline.com
http://yoga.about.com
http://science.naturalnews.com
Cortisol: https://www.alsearsmd.com
About the author:
Paul Fassa is dedicated to warning others about the current corruption of food and medicine and guiding them towards direction for better health with no restrictions on health freedom.
You can check out his many non-compromising cutting edge, non-fluff articles here http://www.naturalnews.com/Author712.html
And you can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com
Paul Fassa is dedicated to warning others about the current corruption of food and medicine and guiding them towards direction for better health with no restrictions on health freedom.
You can check out his many non-compromising cutting edge, non-fluff articles here http://www.naturalnews.com/Author712.html
And you can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com
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