If Mastery Required Killing Your Excuses…Would You?

(The following relates to the “Everest For Everyman” program, aiming at 108 Sun Salutations a day for a month).

Today is 50 Sun Salutations, five sets of ten, three hours apart. The only muscle group not directly challenged are the pulling muscles of the upper body, but that can be compensated for easily. The trick is to stay within the breathing, floating on the breath, “tuning” the movement a little to make it more difficult if I have an energy surplus, or easier if I feel a little tired. The INTENT is to do them all without any extra breaths, which will require an advanced awareness.

If I’m correct, if/when I do 30 days of 108 per day, I’ll be at a higher, deeper level of body/mind integration, as well as having defined the most direct and scalable path to that integration.

The “Five Tibetans” are really, seriously interesting, but I can feel that there is stiffness that needs to be relieved after practice. Another concern, frankly, is a lack of provenance. Trying to figure out where they came from is frustrating. There are tantalizing hints, some rumors, but that’s it. So finding a community of people who have been doing it for generations is difficult — the ultimate result of a group experiment can’t be determined.

With the Sun Salutation, we can connect it to one of the eight limbs of Yoga, a six thousand year old discipline. And while the specific motions might be no more than 120 years old (it is very possible that they were synthesized by…