On 108 Sun Salutations: A Yoga Teacher's Letter for the Summer Solstice

On 108 Surya Namaskar, the pivot of the year, and what June 21 asks of us

Every year on the longest day, I lead a class through 108 sun salutations — Surya Namaskar, in Sanskrit. I bring polished black stones to the studio — one hundred and eight of them — so any student who wants to keep count by hand can move a stone with each rep. We start in the early morning. By the time we finish, the room smells like effort, and the practitioners look at each other the way people do after they've survived something together. 108 is not a difficult number to say aloud, but it is difficult to move through with a body. Around rep forty, the practice becomes less a sequence of asanas and more a long, quiet argument the mind has with itself and ego. By rep eighty, the mind has usually lost.

Sunrise on the Mississippi River (New Orleans)

The number is not arbitrary. In the traditions yoga came from, 108 is sacred — the count of beads on a mala, the number of names of Shiva, the number of Upanishads, depending on who you ask. Some teachers will tell you the number connects the human body to the cosmos, with 108 sacred sites in India and 108 lines of energy converging at the heart. I am not interested in arguing the metaphysics. I am interested in what happens when you ask a person to move through any single sequence 108 times.

What happens is that the small self gives up first. The part of you that has been narrating, judging, comparing — “I'm tired, this is too much, why am I doing this” — falls quiet somewhere around the middle of the practice, not because the body has won but because the part of you that was complaining has been worn down by the simple repetition. What is left is something quieter. Just the breath, just the salutation, just the floor coming up to meet you again. A chance, briefly, to forget yourself.

The strange thing happens then, and I have stopped trying to explain it. Twenty or thirty people moving at their own unmetered pace — no count called out, nobody watching anybody else — will, somewhere in the middle of the practice, fall by accident into unison. Breath syncs. Hands meet the mat at the same moment. The room becomes a single body moving, rising, flowing. Students reach for words afterward — “meditative movement, cleansing, rebirth” — and they all point to the same thing. Each person is caught in a tide of energy that nobody is generating on purpose.

We do this practice on the summer solstice because the solstice is the day that asks for it.

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, and the day light begins to wane. Both things are true at once. The whole architecture of the year hinges on this single rotation. From here, the sun pulls back. The days shorten. The light we have been gaining since December has reached its limit and starts, imperceptible at first, to recede.

This is what the Zen tradition I sit closest to would call a pivot point. The moment a thing is at its fullest is also the moment it begins to change. Impermanence is not a sad teaching; it is just an accurate one. The longest day is not a contradiction of the year's turning toward dark — it is the year's turning, in the only honest place such a turn could happen. At the peak.

What I have come to think the solstice asks is this: “What have you done with the light, and what are you carrying into the dark half of the year?” Not as judgment. As inquiry. The 108 sun salutations are one way to ask the question with the body. By the time you have moved through it 108 times, you have, briefly, run out of room for the kind of self that would lie about the answer.

This year, the solstice carries more than one weight. June 21, 2026 is also Father's Day in the United States. It is the International Day of Yoga, the global observance the United Nations set on the solstice for reasons that should be obvious by now. It closes Men's Health Week. And it sits inside Men's Mental Health Awareness Month, which is something most men I know would benefit from sitting with rather than scrolling past.

I find I cannot separate these. The longest day, the day the light turns, the day yoga is celebrated worldwide, the day we are asked to think about fathers, the month we are asked to think about the mental and emotional lives of men — all converging on one rotation of the planet. It is, if you let it be, a remarkable invitation. A day to sit with what light you have, what you are passing on, what you are carrying. A day to notice that even at peak brightness, the turn has already begun.

If you have a yoga practice, June 21 is a good day to use it. If you don't, the solstice is a free practice anyone can do — step outside at the longest light of the year, notice that it is also the moment the light begins to leave, and sit with that for a minute. If you are a man, or love one, the convergence with Father's Day and Men's Mental Health Month is not a coincidence we need to manufacture meaning around. It is already meaningful. The day asks us to be honest about what we have built, what we are, and what we are passing to the people behind us.

I'll be on the mat that morning, leading the 108. The salutations have their own logic. By the end, the small self has usually quieted down enough for the day's actual question to land.

You don't have to come to my class to ask it. But it is worth asking, somewhere, in some form, on the longest day of the year — the day that knows what is also already beginning to leave.