Is Sun Salutation & Surya Namaskar the same thing? 🫨 - part 2

"Dance to the beat of your own drum 🥁; whether the world likes your rhythmic movements or not." - Matshona Dhliwayo 🎶

A few days ago I wrote about the value of a sun ☀️ salutation and how it can organically transform into something beyond the structure and the breath. And when this happens, it becomes Surya Namaskar.

Since then, I've received quite a few emails asking me to elaborate, so I wanted to share a little more.

I see the sun salutation almost like learning a dance sequence. We follow the counts, the breath, and the movements, and once everything comes together, it becomes a beautifully intrinsic flowing "dance".

But there's another side to it. When you're at home with some music playing 🎸, there's nothing quite as liberating as dancing freely because nobody's watching. In organised and structured dance, we learn sequences and technique, yet the real freedom for the soul comes when we take everything we've learned and weave it together in our own freestyle, expressing our personality and uniqueness rather than staying constrained by someone else's structure.

As an example, I realised a long time ago that I breathe out 😤 when I push up into upward facing dog or high cobra 🫨. I do that instinctively because I need to create intra-abdominal pressure to support my lower back. I didn't know that at the time, I just did what felt right for my body. But I only really allowed myself to do that in those short five or ten minute sessions when I practiced alone. In class I was always following the technique properly. Going to Laura's class taught me how it should be done technically, whilst those few minutes at home let me refine it and adapt it to what my body actually needed practically.

That's exactly what Surya Namaskar becomes for me. A standalone five minute sequence, sometimes once a day if I have time, that doesn't challenge the way it's taught to me in class, but allows my intuitiveness and quirks to express themselves. I need both. Laura's class, perhaps, is more important for me in terms of technique and structure.

My own practice isn't against what Laura teaches me, but it's like the yin yang symbol. Not opposites, but complementary, merging into one.

I encourage most people to try practicing sun salutations at home once a week, even if only for five or ten minutes. At first it can feel quite robotic and engineered. Your brain is busy mapping out the sequence from memory (or conditioning) and breath counts, and everything feels organised, just as it should when you're following along in class. But over time, that conditioning begins to drop away. Your own movement starts to show up in the gaps. Waves move through your spine that weren't in the original sequence, and you stop counting breaths in your head. The anatomy and form matter less because you're allowing your own personality to unfold. It feels just as liberating as dancing alone knowing that no one is watching 👀.

Of course, the foundation remains essential. You don't neglect the structured sequences and classes simply because you're enjoying a few minutes of freestyle at home. That foundational practice is what supports and informs everything you do when you're on your own mat 🙏🏽.

This isn't the first time I've circled this idea. A while back I wrote about Parvati and her own version of dancer pose, the same tension between expectation and personal expression, just told through mythology instead of a Monday morning email [Read it here - The Mythology of the Dancer Pose]

And if you want to go deeper than an email can take you, this is exactly the kind of thing I spend time trying to unpack on the 200H Teacher Training. Not just the shape of the pose, but what's actually happening underneath it, and how you eventually learn to trust your own instincts inside someone else's structure. [Details on the 200H here]

Namaskar

Zahir

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