I attempted 108 Sun Salutes - here's what happened relating to movement and headspace.....

I did it. I think.

108 Sun Salutations. About 50 minutes of moving, sweating, counting, overthinking, negotiating with myself… and eventually just moving.

I started in the shade. The sun, apparently, had other plans and slowly moved in to join me. By the end I was very much in it.

I knew this wasn’t going to be my best yoga practice. I wasn’t aiming for beautiful, perfect Sun Salutations. I knew that 108 would be tough, so my intention was to make the movement as easy and sustainable as possible. Keep breathing. Keep moving. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/d88265_94d8234470834c3bbe4d46c9f134f692/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Moving though mentally and physically

Counting, however, was HARD.

By 40 I was bored and overthinking everything.

At 50 I thought, I’m almost halfway…

At 54 I was officially halfway and my mind was telling me I was overdoing it. You could stop now.

So I told myself: one more.

Then another.

And somewhere around 60, something shifted.

My mind got quieter. My body seemed to know what to do. The movements became less about counting and more about simply moving through them.

As the numbers climbed, they just came.

I fidgeted less. I streamlined the movements. I stopped thinking quite so much about whether I was doing it “right” and just kept going.

And then…

100 

A smile appeared on my face.

I’ve got this.

108! 

Done.

There was even a little jump for joy at the end — although my legs were considerably less enthusiastic about the jumping than I was.

I recorded the whole thing in time lapse and it’s genuinely quite funny to watch. A slightly sweaty human slowly making her way through 108 Sun Salutations while apparently having a very complicated conversation with herself.

There’s something quite beautiful about the tradition of 108. In yoga and other Indian spiritual traditions, 108 is considered a sacred number — 108 beads on a mala, 108 repetitions of a mantra, and 108 as a symbol of completeness or a full cycle.

I’m not sure I experienced enlightenment today.

But I did experience something.

The resistance. The boredom. The I can’t do this. The maybe I should stop. And then, eventually, the quiet.

Perhaps that’s the practice.

Not doing 108 perfectly.

Just meeting yourself at 1… then 2… then 3… and continuing until you discover that the thing you

thought was too much is actually something you can move through.

108 completed.

Sweaty. Smiling. Slightly wobbly.

And very glad I kept going.