by Elin Sandberg: To describe yoga can be a hard task many times. What is yoga? Why do we do asanas? What does it mean to live in peace and stillness?

And what is love? We let our great teachers, authors and philosophers and spiritual leaders describe it for us. Yoga Quotes.

What is yoga?

Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self.

The Bhagavad Ghita

Yoga is not a religion. Yoga is a science, a science of well-being, science of youthfulness, science of integrating body, mind and soul.

Amit Ray

Yoga takes you into the present moment, the only place where life exists.

Unknown

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

Jason Crandell

Yoga is not about self-improvement or making ourselves better. It is a process of deconstructing all the barriers we may have erected that prevent us from having an authentic connection with ourselves and the world.

Donna Fahri

Yoga is not a work-out, it is a work-in. And this is the point of spiritual practice; to make us teachable; to open up our hearts and focus our awareness so that we can know what we already know and be who we already are.

Rolf Gates

Yoga is a technology for arriving in this present moment. It is a means of waking up from our spiritual amnesia, so that we can remember all that we already know.

Donna Fahri

Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind.

Patanjali

Yoga is a powerful tool, but you must learn to use it properly. You can buy the latest super- duper computer, but if you only know how to use it as a typewriter, that’s all it is.

Unknown

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

Rodney Yee

Doing anything with attention to how you feel is doing yoga.

Jean Couch

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.

Donna Farhi

We start to see that yoga can be an inward journey of body-mind sensitivity during both our so-called practice time and our time spent everywhere else. It is at this point that yoga is o longer relegated to an activity we do while wearing certain clothes at the yoga center or gym, but instead becomes a living vehicle for embodied wholeness, a potent path of transformation.

Sarah Powers

Yoga philosophy teaches that real man is not his body, but that the immortal I, of which each human being is conscious to some degree according to his mental evolution, is not the body but merely occupies and uses the body as an instrument.

Swami Vishnu-devananda

Yoga aims to remove the root cause of all diseases, not to treat its symptoms as medical science generally attempts to do.

Swami Vishnu-devananda

Yoga is the bringing together of that which was never separate.

– Richard Miller

True yoga is not about the shape of the body but the shape of your life. Yoga is not to be performed. Yoga is to be lived. Yoga doesn’t care about what you have been, yoga cares about the person you are becoming. Yoga is designed for a vast and profound purpose. And for it to be truly called yoga, its essence must be embodied.

Aadil Palkhivala

What is yoga asanas?

Stirum sukham asanam. Seated posture should be steady and comfortable.

Patanjali

In truth, it matters less 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.

Donna Farhi

Another important aspect is that the masters taught us to move from a deeper source, not just from muscles and joints.

TKV Desikachar

Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.

Eckhart Tolle

The yoga pose that you avoid the most you need the most.

Unknown.

It is at the edge of our comfort zone that change is created.

David Keil

There is a common misconception that we should be able to control or eradicate pain. Although yoga poses often bring some relief to blocked areas of the body, we will still have to endure discomforting pains as long as we are in this body. Instead of expecting miraculously become pain free from yoga practice, we can utilize the poses to help us fully inhabit our bodies with dignity and care, wheather we are experiencing pleasure or pain. If we want to learn how to come home to our bodies, we have to take up residence in every corner of ourselves, no matter how sick, injured, decrepit, or immobile we are.

Sarah Powers

Sadly, if we approach and practice yoga with the same cultural dictum of striving and effort, force and self-coercion that we may have applied to other aspects of our lives, we may practice diligently for decades while never allowing our self to appreciate the simple truth of its owns wholeness.

Donna Farhi

The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.

Swami Vivekananda

Writhe with your whole body. Stretch everywhere, energize everywhere. Flood all parts of you. Wake yourself up gently, slowly, sensually. Make it feel good. And immerse yourself fully in what you’re doing as you are doing it. Stretch your whole body open from inside out. Press into the various tight spots you find. Release the contracted areas, pent-up energy. Do this for a minute or so. Be attentive to where it’s pleasurable, where it’s painful, and where there isn’t much sensation. Feel deeply. Concentrate on experience the ever-changing sensations of stretch. Explore every part of yourself. Immerse yourself so fully that you’re momentarily not thinking about anything else. Then stop the gentle writhing, stand still for a few moments, and be aware of how you feel after having done this.

Erich Schifferman

The success of Yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships.

T.K.V. Desikachar

To perform every action artfully is yoga.

Swami Kripalu

The Study of asana is not about mastering the posture. It’s about using the posture to understand and transform yourself.

Gary Kraftsow

Breath

For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth.

Sanskrit Proverb

When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath.

Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Practice

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.

Unknown

Yoga is an inside practice. The rest is just a circus.

Sri Pattabhi Jois

The body is your temple. Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in.

B.K.S Iyengar

It is important that we do not start Yoga by first doing Ahiṃsā and when that is mastered, do Satya, etc.
As we progress, seeking to better ourselves by any means, very gradually these things happen.

TKV Desikachar

Without the Yamas, known as the ethical rules, there is no success in Yoga.

Sri Dharma Mittra

The practice itself, done consistently and accurately, is the real teacher.

Tim Miller

Understanding without practice is better than practice without understanding. Understanding with practice is better than understanding without practice. Residing in your true nature is better than understanding or practice.

Upanishads

Yoga is a light, which once lit, will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter the flame.

B.K.S Iyengar

Practice and all is coming.

Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

What is counciosness?

Yoga is to still the pattering of counciousness.

– Patanjali

When there is no mind, you are in yoga; when there is mind you are not in yoga. So you may do all the postures, but if the mind goes on functioning, if you go on thinking, you are not in yoga. Yoga is the state of no-mind. If you can be without the mind without doing any posture, you have become a perfect yogi. It has happened to many without doing any postures, and it has not happened to many who have been doing postures for many lives.

