Sun Salutations form an integral part of yoga. It helps you begin the day with the goodness of yoga.
If you do not have time to go through the entire yoga exercises, these Sun Salutations help you keep in touch with yoga and imbibe its benefits in a short time each day. Let us see how this happens.
Individual Aspects of Sun Salutation
Tone your muscles: You get strength and flexibility by doing yoga regularly. Your joints get lubricated; you open your chest, shoulders, and hamstrings. This gives full range of motion to your body. You release the tension in the spine by doing exercises like Cobra Pose and Forward Bends. When your spine is supple, your entire body benefits.
Improve energy circulation: It is important to energize the body early in the morning. By harmonizing the energy flow, we stimulate our metabolism and control stray forces more easily. Sun Salutations will increase blood circulation and stimulate prana energy in the body. It also removes energy blockages that can lead to illnesses.
Share gratefulness: You must be grateful to receive more blessing. This is one of the underlying themes in Yoga. If you share gratefulness with yourself, you will develop more benefits. Sun Salutation is an ideal way to do this. There are many things we assume take place automatically and pass our awareness. By doing yoga exercises, we bring them more into focus and assimilate their goodness.
Develop respect for your body: Exercising gives us a perfect way to know what each part of our body is doing. It helps coordinate their working by opening channels and systemizing energy flow. When we recognize the working of our body, we develop respect for it. Some days, we have good suppleness and vitality in our body, whereas on other days, our honour is not so good. Then, we feel depressed because we lack the proper energy flow.
Get in touch with the senses: We experience dynamic meditation by doing the Sun Salutation. Yoga is a series of asanas that remain interlinked. This gives us a flowing experience, each leading to another good experience. We must practice it daily to keep in touch with this network of exercises. When we breathe, we connect the body and mind. We let the mind follow our breath and through this, we bring back control to the body and mind. We practice being present, being in the moment, and find a place in our minds beyond actual reality.
More Benefits of Doing the Sun Salutation
It is a 12-fold sequence that is an offering to the Sun. We invoke the Sun to reside inside the body. Here is the list of benefits:
- Good for heart health: Regular yoga strengthens the heartbeat and improves heart health. Fresh oxygenated blood increases your cardiovascular health.
- Corrects imbalances: Improvement of our immune system and reordering functioning of the endocrine glands helps bring balance to our hormone levels. This is why we feel invigorated when we do yoga.
- Improved kidney function: By stimulating our kidney functioning, we help blood filtration. This results in lower toxins in our body.
- Calm effect for our nervous system: Yoga is very helpful for making the mind calm. It awakens the brain center and nervous system. It soothes them and thus our mind becomes calm.
Significance of the number 108
There are 108 Sun Salutations and it is considered a sacred number in Hinduism. All mala beads have 108 beads (one extra guru bead is also present). There are 108 sacred sites (called pithas) around India according to yogic tradition. The sacred points (marma points) on our body are 108, and we have 108 Upanishads.
