Dear ones,

Someday you are going to die. As will I. And everyone we love.

This is not morbid negative thinking on the cusp of The Big Dark in the Pacific Northwest. This is me acknowledging something I don’t believe we remember often enough.

The only other thing certain in life besides our birth is our death.

Most of us don’t contemplate death on a regular basis. It’s pretty easy to keep it at a comfortable distance – until something happens that brings our mortality much closer. A serious diagnosis. A medical scare. The death of someone we love. For some of you reading this, mortality has already looked you right in the eye.

Denial of death – or our fear and resistance around it (called abhiniveśa in the yoga world) – isn’t particularly useful, but it’s very human. Abhiniveśa can also be understood as our deep instinct to cling to life, to hold tightly to what we know and what we are. Pushing those thoughts – those realities – away doesn’t help us live an intentional life. So I often wonder what might happen if, instead, we allowed ourselves to contemplate this inevitable reality? Can we soften our grip enough to make some peace with – or at least find some acceptance of – the fact that, eventually, we will have to let everything go?

Life is a blend of circumstance and fate, the conditions into which we were born and that have shaped us, how we meet what comes our way, and what we choose to do with the life that is ours.

What do we do with our precious time? In what ways do we want to embrace living? What does it even mean for us to be “fully alive”?

It’s so easy to get stuck in a pattern of taking life for granted – week by week, just chugging along – or sometimes simply getting through each day. Maybe our schedules are hectic and chaotic. Maybe they’re rote. Maybe they’re spacious and calm. Either way, it’s incredibly easy to move through our days without consciously considering the life we are, in fact, living right now. Yes, each day brings us one day closer to the end of our lives – and each day is a unique opportunity to be fully engaged with the life we have. We will not always have the luxury of tomorrow.

Contemplation of death has long had a place within spiritual and contemplative traditions, including yoga practice. Śavāsana translates as corpse pose. (Although when was the last time your yoga teacher called it that? Even we often shy away from the literal translation.) While most of us know it as the resting pose at the end of a yoga practice, there is something much deeper embedded in the pose: an opportunity to practice truly letting go. To become still. To release our grasp, if only temporarily, on our roles, our plans, our patterns, our identities, our bodies, our material accumulations – all the things we will one day relinquish.

I’ve created something really special for the end of this month that invites us to sit with all of this. It’s an opportunity to pause, acknowledge, be with, and breathe into what it might eventually mean to let all the trappings of our life go. And hopefully, in doing so, we can ask ourselves: How might I embrace my own life more fully, with meaning and authenticity, while I am here now – alive and vital?

Śavāsana as Corpse Pose: Practicing Death, Honoring Life
Sunday, October 25, 3:00–5:30pm
Datza Studio, Seattle
Learn more here

We’ll open with a special cacao ritual on the rooftop to arrive, acknowledge what we’re ready to release, and honor what we wish to carry forward. Then we’ll move downstairs into the cozy womb of the studio for a contemplative practice including guided meditation, Restorative postures, and – of course – extended śavāsana.

I’m excited to welcome you into this unique container and see what opens up – and what beautiful threads you might choose to carry forward as you continue weaving the tapestry of your one precious life.

With the ebb and the flow of autumn blessings,
Nicole

“It doesn’t matter how long you have forgotten, only how soon you remember.”
—Buddha

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Śavāsana as Corpse Pose

Nicole Bratt Yoga