I Didn't Plan It This Way

As it turns out, yesterday’s yoga practice provides a wonderful lens through which to view the integration of my mental, physical, and spiritual preparation.

Our practice at the studio was 108 sun salutations in honor of the summer solstice. A sun salutation consists of 12 yoga poses, or asanas. You flow from one pose to the next. Each inhalation brings you to an expanding, stretching asana; each exhalation brings you to a contracting asana. 108 sun salutations of 12 asanas each is 108 X 12 = 1,296 asanas. Even if you make it effortless, it is definitely a physical workout!

“Sun salutation” is the translation of “surya namaskar.” Surya is sun; namaskar is Hindu for namaste, from the root, to bow. So a sun salutation is a way of bowing to, greeting, praising the sun. Why 108? The number 108 plays a significant role in Buddhist, Hindu, and other traditions as is evidenced in many ways. Buddhism identifies 108 different sins and worries. “Temples often have 108 steps, 108 columns, or some other feature.” Ancient Indian astronomers reported that the sun is 108 sun-diameters from the earth, and the moon is 108 moon-diameters from the earth. In fact these distances are 107.6 sun-diameters and 110.6 moon diameters. (With thanks to Mark Barone for his research on 108.)

Whatever its origin, 108 has strong spiritual roots. With each of the 108 salutations, we honor the sun without, its light, its warmth, and all that lives, grows, flourishes because of the sun. With each of the 108 salutations, we honor the sun within, the fire that burns in our belly, the light that shines in our heart. 108 spiritual sun salutations.

In fact, we did not do 108 sun salutations without stopping. Rather, we did nine sets of twelve salutations. Between sets, we would sometimes stand silently, observing the sun without and the sun within. At other times, we would lie on our mats in savasana, or corpse pose. It was during one savasana that one of our instructors read a poem.

Brown earth lay blanketed beneath
the weight of white snow.
People hold within their heart
the promise of light
Light that overcomes the night
Igniting fire
That burns a hole
all the way to the hot dry summer fields
The hope that the light holds in winter
becomes in summer
the knowing of the sun’s pathway back again
We poise on the edge of these great turnings
Balanced day and night
But for a moment.
Cheryl Ban

In hearing this poem, I understood, in a way that I had not before, that the sun within me is on its knowing path back again. That knowing—even when it is not knowing—is one of the gifts of this stage in my life. That knowing—of the promise, of the fire, of the hope—is the knowing that I seek to share with those I am mentoring. That knowing—both in knowing and not—is a source of great peace and equanimity.

As I honored the path of the sun without, I also honored—and understood a little more fully—the path of the sun within. 108 sun salutations brought more closely together my mental, physical, and spiritual preparation for this journey that I am on.