How to Practice?.....Yoga mala summer solstice

To answer my own question posed, perhaps one method of practice is completing a yoga mala for the summer solstice.

(Image of the solstice from the blog "Ecotime")

Open Heart Yoga School, the studio I attend is offering  for the second year in a row, the opportunity to complete 108 sun salutations as a group. Yoga malas take place four times a year, each making the change of the seasons, in this case, the summer solstice. 

Last year I completed the entire 108 sun salutations but injured myself. This time, as hard as it is for me to "quit" or leave something half-way through, I decided I would do 54 sun salutes today and 54 tomorrow.

For this spiritual practice has a separate theme for the four rounds of 27 sun salutes. Overall, the practice honors the change of seasons, the heat generated in the practice and inherent in the season of summer. By rounds, the theme of the practice is "love, happiness and understanding": 

• the self
• others - especially teachers, elders, those you love and/or those whose relation you which is particularly challenging
• the world
• the universe

Breaking open what exactly this means to share my practice with anyone reading this and inspire others towards practice that honors the beginning of summer and the heat (and thus, acts as a catalyst for change) that the season brings.  To read more, click on the link below.

 "(Japa) mala" is a sanskrit term which wikipedia describes as being used:

 "for repetition of a mantra, for other forms of sadhana (spiritual exercise), and as an aid to meditation. The most common mala have 108 beads."

Threrefore, a yoga mala refers to a repetitive practice of yoga as a form of spiritual practice and related to the number 108. 

What is involved in a sun saluation? To the right is an image similar to the Sun Salutations we performed taken from the blog "Yoga Lotus".

For those who are familiar with yoga poses, one sun salutation is a sequence includes:
Mountain pose (Tadasana) --> Forward Bend --> Lunge R/L leg --> Downward Facing Dog --> Plank --> A downward pushup --> Upward Facing Down --> Lung L/R leg --> Forward Bend --> Mountain Pose

I would encourage everyone to find some practice to pay homage to the change in the seasons, including a round of mantras chanted with mala beads or a yoga mala. To prepare for a yoga mala (highly recommended), I have done 10 sun salutations per day on most days for about 3 weeks now. I would practice a round of 27 to get a sense of what this is like and then imagine doing 27 x 4 to decide how to best organize your practice around the sacred number of 108 .