Shine on Me

Start your day with reverence for the sun, and harness its life-giving energy with Surya Namaskar.

By Kelly McGonigal

Each Sunday morning, Christopher Key Chapple opens his 8:30 yoga class with eight rounds of Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation). Students at the Hill Street Center in Santa Monica, California, reach their arms toward the sky and then fold forward to the ground as if in prostration to the sun, expressing the same reverence for the life-giving solar energy as did the ancient yogis.

Repeating the sequence in each of the four cardinal directions, the students perform a silent yet powerful ritual of gratitude. Chapple, a professor of Indic and comparative theology at Loyola Marymount University, says the sequence not only wakes up the body but also "calls us to stretch our minds and spirits to the corners of the universe, allowing us to feel the vast expanse of the cosmos within the movement of our bodies."

To Chapple, Surya Namaskar is nothing less than the embodiment of the Gayatri mantra, a sacred prayer to the sun. "As we sweep our arms up and bow forward, we honor the earth, the heavens, and all of life in between that is nourished by the breath cycle," he says. "As we lower our bodies, we connect with the earth. As we rise up from the earth, we stretch through the atmosphere once more, reaching for the sky. As we bring our hands together in Namaste, we gather the space of the heavens back into our heart and breath, acknowledging that our body forms the center point between heaven and earth."

While it's not always taught with such auspicious intentions, the humble Sun Salutation—performed in studios across the country as an energizing sequence that links the body, breath, and mind—is nonetheless deeply potent. "It revitalizes every aspect of your being, from physical to spiritual," says Shiva Rea, creator of Prana Flow Yoga and founder of the Global Mala Project.

Rea prefers the Sanskrit name for the sequence, arguing that the translation to the English "Sun Salutation" doesn't capture the intention and experience of the word namaskar. "'Salutation,'" she says, "seems so formal and stiff. It has nothing to do with the heart. Namaskar means 'to bow,' to recognize with your whole being. Reaching up, bowing forward to the earth in prostration—the meaning is inherent in the movement. Eventually, you are going to have an ecstatic experience of the life force entering your body."

Surya Namaskar also embodies the spirit of yoga in the West: It is intensely physical but can be infused with devotion. And like so much about yoga today, it reflects both ancient ideas and modern innovation. Understanding its history and meaning will allow you to bring the healing energy of the sun and a connection to the Divine into your own practice.

Sun Kissed

The original Surya Namaskar wasn't a sequence of postures, but rather a sequence of sacred words. The Vedic tradition, which predates classical yoga by several thousands of years, honored the sun as a symbol of the Divine. According to Ganesh Mohan, a Vedic and yoga scholar and teacher in Chennai, India, Vedic mantras to honor the sun were traditionally chanted at sunrise. The full practice includes 132 passages and takes more than an hour to recite. After each passage, the practitioner performs a full prostration, laying his body face-down on the ground in the direction of the sun in an expression of devotion. The connection between the sun and the Divine continues to appear throughout the Vedic and yoga traditions. However, the origins of Surya Namaskar in modern hatha yoga are more mysterious. "There is no reference to asanas as 'Sun Salutation' in traditional yoga texts," Mohan says.

So where did this popular sequence come from? The oldest-known yoga text to describe the Sun Salutation sequence, the Yoga Makaranda, was written in 1934 by T. Krishnamacharya, who is considered by many to be the father of modern hatha yoga. It is unclear whether Krishnamacharya learned the sequence from his teacher Ramamohan Brahmachari or from other sources, or whether he invented it himself. In The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, yoga scholar N.E. Sjoman identifies an earlier text called the Vyayama Dipika (or "Light on Exercise") that illustrates athletic exercises for Indian wrestlers, including some that are strikingly similar to Krishnamacharya's version of Surya Namaskar.

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March 2010

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