How to do Pratyahara, the Least Known Yoga Pratice: Five steps, Five senses.

Early on in her students’ study of yoga, Dassa Oppenheimer teaches Pratyahara as an entry into Shavasana. Pratyahara is the yoga practice of  ‘withdrawal of the senses’  from the body and from the environment . The practice facilitates the journey into the inner world where there are no loud noises, advertisement to buy, lists to do, and other things that might distraction us from our intelligent being. Dassa said, “If you don’t learn how to withdraw from your senses during Shavasana, you might as well sit in a chair and do something else.”

Here I will tell you how Dassa teaches us to use ‘withdraw our senses’ as the gateway into a surrendered Shavasana.

5 Five Steps to Pratyahara ( while in Shavasana)

1) Sight/Eyes. We begin with the most dominant sense. Lightly close your eyes and then lift the upper eyelid ever so slightly so that it does not press against the lower lid. This is difficult because when you lift the upper eyelid, you can easily tense the forehead. Do not tense the forehead. Slightly lift the outer edges of the eye toward the temple to avoid forehead tensing. Once the eyelids are in position and you are aware of a lightness around the eyes, roll the pupil downwards, as if looking towards the heart. No straining. Once in position, the eyes do not move.

2) Taste/Tongue. Relax the jaw. Let the tongue drop away from the palate. Do not hold the tongue back. The tongue tip nestles gently behind the lower teeth. Relax the corners of the mouth, letting the corners melt downwards toward the jawbone.

3) Nose/Smell. Bring your attention to the root of the nose. That’s the bridge of the nose. It doesn’t take long to relax here; just focusing attention at the nose’s root seems to relax the sense of smell. For help, image a dark warm circle—a black hole, if you like—sinking from the nose’s root into the brain.

4) Ears/Sound. Here we relax the inner ear. Bring your attention to the upper rims of your cheekbones. Allow the cheekbone to melt down toward the earlobe, which in Shavasana is the lowest part of your face. You will feel your inner ear let go of tension.

5) Skin/Touch. Skin is the largest sense organ. This step of Pratyahara teaches you to relax your face. ( Dassa says the results of practicing regular technique on the facial skin are better than botox). Imagine

How to Do a Proper Shavasana (corpse pose)- 10 STEPS

Iyengar has called Shavasana*,  the final relaxation pose, one of the most difficult. Why is it difficult? As serious yoga practitioners we strive to eventually be able to live outside time–inside time’s heart but disconnected from the past and the future: in other words, to be always in the present. Shavasana is training for this triumph.**

To do shavasana is to cut the threads that connect us to the concept of “I.”  We become present but formless.

My yoga instructor, Dassa Oppenheimer studied with Iyengar in the 70s when his class size was no more than a dozen. She got a lot of direct, personal instruction that she passes on to us and stories, too. For instance she told us: “In class, Guruji liked to sit on my abdomen when I was in Urdhva Dhanurasana (the wheel, upward bow pose). ‘Look,’ he would say. ‘Oh, she’s a strong one’.”

I suppose that story let us know that despite her small size and elegance, she’s tough. Not that we hadn’t realized that already. We have been studying with her for decades. Her instruction possesses the sturdy, relentless drive of a master teacher who both cares for her students deeply but who also has little tolerance for lapses of attention to detail.

“No,no, no,” she says when we are about to stop sweating and are ready to close our eyes in a welcome, final relaxation.“How many times do I have to tell you!”  She knocks our legs an inch further apart or a bit closer together.

According to Dassa, an improper shavasana never permits you to let go of your body, which is a necessary step in letting go of your thoughts and therefore entering timelessness.

10 STEPS FOR A PROPER SHAVASANA

1. From sitting to lying. Place yourself on the mat in dandasana, heels at the bottom of the mat. Align your body. Be in the center of the mat and your body. On your sit bones. Your hip bones parallel. Have a folded blanket ready at the head of your mat (or a prop that will lift your head & neck only as much as to be on the same plane as your spine, not higher.)

Going down from dandasana to shavasana is one of the few times in yoga that you are permitted to collapse your torso. Roll down from sitting, vertebrae by vertebrae, to a flat-on-your-back position.

2. Placing head prop Place the head/neck prop

IYENGAR YOGA AND THE SACRUM: a mind-blowing epiphany

My  yoga teacher Dassa Oppenheimer, who was a student in Iyengar’s first Western class, is in her nineties, but we and she would never mention this because it is not important. “In yoga there is no age,” she says. She’s right: we are only as old as our spines are flexible. Her poses are filled with energy and that’s what she wants us to find. “Feel it?” she asks. It’s a sense of awe and freedom that she wants us to find comfort in after we have worked to ‘get’ the pose. It’s a beautiful wave of authority that we find. Not for beginners.

Dassa teaches (and demonstrates) it all: backbends, twists, inversions, dogs,and forward bends. No one teaches the forward bend better than Dassa. 

For years, I have been working on leading with my navel and maintaining a flat back as I descend my upper torso towards my thighs and knees. “The head is last, always last.”

Still, after thousands of forward bends, at a certain point in the descent I round my shoulders before getting my front body onto my thighs and lower my head. It’s not my hamstrings, calves or ankles that cause the rounding.

Each year I have inched up the spine, widening and loosening the muscles away from fascia, or stickiness as I like to call it. To achieve the desired flatness, I’ve lengthened the sides of my torso and arms, stretched under my armpits and the sides of my gluts. I’ve been taught to lift my sternum without hollowing my back. And never move the hips once you ‘go.’

It’s as if something pulls the hips backwards. And there is a compactness in the hips that creates space in the eyelids of the groin (the crack between the upper torso and the upper thigh.) You have to pull in the abdomen to achieve the space and work a rotational movement of the skin that begins at the navel around to the lower back. 

So here’s the epiphany: It’s the expansion of