February 17 marks the start of the Lunar New Year, an occasion traditionally celebrated for 15 days, ending with a Lantern Festival. The Lunar New Year, sometimes referred to as the Chinese New Year, is observed across large parts of Asia—including China, South Korea, Vietnam and throughout the Asian diaspora. Celebrations also abound in the Atlanta area, including John’s Creek, Decatur, Chamblee and Stone Mountain, as well as the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.

As with any living tradition spread among so many cultures and peoples, the celebrations vary widely in style, but they all share a focus on the family and the intention to welcome and wish for a year of abundance and health. They also provide devotional and pious activities related to religious beliefs. Because of the family focus, there’s often a lot of travel and planning associated with the holiday, and it is common for families to engage in home cleaning and other domestic and religious rituals to mark the beginning of new cycles and the ending of others.

While the Western celebration of the new year occurs on the first day of January in the Gregorian calendar, The Lunar New Year coincides with a new year in the Chinese zodiac. Each year of the Chinese zodiac has an animal and an element associated with it, and each new year alternates between yang and yin. According to those who follow the Chinese zodiac, in the new year, we are leaving the yin year of the wood snake behind and entering the yang year of the fire horse. The qualities of a fire horse year are thought to be movement, energy, productive relationships and heat. And that heat must be harnessed and directed for it to be useful and beneficial for us.

Accordingly, yang energy will predominate in 2026, thanks to the busy celebrations and the qualities of the upcoming year. That means that yoga practices that calm the nervous system and dampen excess energy will help people to ground, center and focus. Moon salutations may be just the perfect addition to one’s practice to facilitate such a task.

A Moving Practice that Grounds Energy and Attention

Yoga practitioners often welcome a new year with multiple repetitions of sun salutations and many studios hold new year practice sessions of 108 salutations to welcome new beginnings. But another option — one that might be particularly beneficial at the start of a yang year — is to introduce moon salutations, known as Chandra namaskar in Sanskrit, into one’s personal practice. Lord Chandra, the Hindu moon deity, is understood to rule over the mind and intuition, encouraging introspection and calm, and his quieting and inward-turning characteristics are inherent to the poses of the moon salutation sequence. As a result, the moon salutation poses allow the practitioner to maintain a flow that is not as heat-generating as sun salutations.

To achieve this effect, the practice incorporates side-bending, forward folding and connection to the earth with the knees and the hands to ground the senses and draw energies inward. It also opens the inseam of the leg, in particular, gently stimulating the kidney meridian and further cooling the body. It omits yoga push-ups and longer holds, each of which grow heat in the body, and allows for more time with the breath than sun salutations that favor breath and movement alignment.

A few helpful notes before you begin:

• In the moon salutation, there is no suggestion to align one breath with one movement as there is in sun salutation. It might feel right to exhale and fold or close the body and to inhale and open, stretch or extend, but then feel free to pace the practice as you see fit. Doing so helps make moon salutations more of a cooling practice than sun salutations.
• The moon salutation offers several poses that face the long edge of the mat, so it can be helpful to keep that in mind when setting up.
• As with any yoga flow, there are variations to the sequence of the moon salutation, but the sequence presented below reflects what is commonly taught in studios throughout North America. However, one should feel free to vary the practice as one’s body indicates. Less rigor and more openness to variation speaks to a less heated or rigid quality of practice, which is a helpful balm to yang energy.

1. Begin standing upright at the top of your practice space. Ground through your feet and allow a centered quality to take hold before you progress. Try to release any sense of haste.

2. Exhale, and take a side lean to the right, uniting palms or clasping hands around opposite wrists. Try to stay grounded through both feet, allowing the side-body to lengthen, keeping neck and mouth soft. Then inhale, taking the upright position once more.

3. Exhale, step out to the left into goddess pose. With bent knees and elbows, stay grounded through the legs and feet and centered from the crown of the skull to the base of the spine. Soften the jaw, the base of the throat and the eyes.

4. Inhale and exhale into pentacle pose. Extend the arms, especially through the inseam, and firm the thighs. Feel the energy extend through each of the limbs. Stay calm but alert.

5. With the right leg forward, take triangle pose. Keeping the neck long and easy, retract the chin and the lower ribs as you gently engage the lower abdomen. Keep the legs firm, with the inner thigh of the left leg spiraling inward and backward.

6. Turn toward the top of the practice space once more, squaring the hips, and make pyramid pose. Engage the lower abdomen as the torso lengthens and feel free to bring blocks under each hand. This is a nice place to add some spinal undulation and breath rounds. Try inhaling into a rounded shape and then exhaling as the spine lengthens in the forward fold once more.

7. Drop the back knee. If desired, lengthen the distance between your legs, and come to low lunge with your choice of arm variation. Allow gentle compression of the kidneys in the back body as the chest and abdomen open. Keep the mouth soft and the chin down. Lift through the base of the skull.

8. Turn toward the long edge of the mat once more and gently bend the right knee, extending the left leg as you seek the sensation of opening or stretching on the left side. Bend your right knee only as far as it is comfortable. This pose is sometimes called skandasana, referring to the Hindu deity Skanda, but it does not have an English translation. It is considered a side lunge.

9. Come to a squat, centered once more. This is the garland pose at the mid-point of the sequence

10 through 16. Reverse the order, taking each pose through its second side. From here you will work your way back to the top of the mat. Stand in an upright position to close the moon salutation, connecting with earth and breath, noting the grounding, introspective qualities of the flow. Many practitioners will do this flow a few times, adding variation and possibly adding inversions. ❧

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For a video of this asana, visit: bit.ly/moon-salutation-0226.

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Patricia Schmidt, C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, YACEP, is a certified yoga therapist specializing in pelvic health, accessible yoga and yoga for cancer support. She is a Franklin Method trainer, Roll Model method teacher and somatic movement specialist. To learn more, visit http://PLSYoga.com/.