Should I Do Meditation Before Or After Yoga

Dear Friend,

Yes, it is perfectly fine to do Suryana Namaskar or other exercise after meditation. My only suggestion is that you perform the exercises with a meditative and inward consciousness. It is important to maintain one’s inwardness and inner peace when performing any action that follows meditation.

Suryana Namaskar, also known as a Sun Salutation, is the Sanskrit name for a sequence of 12 yoga asanas (poses). “Surya” means the sun and “Namaskar” means greetings.

In Indian culture, this practice is viewed as showing respect to the sun, considered the source of all life. Hinduism considers Surya the creator of the universe, while Vedic tradition views the sun as symbolic of consciousness and God. Suryana Namaskar is one of the most popular and important yoga practices.

It’s performed in the morning with the goal of harnessing life energy most abundant at dawn. The sequence is said to stimulate muscles, organs and chakras and cultivate concentration and stillness of mind.

Some people use Suryana Namaskar as a warm-up at the start of a longer yoga practice.

My teacher, Swami Kriyananda (a direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda) encouraged us to move gently and peacefully in our tasks following meditation. But that can include doing asanas, energization exercises or even more physical exercises so long as you make the effort to stay centered in the Self.

Energization Exercises are a series of 39 exercises Yogananda developed to recharge every part of the body. He considered them a fundamental technique of the Kriya Yoga path.

Yogananda actually suggested doing exercises before meditation to awaken energy and release tension.  The purpose of the exercises is to calm and relax, not excite the nervous system.

At Ananda, we don’t consider the purpose of yoga to be how agile you are or how far you can bend yourself into a pretzel. To us, the main point of yoga is how it helps you have better meditation and develop your inner life.

Regular practice of yoga and meditation can bring a change of consciousness. They help practitioners have an attitude toward life that is expansive, as opposed to the usual one, which is contractive.

Swami Kriyananda taught that after meditation, we would best learn to live life not so much analytically but from a vision of underlying oneness. Our meditation should help us learn to be solution-oriented rather than problem oriented. We would be more consciously guided by inner joy and feel joy in everything we do. We ideally also see others not as separate from us but as part of our own greater reality.

The point here is to learn to gradually extend the peace of meditation into the day of activities so that, someday, your actions will become meditation and your meditation will be the action of seeking the actionless state! As Bhagavan Krishna counsels, “One cannot achieve the actionless state without acting.”

ok?

Blessings to you!

Nayaswami Hriman