Turning toward mortality: yoga's savasana as a salutogenic practice for engaging with death anxiety.
Frontiers in public health January 1, 2026 Lori Rubenstein Fazzio, Anne Pitman, Shelly Prosko
Death anxiety is common in modern cultures and leads to avoidance of advance care planning and overuse of life-prolonging treatments. This Perspective proposes shifting from a pathogenic focus on life-extension and symptom reduction to a salutogenic approach emphasizing meaning-making and adaptive engagement with mortality. Antonovsky's Sense of Coherence framework—comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness—is presented as a psychosocial resource that supports wellbeing amid existential stressors. Cultivating conscious mortality awareness may strengthen Sense of Coherence. Savasana (corpse pose) is proposed as an embodied contemplative practice for experiential engagement with impermanence, not as a treatment for death anxiety but as a salutogenic practice supporting reflective meaning-making when practiced intentionally across the lifespan.