Hannah Borno

“Press back the shoulders, flatten the back” my yoga teacher, Diana, murmured as my pelvis clicked into position. It was my tenth and most excruciating Sun Salutation of the morning, and I didn’t want so much to salute the sun as kick it in the shins and tell it never to bother coming round my way again. But as my four day yoga course progressed, and Diana’s murmurings became more approving, my hips grew a tiny bit bendier, my pelvis clicked less, and the hideous band of iron tightening and squeezing my un-worked-out shoulders began to ease off a shade. Of course, we never actually managed to salute the sun itself - only the drizzle trickling down the windows of the yoga studio.

Although at times I loathe this sequence it’s one of the most important in yoga - in fact some yoga masters rely upon this one movement alone for an entire lesson forcing their increasingly bored acolytes to do 70 of them - one after the other

In case you’ve never salutated the sun, here’s how the sequence unfolds. It’s supposed to be a ‘graceful flow’, but mine is actually more like a bend, a hop, a shuffle, a groan, another groan and one last shuffle-hop to end.

I left Diana’s tutelage promising myself that I would commit to one salutation a day. Yesterday I forgot clean about it until just before 1am. So I did my first home-turf salutation on my bedroom floor, slightly drunk, substituting for a sun the soft orange glow of a streetlamp, flattening my back and hoping the creaking of my hips and my gasps for air didn’t wake the people downstairs…