The long savasana
On the unfashionable case for ending every practice with twenty minutes of lying still — and what gets lost when you cut it short.
Most yoga classes give you five minutes of savasana at the end. Some give you eight. The good teachers give you ten. Almost no one gives you twenty, because the class would run over time and the students would get restless. But twenty minutes is what the practice is supposed to end with, and at home I have gotten into the habit of taking it.
Lying flat on the back, palms up, eyes closed, no music, no instruction, for twenty minutes. The first ten minutes is the body settling. The second ten minutes is when the actual work happens. The work that gets cut when you give yourself five minutes is the work that makes the whole practice integrate.
What the second ten minutes does
Allows the nervous system to genuinely settle. A five-minute savasana lets you rest. A twenty-minute savasana lets you reorganise. The breath drops to a depth it has not reached during the practice. The face softens in a way it could not soften standing. The mind, which has been negotiating with the practice for the previous forty-five minutes, finally lets go of its small ongoing commentary.
Something around the fifteen-minute mark happens — not for everyone, not every time, but most of the time for me. The body crosses a small threshold. The breath gets a slightly different quality. The space behind the eyes opens. Time, briefly, becomes strange. Whatever this is, it is the thing the practice was aiming at the whole time, and you cannot reach it in five minutes.
On the discipline of staying
The hardest part is not the lying down. The hardest part is not getting up after eight minutes when the mind has decided the practice is done. The mind will argue persuasively. There is a thing to attend to, an email to send, a tea to make. The arguments are real. The arguments do not need to be answered. The body keeps lying still.
I have started using a small twenty-minute timer for this — set before lying down, ignored once set. The timer holds the time. The body holds the position. The mind has nothing to negotiate with. By the time the timer sounds, the savasana is over on its own terms, and the body that gets up is a noticeably different body than the one that lay down forty-five minutes earlier.
If you are going to take twenty minutes out of a busy day, twenty minutes of long savasana after a real practice is the most valuable twenty minutes you can take. I have done many other expensive things for the body. None of them has changed my baseline the way this one has, and it costs nothing except the willingness to stay on the floor.