Many years ago, when I started to practice yoga, I was a 20-year-old girl who was in search of happiness, new knowledge, new adventures and discovers. I don’t remember exactly which book started my interest to the moon, but what I remember is my first visit to India and how I got my first full moon meditation.
About 200 hundred people or more were sitting on both sides of Ganga river in Rishikesh and focusing on the moon, singing a mantra “Om Chandray namaha” (the moon mantra which calls us back into perspective when life becomes confusing and helps us to see things more clearly. It sharpens our intellect and calms our nervous system, to restore balance).
I think it was the 1st time I noticed the moon. It fascinated me. It was so beautiful, so incomprehensible, so attaching.
When a person is disappointed in faith in god, disappointed in people, in himself, something should pull him out, something new, strong, ideal, should revive faith. For me in that time it became yoga and , of course, the rituals surrounding that ancient philosophy of life. The moon has been my goddess for a long time, a friend of bright full moon nights when I could not sleep but I was watching myself or just was having fun celebrating the beginning new cycle of life.
Years passed by. I experienced the blind faith, yoga idols, faith in surf idols, descended from heaven to earth to globally accepted scientific world.
So, I was very pleased to learn that some parts of my faith have been confirmed by science.
The full moon comes every 29.5 days and lasts one night. This happens in the moment when the earth is located between the sun and the moon. The full lunar disc is visible because the sight faces the earth. The earth is fully illuminated by the sunlight.
How does the moon affect humans ?
1) Lower sleep quality. The deep sleep part is on average 25 minutes shorter.
2) The moon affects people with bipolar disorder, as their mood strongly depends on the quality of sleep.
3) The full moon triggers subtle fluctuations. There is the magnetic field in the earth to which some people may be sensitive.
4) The ocean is the electrical conductor because is made of salty water and flows with the tides. That has magnetic field associated with it. It is like all the invisible electric cover. It might be strong enough to knock out power grids and which, some scientists have suggested, may affect electrical sensitive cells in the heart and the brain.
5) “Another possibility is that patients are responding to the moon gravitational pool in the same way the ocean does: through tidal forces. Humans are made out of water but the pool is so week, that it would be difficult to see how that would work from physical point of view”, says scientist Kyriacou.
Even so he points to studies of Arabadopssis Thatiana (a weed considered by biologists who study flowering plants “a model organism”). Suggesting that their root growth follows a 24.8 hour cycle. The amount of time it takes the moon to complete one full orbit of earth. “There are incredibly small changes which can only be detected with extremely sensitive devices. But now there are over 200 hundred publications to support this idea”, says Joachim Fisahn, a bio physicist at the Max Plank Institute of plant physiology in Germany. If a plant’s cells are really sensitive to such tidal forces, then Fisahn sees, there is no reason why human cells could not be affected as well.
To sum it up, knowing how the moon is adored in India, knowing a little scientific knowledge, observing myself and people around in different cycles of the moon, for myself I decided that there is an impact. However how big it is , how much our behavior and our condition change, we only have to guess and look forward to new discovers and scientific researches.
