What’s sun got to do with it?

Sun is inseparable from Vaidika spirituality (those Indian systems that site the Veda-s as their source, like Yoga)

We assign meaning to everything we encounter. From each other, to rainbows, to work, to occupations, roles and rules, each has its own identity and what we project into it. 

From day-to-day, decade to decade, these meanings shift. Two celestial entities will be the focus of our upcoming classes, the Sun and the Earth. With innumerable ways to interpret their presence, we will channel it for a higher purpose. This months Sūrya Namaskara chanting course and April appreciation meditation courses aim for health and healing.

Let’s center attention on a few of the sun’s inspiring qualities as its power starts popping all around us.

It’s a great, radiant, rising presence, a friend to us all. Each morning, it reliably, predictably appears. It helps wake us up to the day, our responsibilities. Of deeper significance, it helps spark the light within, without which life is just a series of mechanical tasks. It infuses our mornings with a sense of hope and envelops us in its loving rays.

Beyond its peeking over the horizon, its light sets the whole world aglow. And we cycle through seasons where the Sun archs lower and higher in the sky. Indian holidays celebrate this particular northward journey of the sun, in January, with significant solar holidays/festival days such as Makar Śankranthi and Pongal. From another angle, sunrise is a moment in time, and then we cycle through morning, afternoon and evening. And the sun is with us on planet earth all along. Even on a cloudy day, even at night.

Sun removes heart diseases, physical and metaphoric. Living, eating and worshiping with the cycles of the sun keeps us attuned to nature and its bounty. Regular health rhythms build and restore balance. Spiritually, grief, loneliness and sadness can be modulated, processed and navigated with regular chanting to the sun, with visualization. Just as darkness and light operate on a continuuim, so do these realities for us all. To add sunlight is too add faith when the divine may feel inaccessible, clearing temporary pathways for healing, repeatedly.

Chanting these mantra-s together will attune us to a universal pathway to health, healing and spiritual development. Access to these teachings is a gift that we can unwrap to light our way through our microcosm universes, no less of an attempt ant orderly chaos than the macrocosm.