year planning and the origins of the sun salutation — surya namaskar
year planning and the origins of the sun salutation — surya namaskar
Without the slightest basis in reality, I’m excited for 2024. I’m of the team who loves the fiction new year, new life. Rethinking the whole existence, as if it were possible to start from a blank sheet — when in fact you can see the mark of the pen on the back, there was (a lot of) stuff before.
You can’t reset life, but when the year turns, I have some rituals to mark a knot symbolising that time has passed — we are in a new cycle. There are two activities that shape the turn, each has its own time and intensity: they cannot be accelerated, they are narrative processes that unite past and future in a present.
I know that the New Year’s celebration would already be a rite to mark this turn and it’s not that I have any distaste for New Year’s Eve, I’m not like Tati Bernardi, who has an aversion to celebrating on crowded beaches, but these are more introspective rituals, precisely because I don’t have a preference for this date.
In some years I spend the night dancing crazy with MD — in others I go to bed early, alone, before midnight, in peace, happy with life. Since my disposition can vary, I created two little rituals that can be maintained in any situation: doing 108 sun salutations and writing some plans in the planner.
Ritual 1: Dance according to the music
Putting “plan the year” as a personal little ritual is almost a cruel joke. As Marília Morchovich speaks very well in this text, having to plan is a symptom of the accumulation of functions that capitalism dumps on our shoulders and makes self-organization almost a question of survival — every man for himself.
It is no coincidence that productivity methods and resources like bullet journals, planners, and pomodoro become increasingly popular. With precarious working conditions, more tasks are required from workers than it is humanly possible to accomplish. Thus, working time not only needs to be extended, but also optimized.
Despite understanding that the overload is systemic and unfair, it does not help to keep struggling against it.
No one is going to break the system by distributing anticap leaflets on the train, nor are they going to win the system if they have a stroke before 50 in exchange for making 6 digits a year.
Time management and monthly-annual budgeting are some of the best rituals that have been built for us in these times and it’s not worth throwing the carpe diem only to stuff myself hidden with rivotril later.
The middle way is Cicero’s planner.
Wednesday: day that the manager goes face-to-face, stays 12 hours in the office to make an average.
Friday: home office day, go to Republic Square at the act against the privatization of corner beds
Reminder: wash the MST cap.
Some people may not like to plan, they think it is paving the way for anxiety or plastering day to day.
Planners, calendars, lists, and scapulars
If the focus of the planning is to answer “Exactly where do I want to go”, “Exactly how much do I want to earn”, it really becomes heavier, these metric mental masturbations are an easy path to frustration, especially if you are prone to believe in fictions and expect everything to come out 100% as expected.
I am a devotee of Thais Godinho, she was an outperformer, one of those we suspect live a 30-hour day, so she created the organized life blog (a bible). At some point, Thais stumbled upon Buddhism and tried to hold the paradoxes of old and new beliefs with the rebranding compassionate productivity.
Fortunately, she didn’t stop there, she would age very badly, life was generous and pulled her into a deeper hole: today the cat is doing a PhD in the area work sufferings — I confess, it was when I thought she was going to throw in the towel, but she holds firm, because it’s what we can do.
I say this to illustrate that “productivity” is a complex and paradoxical subject, not always synonymous with alienated corporate bitches. I also tell you to go there on her blog, it has everything.
My mini contribution to the subject is: “How do I want to feel” and “Who do I want to be with” are good question-exercises to guide the steps when planning, as well as planning from 12 to 12 weeks instead of the whole year, and using the notion app (along with the planner, yes) — everything for me.
I shared in the last edition some of the cool things to do at the beginning of 2024 and I have already prioritized this, if it is not precisely the fun that is left for the second plan, buried by the accumulation of functions and maintenance of everyday life: training, taxes, food, work, courses, professional events, doctors…
The scheme is to think that planning is more of a compass than a map.
It’s an instrument that guides you in some direction, for example, I like to think of a larger goal as the theme of the whole year, but I don’t specify from January to December how to get there. Another thing, I keep a list of trips-rides I would like to do and choose on average 2 to do each trimester.
I have a very experimental personality, I want to acquire many skills or at least humble myself trying — it’s stronger than me. I usually try about 5 habits-hobbies per year. By the way, we are here, now, directly, live, in habit number 1 of 2024, writing and publishing weekly. Stay tuned for more:
Subscribe now
So that I can do this without losing track of the activities-to-survive, planning is essential, it helps me fit work in between fun, I mean.. the opposite.
Ritual 2: Connect the body to the present moment
Besides this ritual-planner, on day one, I also usually do 108 sun salutations. In some yoga studios, on special dates, people do exactly that, so I just borrowed the little ritual for myself too — this magical Indian number and this random sequence.
The idea is to have a moment during the day to make a knot in time, connect breath, thought, body, everything in one place — we are here, we are this, we are together, we have passed another year.
Of course, I would rather ground mind-body-breath to the present moment with my tribe, in a ritualistic dance, singing, playing instruments, and perhaps with a touch of medicinal herb, but I didn’t get to be born in that context.
