Corpse Pose

In a yoga class the other day, lying in shavasana, my body floating in that space between relaxation and sleep, I thought of Daryl.

Shavasana is also known as “corpse pose,” because you lay on your back, on the ground, arms open at your side. Of course, you are breathing, which is very un-corpse like, but you get the picture: Your body lying flat and open and still. It was a memory of the first time he came to visit me in the US, we traveled to LA to see friends and went to a yoga class. I ended up tweaking a muscle in my back and had to sit out in the lobby, but Daryl finished the class and, afterward, declared he “liked the sleepy bit at the end the best.” It was so him, relaxed, present, playful. I let myself dream for a minute that it was this body on the yoga mat next to mine.

So much of yoga and meditation is about just showing up, for yourself, for your body. My life revolved around my body after he died—protecting it from COVID, protecting it from bad habits, protecting and strengthening it against old age and my already misaligned spine, protecting it and preserving it so I can keep going.

For the last few years, I’ve been in a form of corpse pose; all I've been able to muster is raising my hand and saying, “Present.”

My “journey,” if I dare call it that, the last few years has been deeply internal and therefore, invisible. When it comes to the outer trappings of what an active life looks like—career, kids, family, a house, travel—I disappeared. As a widow in her 40s I am already beyond all sorts of urgent calls to action (Get married! Start a family! Advance your career!), and, to be honest, it’s kind of nice. I recently started to search for a job, because, like the rest of the world, I need a stable income, but it also feels like a very basic way of proving to the world that I DO something and therefore exist. But sometimes, I’m not sure I’m ready to exist in that way and maybe I never was.

I’ve made all the lists, bought workbooks, downloaded apps, set all the intentions, made vision boards, deeply studied my best and worst attributes and habits, I’ve listened to podcasts on efficiency, on procrastination, on trauma on comparison, on finding meaning and none of it can explain this feeling of being on the other side of life and at the same time living.

Grief can feel like an invisibility cloak. It allows you to hear and see things differently, and be privy to thoughts and feelings normally inaccessible. I’ve viewed and taken stock of my life from all sorts of different.  

While it’s hard to imagine anything called “corpse pose” as rejuvenating, it is because you are just there, no past, no future, just present. Just you, your body, your breath and the ground beneath you. Presence, that illusive thing. And I do feel present in so many more ways than I ever was before, and with that presence comes a sharpening of pleasure and pain.