The morning I was told to feel my feet
On surya namaskara, the salutation to the sun, and what twelve movements can do in you before the day can claim you
Many years ago, on one of those evenings that seem to keep a different clock than the rest of a life, an old monk named Swami Shankarananda sat a frightened, restless boy down on a cold floor and taught him the beginning of surya namaskara, and the beginning had nothing to do with a posture. The boy was me. I am going to hand you that same evening now, because it was never only mine to keep.
Stand on your own feet, he said. Become aware of your body, and then of your legs, and then take the awareness all the way down to your two feet and to the ten toes, and distribute the weight of your whole body evenly, first between the two legs, then across the two feet, and then, if you can, feel the ten toes and the two heels carrying the entire weight of you.
Try it now, wherever you are sitting as you read this. Stand, and let the floor come up to meet ten toes you have probably not thought about in years. Almost no one can do it cleanly the first time. I could not. The floor would not hold still beneath me, or I would not hold still upon it, and after a few minutes of watching me sway Swami Shankarananda ji turned away and sent me off to practise and to come back the next day.
Everything begins here, at the soles, and it begins here for a reason. A person who cannot feel her own feet cannot feel very much else, and most of us have not truly stood inside our own bodies for years. We live an inch in front of our faces, in the noise and the lists and the lit screens, and the body goes on quietly beneath us, unfelt, like a house whose lowest rooms have been locked so long we have forgotten they are there. To be asked to feel your ten toes is to be handed back the key to the ground floor.
I came to this practice in a season when I had badly lost my way, and without my ever noticing the hour it happened, it walked me home. That is all I will say of that, because this is not my story. It is about to become yours.
You will learn surya namaskara in four stages, the way it was taught to me, slowly, the way a thing learned slowly becomes the very shape of your hands. In the first stage the breath does not yet enter at all. You learn only to place one part of the body rightly in each of the twelve postures, the shoulders loose and the back gently arched in the prayer pose, the elbows straight as the arms rise, the knees straight in the forward fold, the two heels reaching down toward a floor they cannot yet touch in the mountain, the navel pressed to the ground in the cobra, one thing at a time, one posture at a time, until the body stops asking where it is. Only when that has gone quiet does the breath arrive, and that is the second stage. Later than the breath come the chakras, the small lit stations the attention travels between as the postures change, and later than the chakras comes the mantra, the twelve names of the sun, until one morning the whole thing has stopped being exercise and become, without your ever noticing the hour it happened, something nearer to prayer.
You are allowed to begin badly. You are allowed to do it twice in a week and forget it on the third day and come back a little ashamed on the fourth. The practice is patient with you. It has been waiting a very long time, and it is in no hurry now.
And then the small graces begin, and they begin so quietly that you will credit them to other things at first.
On a morning when there is no smile anywhere in you, make one anyway. Move your face into the shape of it, force it onto the bone, and wait. Within a few breaths, with absolutely nothing in the room having changed, something inside will shift, and the counterfeit will slowly turn into a true one. The scientists quarrelled over this for the better part of forty years, and they have lately come round to it: a smile you choose to make can begin the very feeling it was only pretending to have. The body, it turns out, is one of the hands resting on the dial of the mood, and the hand is yours to move.
And after some weeks you will notice a small gap opening inside you, a half-second between the thing that happens and the way you answer it. Daniel Kahneman spent his life showing that we are run by two minds, one of them fast and forever reacting, the part of you that has already snapped its answer back before you knew you had decided to speak, and the other slow enough to take a single breath first. The practice quietly hands the second mind the keys. You will begin to pause before you answer, and to soften before you speak, and here is the thing that nobody ever warns you of, that when you keep meeting a difficult person from that slower and kinder place, how long can they go on being rough with you, a week, a month, before they change with nothing ever having been said, simply because the war they had braced for never arrives. You will change a single thing, the half-second before your reply, and the people around you will rearrange themselves like iron filings when the magnet beneath the paper is turned.
The endless turning of the mind will slow. You will learn to think a thing only as far as the thinking serves it, and then to act on it or to set it down, instead of running it round and round through the small hours, and your sleep, which may have been a battlefield for years, will quietly become sleep again.
