Encyclopedia of Spiritual Knowledge

“To do shavasana, lie down on the back with your eyes closed. Make sure you feel comfortable in this position. Nothing should distract you. Relax the body starting from the toes. Imagine that a vertical plane — like a glass wall — starts moving through the body from the toes to the head, leaving no tension behind. Feeling of all parts of the body that are behind the plane disappears. Alienate them by saying mentally: ‘This is not mine, this is not mine!…’ If a feeling of some parts behind the plane reappears — move the plane through this section once again. After the plane has passed the head, you can experience the following states:

“The first state: self-awareness vanishes. You fall into something resembling a deep sleep, but this is not a sleep. Self-awareness is regained in about 18-20 minutes. You feel thoroughly rested, as if after a long deep sleep. This is quite a blissful state. You do not have to stand up abruptly, just enjoy it.

“The second state: self-awareness is retained, but absolute peace comes down on you. You may scan the entire body with the inner sight. You may enter the inner space of your body from below. You may see light and dark regions. Gray or black colors represent disorders on one of the energy planes, which correspond to active or still latent stages of diseases. Try to gather all dark stuff in heaps with a rake, as it were, and throw it outside the body.

“When doing shavasana, we may also experience involuntary exits from the material body: we may suddenly feel ourselves in our usual form but in an unnatural position — for example soaring above the floor, standing on the head, and so on. There is nothing to worry about: once we feel like getting back into the body — we will find ourselves there right away. However, under no circumstances we should encourage ourselves to perform such exits: these are still exits into a coarse spatial dimension — into the so-called astral plane. One should learn how to exit immediately into the highest space dimensions; but the methods for doing this are different.

“Children under age of 12 must not be taught shavasana: having realized that they are out of the body, they do not always want to get back into it.”