I grew up with a sun salutation poster on the blue wall of the home office, it was something I used to do since childhood with my mother, it’s a good memory. As an adult, I wanted to know what is the tradition of this sequence, in which text is it? Why does everyone do it? Why is it a little different in each yoga lineage?
If you are also curious to know the origin of Surya Namaskar, the so-called sun salutation sequence, come with me, I will tell here briefly, but I warn you: it is not carved in any ancient sculpture, nor described in medieval scriptures. It’s just a set of movements that a rich Indian invented 100 years ago.
The sun salutation
During World War I and II, showing health and strength was a way to demonstrate national sovereignty. For example, the Germans used their gym exercises not only to develop healthy bodies, but also to promote certain morality and create “new Germans”.
Throughout Europe, texts on sports such as rowing, horse riding, boxing, and swimming, as well as manuals on how to walk, climb, and jump were published. In this context, health and fitness magazines emerged, such as L’Athlète, in 1896, the year the first modern Olympics took place. Before that, in 1893, the first international bodybuilding exhibition took place!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilvTwUjTdHw
In India, various Western gymnastics, such as Ling, Sandow and YMCA, had a great impact, were incorporated into the local culture of fights and we can find this mix in the Indian Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding (1950), a book that was translated into English and sold in other countries, and also included a description of Surya Namaskar as an exercise, along with a detailed history of a supposed tradition.
However, according to the book The path of modern yoga, in extensive bibliographic research, it was discovered that there is no millennial tradition for Surya Namaskar.
In reality, it was Raja Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi (1868–1951) who invented and disseminated the sequence. He tested various foreign & Indian exercise manuals, but saw no result in any of them — like us, who test a thousand workout apps and the belly remains there.
So, he took a sequence that his father used to do to pray, made modifications, called it surya namaskar (sun salutation) and, with the help of the businessman and guru Paramahansa Yogananda, adapted it to the popular form of the time, a step-by-step manual: “Number 1: stand in tadasana, mountain posture… Number 2: bend in uttanasana, etc.”
Bhavanaro systematized his practice as the science of Namaskaras, and incorporated it into the curriculum of his yoga and gymnastics school in Satara. He claimed that the practice had benefits such as muscle development, disease cure, and pain relief.
His booklet included illustrations and recommended practices in cycles, varying from 25 to 50 cycles for children from eight to twelve years old, 50 to 150 cycles for boys and girls from twelve to sixteen years old, and 300 cycles for everyone over sixteen years old.
Since then, millions of people have been doing these prostrations, across India and then around the world, with the help of illustrated manuals translated into English, but also with the little push from gurus seeking ways to disseminate their knowledge in a homogeneous and memorable way.
All of this is very different from the older yoga books, in Sanskrit, medieval, secret, that had little or nothing to do with a sequence of rhythmic movements — of which I will inevitably end up talking in other editions. If you’re interested, stay:
Subscribe now
Hatha yoga is a modern creation and the sun salutation was incorporated into it. It has a base, but everyone does it their own way, Bhavanaro himself mixed the movements with the chanting of Vedic and Bija Mantras.
In fact, it is likely that Bhavanaro named his sequence surya namaskar due to its resemblance to the sun worship ritual, in which Brahmin priests kneel and prostrate — a characteristic of the syncretism that permeates the entire Indian imagination to this day.
Another example that I love, in the akharas, Indian bodybuilding gyms at the time, in addition to weight training, there was the Surya Namaskar and a mix of other techniques that practitioners brought from different places.
K.V. Iyer, combined bodybuilding with yoga postures. 1930. Otley Coulter Collection.
In these places there were also strong anti-colonialist movements, which caused a paradox between accepting European and foreign techniques in general, but at the same time strengthening the nationalist movement, so sometimes everything was appropriated, adapted and renamed as a “purely Indian” practice. Who knows if a bit of what is now said to be yoga and purely Indian is not from another place?
Final Thoughts
You can’t control the future using a planner. There’s a sick productivity p0rn on the internet and I won’t corroborate with that: sometimes I organize myself and don’t deliver anything, it happens.
You also can’t transcend reality by practicing a sequence of movements invented between wars. I won’t embrace alienation and pretend there isn’t a lot of academic research that debunks the magical discourses of gurus out there.
It may sound a bit square, but I like doing these things — and I can handle being cheesy in a good way, I don’t need to justify that I plan because it’s more effective or do yoga because it’s ancient and mystical.
When I laid my head on the pillow, thirty minutes after the turn of the year, I was very happy to be going to bed early, sober, with my alive and clean brother crashed out on the couch and still hearing the sound of my mother washing the dinner dishes.
For this past year, this calm was everything, everything I needed most — I almost cried from how much I needed it. However, I strongly wished that the next turn would be in a short white dress, very nice, bathed in champagne, perhaps even in the midst of some commotion.
Regardless of the situation, I know I will write in my planner and do the sun salutations. As the philosopher Byung-Chul-Han would say in “The disappearance of rituals: A topology of the present”, the ritual is to time, as the house is to space. I like to decorate this knot of time, just as I embellish my house.