What is the significance of doing certain practices before sunrise or after sunset?

Practices like Surya Namaskar and Shiva Namaskar should happen at these times of transition, in the twilight zone between night and day. During these sandhya kalas, around sunrise and sunset, everything is in a state of flux. If you practice at that time, your ability to transcend limitations is better because your life energies are in a state of flux.

With yogic practices, you are trying to remould yourself. You may have great regard and respect for your parents, but you do not want to end up just the way they made you, or just the way they are. You want to be something different or something more. If you only psychologically and emotionally remould yourself, at some point in your life, you will fall back. There are many people who, when they were 18, said “No way!” and rebelled against their parents. But by the time they are 45, they walk, sit, talk, and behave like them, because mental changes will only go that far.

Attitudinal changes will not last. After some time, as life situations change and you become less conscious, you will fall back. If you say you are the way you are because your father was like that or because it is in your genes, you are saying you are a creature of the past. If you want to be a being of the future, it is necessary to remould the fundamentals of who you are. That is what we try to do with yogic practices — we want to remould ourselves into something entirely different.

The best time of the day to do this is always the sandhya when the energies on the planet are going through a certain transition and the friction within the system is greatly reduced, which allows the remoulding to happen more efficiently. This is the fundamental reason why yoga is practised in the morning and in the evening.

There are other aspects to it as well, which I will write a post about. So stay tuned. In that, I would like to explore each and every aspect of Sandhya Kalas.

Reference Book: In is the only way out.

Hope this flicks a switch in you and gives birth to realisation. I offer my obeisance to the divine in you. Har Har Mahadev, Alakh Niranjan, Adesh.

Ashutosh Om.