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“Raise your hand if 2022 went the best way you expected.”

That was the sigh-inducing opening line of an email newsletter I recently received from yoga teacher Kimberlee Morrison. She’s not fallacious. It’s been a heck of 12 months.

Actually, it’s been a heck of a couple of years. And we’ve been navigating them with as much ease and humor and beauty as we will muster. In the course of the early weeks and the ennui of lockdown in 2020, memes of exhausted individuals collapsing into Child’s Pose—and staying there indefinitely—appeared all over the place from Instagram to the Recent Yorker. Who couldn’t relate to wanting more of the pose that offers us permission to fall right into a heap and shut ourselves off from any more sensory input? It was, unequivocally, the 12 months of Child’s Pose.

We quietly tiptoed into 2021 with hushed expectations and cautious optimism. There appeared to be a collective holding of the breath, a we-dare-not-say-it-out-loud musing about how long things could remain intense. Because it turned out, an extended time. The 12 months looked as if it would drag on and on and on, and every time we felt relief may be close, the world experienced otherwise. It felt like three hundred and sixty five days of Chair Pose.

Early 2022, needed to be higher, we thought. But as a substitute of the contemporary equivalent of the roaring 20s that many pundits promised, we saw war. Continued racism. Appalling political actions and inactions. Insane work demands. More layoffs. More variants. Escalated gas prices. Escalated the whole lot prices.

To be fair, the 12 months also brought acts of random beauty, corresponding to strollers left on train platforms for refugees, and moments of on a regular basis silliness, just like the stranger I witnessed dancing within the aisles of a food market to make others laugh on Christmas Eve. However the balance felt prefer it was slipping. We were drained. And it showed. It appeared like the world desperately needed a collective Savasana.

More specifically, we wanted the form of profoundly restorative Savasana from which you emerge, dazed and confused and yoga stoned, wondering what day it’s or who you might be or what planet you’re on. As an alternative, 2022 felt just like the form of fitful Savasana when the playlist reminds you of your ex, a automobile alarm blares incessantly, someone knocks over their water bottle, you will have to pee, and existential angst or work dread loops incessantly through your thoughts.

Why we wanted Savasana in 2022

In 2022, research continued to disclose that we’d like less stress, more rest, and higher sleep. Articles extolling the virtues of slowing down began to indicate up even in finance and business publications.

It’s the 12 months that the creators of the Calm app paid thousands and thousands to amass a health platform that may allow it to integrate more mental self-care to its arsenal of meditation, sleep, and rest audio.

It’s the 12 months that we latched onto the term “quiet quitting” to explain our collective response to feeling continuously overwhelmed, undercompensated, and just blah about our ability to indicate as much as one more insane day at work.

It’s the 12 months that activist and yoga teacher Octavia F. Raheem published Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change and author Tricia Hersey drew approval for her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. Madeline Dore, who spent years interviewing successful individuals in an array of careers, published her book I Didn’t Do the Thing Today wherein she reminds us “rest isn’t about making us more productive—it has an inherent value.”

It’s also the 12 months that Vogue described much of what we shopped for this 12 months as a return to “basics” and “essentials.” Lots of these embraced bland palettes that appeared to be barely there. Fashion, it seems, imitates life provided that there was an undeniable barely there-ness in how a lot of us showed as much as our days.

Yoga challenges us to contort not only our bodies but our understanding of what it means to be human. It asks us to step back from our countless expectations and our attachment to how we wish things to occur. It reminds us to bring our awareness back, time and again, to what’s happening within the moment and to be okay with that.

That’s hard. And that’s precisely why we seek advice from yoga as a “practice.” And that’s why, at the top of every practice, we succumb to the stillness of Savasana and give up to some profoundly restorative force that was known by the ancients and is supported by contemporary research.

Savasana affords us a small measure of the experience of rest that we so desperately need. Even though it’s also the pose that students are most certainly to skip and teachers often skimp on when time is running short.

Why we struggle with Savasana

Toward the top of a recent vinyasa class of difficult poses strung along with thoughtful cueing and good sequencing, the teacher quipped, “There’s a longstanding joke that Savasana is the toughest yoga pose. It’s no joke.”

To sit down still and do nothing? As much as we’d say that’s what we wish, the reality of not doing anything could be, well, intense. It asks us to be with ourselves and our uncertainty about life in a way that we will’t escape.

So we’re left with a selection. We will resist rest and proceed on as now we have been, exhausting ourselves and diminishing our experience of life. Or we will give up to the profoundly restorative, if indefinable, force of being still. Savasana is a respite from cognition, a quiet rebel, a seeming nothing that is definitely the whole lot. It’s the yoga equivalent of understated elegance, something that you sometimes understand is lacking only when you possibly can’t find it.

Possibly we’ll declare Savasana as our yoga pose for 2023 as well. Practice, in any case, makes perfect. We will only hope that allowing ourselves moments of stillness will remind us how desperately we’d like it frequently. And the way lovely life could be after we come from a spot of being our truest selves. Within the words of NaJe`, “Go lay down.”

About our contributor

Renee Marie Schettler is a senior editor at Yoga Journal. She has been an editor at national newspapers and glossy magazines for the higher a part of the last 20 years. She began studying yoga nearly 20 years ago with teachers in Recent York City who emphasized precise alignment. Her understanding of yoga modified when she met teachers who imagine the practice is less about how we execute the asana and more about whether we will give up into the stillness of it. She has been teaching yoga since 2017.