Yoga quotes and sayings

Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.

Yoga is bodily gospel

Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are.

Yoga is invigoration in relaxation. Freedom in routine. Confidence through self control. Energy within and energy without.

The most important pieces of equipment you need for doing yoga are your body and your mind.

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state.

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal.... But don't approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain.

Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind.

This yoga should be practiced with firm determination and perseverance, without any mental reservation or doubts.

The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union; not on the side of the canvas where it is blank, but on the side where the picture is being painted.

The Self in you is the same as the Self Universal. Whatever powers are manifested throughout the world, those powers exist in germ, in latency, in you.... If you realize the unity of the Self amid the diversities of the Not-Self, then Yoga Will not seem an impossible thing to you.

You can enter yoga, or the path of yoga, only when you are totally frustrated with your own mind as it is. If you are still hoping that you can gain something through your mind, yoga is not for you.

Yoga is really trying to liberate us from ... shame about our bodies. To love your body is a very important thing -- I think the health of your mind depends on your being able to love your body.

The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk therapy and antidepressants aren't enough.

By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart.

Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union - the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul. Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day-to-day life and endows skill in the performance of one's actions.

Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy. Constant practice alone is the secret of success.

In Karma-yoga no effort is ever lost, and there is no harm. Even a little practice of this discipline protects one from great fear of birth and death.

Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science.

Yoga is about clearing away whatever is in us that prevents our living in the most full and whole way. With yoga, we become aware of how and where we are restricted -- in body, mind, and heart -- and how gradually to open and release these blockages. As these blockages are cleared, our energy is freed. We start to feel more harmonious, more at one with ourselves. Our lives begin to flow -- or we begin to flow more in our lives.

What yoga philosophy and all the great Buddhist teachings tells us is that solidity is a creation of the ordinary mind and that there never was anything permanent to begin with that we could hold on to. Life would be much easier and substantially less painful if we lived with the knowledge of impermanence as the only constant.

Yoga does not remove us from the reality or responsibilities of everyday life but rather places our feet firmly and resolutely in the practical ground of experience. We don't transcend our lives; we return to the life we left behind in the hopes of something better.

The word yoga comes from Sanskrit, the language of ancient India. It means union, integration, or wholeness. It is an approach to health that promotes the harmonious collaboration of the human being's three components: body, mind, and spirit.

Together may be be protected
Together may we be nourished
Together may we work with great energy
May our journey together be brilliant and effective
May there be no bad feelings between us
Peace, peace, peace

Lead us from darkness to light
From ignorance to truth
And from death to eternity
Let peace prevail everywhere

You can search the whole universe
and not find a single being more worthy of love than yourself.
Since each and every person is so precious to themselves,
Let the self-respecting harm no other being.

I’ve learned to trust what I call the Braille method of living – relinquishing grand plans and schemes in favor of an intuitive approach, feeling my way from tree to tree, relinquishing my attempts to control the world and learning, instead, to trust a discerning surrender.

When you’re experiencing peace, it’s coming from within you, you’re ‘doing’ peace. And this is true of anything else you might be looking for. Love, happiness, contentment, well-being come from within. Nothing external needs to change for you to have what you want…..If you want to be happier – be happier. If you want to be more relaxed – relax. If you want more friends – be friendly. Sounds simple. It is.

I practice now not so much with ambition as with gratitude. And I ask myself frequently, ‘How can I express kindness right now?’ whether I am in a headstand of washing dishes.

In truth, it matters les what we do in practice than how we do it and why we do it. The same posture, the same sequence, the same meditation with a different intention takes on an entirely new meaning and will have entirely different outcomes.

Without intention, all these postures, these breathing practices, meditations, and the like can become little more than ineffectual gestures. When animated by intention, however, the simplest movement, the briefest meditation, and the contents of one breath cycle are made potent

Through practice, I’ve come to see that the deepest source of my misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. Not wanting myself to be the way I am. Not wanting the world to be the way it is. Not wanting others to be the way they are. Whenever I’m suffering, I find this ‘war with reality’ to be at the heart of the problem.

These days, my practice is teaching me to embrace imperfection: to have compassion for all the ways things haven’t turned out as I planned, in my body and in my life – for the ways things keep falling apart, and failing, and breaking down. It’s less about fixing things, and more about learning to be present for exactly what is.

I was caught in the conundrum of believing that I needed to be different, that the way I was right now was not all right….Eventually I came to understand that it was this very non-acceptance that was keeping me stuck in my patterns.

The way that we see things today does not have to be the way we saw them yesterday. That is because the situations, our relationships to them, and we ourselves have changed in the interim. This notion of constant change suggests that we do not have to be discouraged.

Whether things get better or worse depends to a considerable extent on our own actions. The recommendation of a yoga practice follows the principle that through practice we can learn to stay present in every moment, and thereby achieve much that we were previously incapable of.

I feel certain that the change wrought by my practice also changes the world. I don’t see how it can be otherwise. Everything is interconnected in the fabric of oneness. Awakening affects the entire world.

Practicing asanas began to teach me about myself. The body is such a great school of learning. It makes you pay attention.

The challenge, and the opportunity, that Yoga presents to us is the possibility of breaking the conditioning cycle. We do this by becoming aware of the depth and pervasiveness of our patterns and, at the same time, by working to change them. And true transformation begins at the moment that we become aware of our actual condition.

What I want to say is that there is a strong relationship between yoga on the mat and yoga off the mat. I’ve really come to believe that the energy accumulated in practice has a lot to do with my ability to get clarity about the reality of things.

People sometimes ask me what difference practice has made in my life. The answer is it’s changed everything for me. And, in a funny way, it’s changed nothing.

The most profound benefit of yoga and meditation for me has been a natural relaxing into my life. Obstacles are not so scary. I am more fluid, more curious, and at the same time more patient. I have more options for happiness because I don’t require specific conditions. It is a relief to discover that I can be happy even if the world doesn’t revolve around me or my agenda.

After asana & pranayama are perfect, pratyahara, sense control [the fifth limb of ashtanga yoga], follows. The first four limbs are external exercises: yama, niyama, asana, pranayama. The last four are internal, and they automatically follow when the first four are mastered. Pratyahara means that anywhere you look, you see God. Good mind control gives that capacity, so that when you look, everything you see is Atman (the God within). Then for you the world is colored by God. Whatever you see, you identify it with your Atman. The scriptures say that a true yogi's mind is so absorbed in the lotus feet of the Lord that nothing distracts him, no matter what happens in the external world.

Then there are those moments that make it all worthwhile. I’m carried on my breath like a leaf on the wind: folding, arching, twisting, bending, leaping lightly from one posture to the next. My body tingles with energy; my mind is quietly absorbed in the hypnotic rhythm of practice. The poses seem strung on the breath like prayer beads on a mala; I enter each one to the best of my ability, savoring the silky stretches, the pleasurable ache of muscles taxed to their edge.

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal.
Yoga is not mine. But don't approach yoga with a business mind -
looking for worldly gain. If you want to be near God, turn your mind
toward God, and practice yoga. As the scriptures say "without yoga
practice, how can knowledge give you moksha liberation?

If we practice the science of yoga, which is useful to the entire human community and which yields happiness both here and hereafter - if we practice it without fail, we will then attain physical, mental, and spiritual happiness, and our minds will flood towards the Self.