HATHA YOGA

THE YOGA OF THE SUN (HA) AND OF THE MOON (THA)

We all need to improve our life quality. Often I meet people who are disposed to offer a big part of their material success for a little bit of serenity or health, or a formula that cures from the stress’ consequences. Since 30 years I deal with these problems. I explored different methods, searching for how to improve the sleep quality, or how to recover the control in general and the control of the nervous system in particular; let alone the retrieval of confidence in oneself and in the world, of which many people are today deeply disappointed.
My trials and errors brought me to Yoga, remote Indian discipline of existential search, that with its lights and shadows presents itself today, in modern character, as a various system that can solve lots of psychophysical and life problems.
Yoga has its roots in the deepest antiquity of mysterious and spiritual India. Once more, let’s analyze the meaning of this word (Yoga) to see if it can give us any useful indications. It’s a word of the ancient Sanskrit language that comes from the root of the verb Yuj, that means to subjugate. It was used, for example, to indicate the act of yoking oxen to the cart. Its meaning refers to the role of discipline in this system: to subjugate personality, especially the instinctual one, that is in human nature, for orientating and directing it toward higher purposes.
Who practices this discipline, in fact, at the beginning tries, within the psychosomatic framework, to subjugate mind and body, to obtain a perfect harmony and to test the pleasant conditions that an organized mind can give.
Reorganizing one’s mind: this is, in my opinion, one of the focal points on which we have to work to improve our existence quality. 
Anyway, we know that mind and body are strongly correlated one each other, so, for the moment, we can start more easily from the analysis of Yoga techniques, considered more properly body techniques, that give health, youngness and elasticity to the body; they tend to balance in an harmonic way the energies that are in the human entity, but, indirectly, they also act on a mental level.  
I chose, with this purpose, between the thousands of procedures that Yoga suggests, the Surya Namaskara (Sun Salute) and the practices that can be compared to it, for example the Candra Namaskara (Moon Salute) that I invented, a practice that is an easy to learn “do-it-yourself” but that presents big advantages of energetic acquisition, of correct inner behavior and of body’s relaxation.
The Sun Salute is quite young, if we consider that the birth of Yoga is lost in the dawn of time, but is performed nowadays in the Indian Ashram (yoga communities), at dawn, to make the most of a particular aspect of the solar energy that there is in that moment.
Its function, in addition to the Bhakti one (devotional) in which we learn to open our centers to the solar energy, considered divine by birth, can be, in this case, also to wisely choose the body and to train it to face the stress of the day. The Surya Namaskara is a demonstration of how Yoga is not only static, as we normally think, but, sometimes, through more dynamic actions, it tries to expedite the process of evolution.
The psychological and physical relationship with this bright pulsar, anyway, put us in relation only with the masculine energy and the left hemisphere of the brain, that is already too active in the western society. For this reason, I thought it was important to elaborate a mobile sequence that create the premises for a relation with the other aspect, and a recover of some important values present in the female expression of manifestation.
The Candra Namaskara is a due gift to the feminine and to what it is in the macrocosm and in the psychosomatic microcosmic complex.
As you can imagine, the positions of this sequence evoke some aspects of the moon and establish with it a relation based on the inner awakening of a typical behavior of appreciating. The moon, as everybody knows, can interfere in the biological rhythms of people, but, even more, of who, for birth or for choose, is in a stronger relation with it. Just think what happens in a maternity ward when it is full moon or to the artists (art is female) that wake up in the middle of the night and feel their most creative impulses awakened.
The postures that here I present are part of the sequence of the Moon Salute (Candra Namaskara). During the performance the interiorization can bring this practice to become a meditation on the move, especially if after a bit of experience you get the ability to do it with closed eyes.  In general, we breathe in during the expansion postures of the thorax and we breathe out during its compression.
To symmetrically stimulate the body, I recommend you to do the sequences using the both sides of the body, to bring out in a balanced way all the beneficent effects that the practice can give.