Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Being able to recognize which of your desires are vital to pursue and which ones are not is often less than easy. This is precisely why the ancient sages counseled that we practice yoga. Their point was a very practical one: You are best able to discern which of your many desires should (and should not) be responded to when your mind is calm and tranquil.
What does "living your best life" mean to you? Does it mean accumulating wealth and fulfilling all your material wants? Or, does it mean turning away from the material world in order to fully realize the gift of spirit? We often tend to think of these objectives as being mutually exclusive: material fulfillment or spiritual fulfillment, not both together.
Yoga’s supreme objective is to awaken an exalted state of spiritual realization, yet the tradition also teaches you how to live and how to shape your life with a commanding sense of purpose, capacity, and meaning. In the end, yoga has less to do with what you can do with your body and more to do with the happiness that unfolds from realizing your full potential.
There is this expectation that as January 1st dawns, we're going to do it differently. Moreover, there's this kind of pressure, that even if I've been trying to be different for a while, January 1st, from here on in - I have to be different. There's a cultural expectation, there's a personal expectation. I think it's worth just taking pause for a minute and talking about that.
If yoga is about life, this means ALL life, not just part of it. Together, the spiritual and the material constitute the whole you, the whole of the experience of being human, and the nature of the universe in which you live. There may be no step more important to achieving ultimate fulfillment than accepting what the Vedas teach us about desires--that some desires are inpsired by your soul.
A little exposure to the philosophy of many Eastern spiritual traditions - including yoga - could easily lead you to conclude that if you aspire to achieve goals in the material world you cannot fulfill yourself spiritually, or vice versa. However, since all of us, at some level, long for fulfillment in all aspects of our life, it is essential to understand that these two aims are not mutually exclusive.
Any individual or society that fails to honor or provide the opportunity for women to fully exert their power can never truly prosper. All creativity, growth, imagination, nurturing - All possibilities are born within the female womb of the Devine Feminine. To deny Her a rightful place, either within ourselves or in the world in which we live, is to do irreparable harm and endure the loss of countless joys.
Yoga's ultimate intent is to achieve something far deeper and more meaningful than just a better body or less stress and tension. Its ultimate aim is to help you hear your soul's call so that you can be consistently guided to make the best decisions - the ones that serve your highest state of wellbeing. In the process of doing so, you will necessarily be made more whole and act in such a way as to support the larger world of which you are a part.