Action Editor - Make Rig Changes Non-destructive

In Pose, when you make changes to your rig and keyframe your animation in the Action Editor, the changes you make to your rig are persistent even after you push the animation down to the NLA as a strip.

I may be misunderstanding the process, but from what (little) I know about the NLA, the entire purpose is to provide a place to store animations so that they can be applied to a rig and blended / used to create a more complex animation.

So why are Action Editor changes persistent?

I would like to see my rig return to its start state after I push down to the NLA. Not the rest state... the pose the character was in when I started keyframing the animation.

As it is now, I have a character in a default standing state; I animate the character in the Action Editor and push the finished action down to the NLA.

But now my character is stuck in the animated position, even though the keyframes have been removed from the action editor.

Even when the new strip has been deleted from the NLA, the character is still stuck in the pose it was last placed in.

If the character returned to the pose it started with after pushing down the animation, I could then move on to creating a new animation and just keep cranking them out.