Start your day off right by greeting the sun with Surya Namaskar

Yes, it’s there, even if the cloudy New York City winter sky doesn’t let us see it.

Move your morning along with this two-minute Sun Salutation to warm up your body and focus your mind in preparation for a new day.

Sun Salutations, better known as Surya Namaskar are a series of postures that have been performed in India for over 3,500 years. Surya means “sun” in Sanskrit, and Namaskar means “to bow down to.” Sun Salutations activate and warm up your body as you flow from one posture to the next swiftly and with great ease, using the breath as the linking mechanism. It’s the practice of joining movement and breath as you “bow down to” the sun’s rise and fall every day.

Surya Namaskar:

Calms down your mind by focusing it on linking the breath with movement. With every movement, there’s an inhale or an exhale.
Warms up the spine, and heats the body in preparation for harder asanas — or simply a new day in New York!
Practice facing the east, as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west — but if you can’t figure it out in your apartment, don’t get too caught up on that!
Stretches the neck, arms, upper back, lower back, hamstrings, calves, and quads. It only takes two minutes of your morning!

It’s so easy to take things for granted, especially living in a city like New York where life is rushed and there seems to be no time to acknowledge our presence on this earth every day. Try this exercise and let your awareness spread on the auspiciousness of TODAY.