Osho

Any belief, whatever it is, is counterproductive in the context of the practice of yoga. One holds a belief instead of knowing. For example, you wouldn’t say you believe in your right ear, since you know your ear, no belief is required. Believing always excludes knowing. When jnana (supreme knowledge) comes through the practice of yoga, you will know. Do not be satisfied with believing.

Gregor Maehle

A person experiences life as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.

Albert Einstein

Paradise is not a place it’s a state of consciousness.

Sri Chinmoy

To live in awareness and harmony

Through sustained focus and meditation on our patterns, habits, and conditioning, we gain knowledge and understanding of our past and how we can change the patterns that aren’t serving us to live more freely and fully.

Patanjali,

Stillness is not the absence or negotiation of energy, life or movement. Stillness is dynamic. It is unconflicted movement, life in harmony with itself, skill in action. It can be experienced whenever there is total, uninhibited, unconflicted participation in the moment you are in – when we are wholeheartedly present with whatever you are doing.

Erich Shifferman

When you listen to yourself, everything comes naturally. It comes from inside, like a kind of will to do something. Try to be sensitive. That is yoga.

Petri Räisänen

It is not arrogant or egotistical to feel good inside. You had nothing to do with it. It’s simply the honest response to clearly perceived Reality.

Erich Schiffman

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

Deepak Chopra

Love

Love is the willingness to let go of your ego reactions to the way people are presenting themselves in order to see them as they really are.

Erich Schifferman

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

Wisdom is knowing we are all One. Love is what it feels like and Compassion is what it acts like.

– Ethan Walker III

Don’t move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.

– Osho

The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I’m caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

Ram Dass

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

– Rumi

Identification and attachment

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.

Donna Farhi

Suffering does not befall him who is without attachment to names and forms.

Buddha

You only lose what you cling to.

Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha.

The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

Eckhart Tolle

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.

– Ram Dass

Our own bodies are changing every second. Yet we take the body to be our Self; and, speaking in terms of it, we say, “I am hungry” or “I am lame”; “I am black” or “I am white.” These are all just the conditions of the body. We touch the truth when we say, “My body aches,” implying the body belongs to us and that therefore we are not that.

― Swami Satchidananda

The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

– Ram Dass

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

– Alan Watts

Those who counciosness is unified abandon all attatchment to the results of action and attain all peace. But those who desires are fragmented, who are selfishly attatched to the results of their work, are bound in everything they do.

Bhagavad Gita

A person who lives moment to moment, who goes on dying to the past, is never attached to anything. Attachment comes from the accumulated past. If you can be unattached to the past every moment, then you are always fresh, young, just born. You pulsate with life and that pulsation gives you immortality. You are immortal, only unaware of the fact.

– Osho

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

– Eckhart Tolle

Change is not something that we should fear. Rather, it is something that we should welcome. For without change, nothing in this world would ever grow or blossom, and no one in this world would ever move forward to become the person they’re meant to be.

– B.K.S Iyengar

Wise words

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

B.K.S. Iyengar

One must know oneself as one is, not as one wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and therefore fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be.

J. Krishnamurti

It is health that is the real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

Mahatma Gandhi

At various points in our lives, or on a quest, and for a reason that often remain obscure, we are driven to make decisions which prove with hindsight to be loaded with meaning.

Swami Satchidananda

Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.

Rumi

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.

Stephen Cope

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

– Howard Thurman

Ego is when the wave – you or me – mistakenly believes that it stands alone and that, somehow, it is essentially separate and different from the ocean and from another waves.

– Erich Shifferman

Meditation and stilling the mind

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Baba Ram Dass

When the mind is clear, empty of memories and knowledge, things are seen exactly as they are.

Patanjali

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Swami Sivananda

If you can’t meditate in a boiler room, you can’t meditate.

Alan Watts

Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent—not even a flicker of thought—and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. You are drowned in the beauty of a sunrise, of a starry night, of beautiful trees.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Intelligence comes into being when the mind, the heart and the body are really harmonious.

J. Krishnamurti

If you want to find God, hang out in the space between your thoughts.

Alan Cohen

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.

Eckhart Tolle

Meditation is a silent heart, a peaceful mind which can make life more lovable, more livable.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Living principles

One who outwardly perform his social duties, but inwardly stays free is a yogi.

Bhagvavad Gita

Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is.

Mary Radmacher.

Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

Seth Godin

Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.

Swedish Proverb

The mind is everything. What you think, you become.

Buddha

Rid your body of its impurities, let your speech be true and sweet, feel friendship for the world, and with humility seek wealth and knowledge.

T. Krishnamacharya

Counciousness settles as one radiates friendliness, compassion, delight and equanimity toward all things, wheather pleasant or painfull, good or bad.

Patanjali

This capacity to remain attentive and nonjudgamental toward what we are expressing naturally transforms the experience from one struggling with difficulty to one opening up for challenges.

Sarah Powers

Being firmly grounded in nonviolence creates an atmosphere in which others can let go of their hostility.

Patanjali

Comparison is the thief of joy.

– Theodore Roosveldt

Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past, or a pioneer of the future.

Deepak Chopra

Freedom from wanting unlocks the real purpose of existence.

Patanjali

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

Ramana Maharshi

True happiness is to learn how to live beyond the imperfections

– Rita Maatta

Healthy plants and trees yield abundant flowers and fruits. Similarly, from a healthy person, smiles and happiness shine forth like the rays of the sun.

B.K.S Iyengar

The future depends on what we do in the present.

Mahatma Gandhi