People will tell you the practice is invigorating, and the word is a thimble trying to hold the sea. What you will feel is closer to the wringing of a cloth. Imagine a towel that has drunk up everything, day after day, into the deepest of its fibres, and imagine the practice as the slow twisting of that towel until the water buried in the deep fibres is forced at last up to the surface, and then imagine shavasana, the stillness you lower yourself into when the rounds are done, as the moment the water finally lets go and falls to the ground and leaves the cloth lighter than it has been in years. That stillness is another sleep laid gently on top of sleeping, the deepest of all sleeps taken while you are wide awake, the cool icing on a cake that has already come out of the oven.
And then, if you stay true to it, there is the matter of time. A single slow round, the twelve postures repeated on each side, ought to take a minute, two at the very outside. You will do it slowly and look up and five minutes will have vanished. Suspicious now, you will begin the next round having just that second checked the clock, determined to catch time in the act, and you will look up and it will read five minutes and twenty seconds, and you will sit there in plain disbelief, unable to find where the time has gone. The scientists who study what they call flow, after the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi, describe this exactly, that when the attention becomes total the one who acts and the acting fuse, the self goes quiet as a snuffed lamp, and time stops keeping its appointments. This may become the only meditation you will ever need, truer than anything sold in the studios and the bright applications, twelve movements given the whole of your attention until the one who moves and the moving are no longer two.
Slowly you will come to see that surya namaskara is five practices folded one inside the other like the layers of a single flame. Lay a mantra upon each posture and it is mantra. Arrive in a posture and hold it, steady and at ease, and it is asana, in the old and true meaning, sthiram sukham, steady and comfortable. Move the breath with intention between the postures, holding it in and holding it out, and it is pranayama. Lie down at the end while the senses turn their faces inward and release the world, and it is pratyahara. And when you are so wholly inside the thing that time forgets to pass, that is dharana. One sequence of twelve movements, and the entire ladder of yoga is standing inside it.
And there is the freedom it will give you among your own inner centres, which I have found in no other practice anywhere. The awareness travels as the body travels. In the prayer pose it rests at the heart. In the raised-arm pose it lifts to the throat. From the throat it falls all the way to the base of the spine, and from the base it climbs again to the point between the eyebrows, so that inside a single round you will have touched and tuned one centre after another, and across the seasons you will grow more intuitive and more open, steadier and far less afraid, for the simple reason that you have been quietly balancing the very centres in which courage and intuition and steadiness keep their homes.
None of this is new, and none of it is mine. Surya namaskara was given its modern shape by Paramahamsa Swami Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga, in a slender book published in nineteen seventy-three under a title that tells you everything it knows, a technique of solar vitalization. The twelve postures each carry one of the twelve names of the sun, for the sun wears a different name and a different quality in each phase of its long year. The practice is, quite literally, a salutation, a worship of the sun without, the burning centre of our small wheeling family of planets, and of the sun within, the warm centre at the navel from which the body draws its own fire, and it balances the two great rivers the tradition calls ida and pingala, the cool and the warm, the moon-side and the sun-side of a human being. And it is older than memory can follow. The adoration of the sun was among the very first things the human creature ever did upon sensing a power vaster than itself, and you may still stand today before the great chariot of carved stone at Konark and feel in your own chest how seriously the ancestors took it. The Rig Veda holds a single line that became the seed of the Gayatri itself, that we meditate upon the radiant glory of the sun and pray that it may illumine our minds. Twelve movements on a mat at first light are the small, daily, private end of something almost unbearably large.
So it comes back, in the end, to where Swami Shankarananda ji began with a swaying boy on a cold floor. Before the postures, before the breath, before the mantras and the names of the sun, there is only this. Stand on your own feet. There is a line I have come to live by, and it lies underneath everything I have ever built. The only miracle in the world is you standing on your own two feet.
You do not have to believe me. You need only a few feet of bare floor, a little quiet before the house wakes, and the willingness to begin clumsily and to come back again the next morning. The sun will do the rest. It has been rising, without fail and without ever being asked, since long before you had a name, and it will meet you the moment you turn to face it.
Stand on your own feet. Feel your ten toes. Begin.
The full technique, posture by posture, with the breath, the mantras, the seed sounds, and the point of concentration for each of the twelve, is laid out on the OMJOOMSUH wiki at the Surya Namaskara concept page.