108 Sun Salutations
Doing 108 sun salutations in large groups around the world was popularised by Californian yoga teacher Shiva Rea who describes herself as "A Global Movement & Yoga teacher". In 2007, she organised a Global Mala for Peace for the International Day of Peace on 21st September, where she envisioned "a mala around the earth" and encouraged people around the world to practice 108 sun salutations and donate the proceeds to vetted international organisations focused on health and climate such as Trees for the Future. While she still holds retreats and events at seasonal solstices, her activism and fundraising are not directly associated with these events. Many yoga studios continue to arrange 108 sun salutations events - some for charity, some commercial.
Why 108?
The association with 108 and yoga originated from the Indian Vedas and on the sacred significance Indian scholars placed on 108 for its mathematical properties such as the calculation using trigonometry to determine that the distance between the Earth and the Sun is roughly 108 times the Sun's own diameter, that is is a hyperfactorial of 3, and a Harshad number (and a whole lot more sums and calculations that I can't get my head into - but click here for Wikipedia explanations of these numbers and more).
It's likely that this was then spread along with other teachings from the scriptures from India via the Vedas to Tibet, China, Japan and the rest of the world and then humans did what humans do, and started seeing the number everywhere and using it in stories.
108s
there are 108 beads in a mala bracelet used to recite mantras during meditation
there are 108 Vedic Texts in the Upanishads
The Kangyur (the official, historical Tibetan Buddhist canon) is traditionally compiled into exactly 108 volumes
the Sanskrit alphabet has 108 spoken frequencies
the number 108 appears in the design and architecture of ancient Vedic fire altars described in the Rig Veda
in Homer's the Odyssey there are 108 suitors for his wife Penelope
there are 108 stitches on a regulation baseball
Whether all of that means anything is beyond me - both the maths and the spiritual significance. But it's probably a bit like blue cars and the frequency illusion - once it's on your mind, you're going to see it everywhere.
I've done it a few times and definitely enjoy not only the physical challenge, but the endocannabinoid response from a long bout of medium intensity exercise - often talked about in terms of a "runners high". I also enjoy practising yoga in a group for all the reasons listed below.
Ceremony and community
Why do we and why should we perform rituals and ceremonies?
My own personal opinion is that we have lost some valuable things from religious practices in a mostly secular society, but we have also shed some habits that are not so great - like fleshy offerings to the Gods and blindly following doctrine. Connection, community and ceremony are a few things that have been somewhat lost, and that people are trying to bring back through these types of events.
Collective Effervescence
Emile Durkheim, a French Sociologist demonstrated in his work that there is a collective effervescence that comes about when people get together and do something in unison. He was studying totemism (a system of belief in which humans are said to have kinship or a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal or plant) among Australian Aboriginal tribes in the 1920s. He wanted to know what held certain societies together and concluded that chanting together, making the same movements and focusing on the same thing brought about this collective effervescence or to use his own words "a kind of social electricity".
In a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations, submitted to Personality and Social Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the authors reviewed and measured "the conceptions of Collective Effervescence (CE) - a state of intense shared emotional activation and sense of unison that emerges during instances of collective behaviour, like demonstrations, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, and others."
What they found was that when people come together, pay attention to the same thing, act in unison (chanting, singing, dancing, gesturing, protesting) it produces a bunch of effects that are described as self-transcendent (a category of positive emotions — compassion, awe, gratitude, appreciation, inspiration, admiration, elevation, and love as cited in this paper by Jonathon Haidt). They concluded that this happens whether religion is involved or not, and they studied the responses at a wide variety of events around the world (some of the reviewed events included scouting events, Rock Ness Music Festival, protests and meditation plus mindful movement).
We all kind of know that when we get together and sing or dance together, we feel connection - to ourselves, to our environment and to each other. It increases our self-esteem, our feelings of purpose and connection.
Practising together in a yoga asana class is a modern way of us coming together in community and performing something ceremonially. It doesn't need to have a religious basis for it to give us this feeling of exuberance. Is it really so bad to do it just because as human beings it helps us to feel connected and at ease with each other - perhaps more so than when we talk to each other? We give up all the bullshit chatter our ego minds distract us with and we just move and breathe together.
That said I think it is important that we keep reminding ourselves where these practices came from, and do a little bit of research into their historical roots so that we don't create untrue stories about what we're doing and why. Whether over eons of time that is possible, I'm not sure - but then that would make us question history altogether and I'm not going down that rabbit hole.
We are hosting 108 Sun Salutations on Sunday 26th September at 2pm at My Yoga Place in Ayr. We will use the event to raise funds for Megan's Space, a local charity that aims to prevent the needless loss of young lives to suicide and reduce self harm whilst promoting mental wellbeing. If you prefer a recommendation for what to donate, we would suggest £20, but please feel free to donate whatever you can.
To practice, you can do some or all of the sun salutations, or get together with a friend and do it as a relay. It really is the kind of thing that once you get into it, it becomes quite meditative.
We're inviting local studios and yoga teachers to do the same and to either join us in the studio or at their own studios and we can make our own attempt at creating a mala of practice and giving.
Resources used for this blog:
(the list below)
Research assistance: background research for this post, including locating sources and summarising academic papers, was carried out with the help of Claude (Anthropic), an AI assistant. The blog was written in my own words.
Sun salutations and 108 sun salutations
Wikipedia, "Sun Salutation" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Salutation
Yoga Journal, "The Origin of Sun Salutations: Where Did They Come From?" — https://www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/history-of-yoga/the-origin-of-sun-salutations/
https://www.yogamatters.com/blogs/philosophy/yoga-mala-time-find
Ritual theory (Durkheim, Turner, secular ritual)
Wikipedia, "Collective effervescence" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence
Wikipedia, "Victor Turner" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Turner
Mark Jennings, "An extraordinary degree of exaltation: Durkheim, effervescence and Pentecostalism's defeat of secularisation," Journal of Sociology (2015) — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0037768614560959
Olaveson, T., "Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner," Dialectical Anthropology 26 (2001) — https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/A:1020447706406.pdf
Frontiers in Psychology, "Arts, secular ritual, and health" — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/social-psychology/articles/10.3389/frsps.2025.1477404/full
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Durkheim, Emile" — https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
Collective effervescence meta-analysis
Pizarro, J. J., Zumeta, L. N., Bouchat, P., Włodarczyk, A., Rimé, B., Basabe, N., Amutio, A., & Páez, D. (2022). "Emotional processes, collective behavior, and social movements: A meta-analytic review of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations." Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 974683. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.974683/full
Self-transcendent emotions
Haidt, J., & Morris, J. P. (2009). "Finding the self in self-transcendent emotions." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(19), 7687–7688. https://www.pnas.org/content/106/19/7687
Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., & Keltner, D. (2017). "Self-Transcendent Emotions and Their Social Functions: Compassion, Gratitude, and Awe Bind Us to Others Through Prosociality."
Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood, R. W., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). "The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience." — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/gpr0000102
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