Quotes by Yoga Teachers

Tranquillizers do not change our environment nor do they change our personalities. They merely reduce our responsiveness to stimuli. They dull the keen edge of the angers fears or anxiety with which we might otherwise react to the problems of living. Once the response has been dulled the irritating surface noise of living muted or eliminated the spark and brilliance are also gone.
Indra Devi
[Let] go of your attachments: your attachment to being right, to having total control, or to living forever. This process of letting go is integral to the process of becoming whole.
Judith Hanson Lasater
The goal of human life," says Ramakrishna, "is to meet God face to face." But the magic is this: if we look deeply into the face of all created things, we will find God. Therefore, savor the world, the body. Open it, explore it, look into it. Worship it.
Stephen Cope
In the end, what I love most about contemporary yoga is its ability tosynthesize the everyday with the extraordinary, the practical with thevisionary, the mundane with the sacred. I love that yoga can work torelease my tense muscles, negative emotions, and psychic detritus at thesame time. That it can connect me to my body in ways that create newneural pathways in my brain. That it offers a practical tool for copingwith everyday stress, as well as an intuitive opening to the hidden magicof everyday life.
Carol Horton
I understood that the attachment to myself and my image ... was actually taking me away from my self, away from this wonderful opportunity to just sit, just breathe, just feel the warm animal of my body, just feel the soft, sultry heat of June. The density of my attachment was making it impossible for me to have a truly satisfying experience of life in my body just as it was in the moment. When under the sway of this obsession, my mind's attention was always in the fantasized future, or the idealized or devalued past - never present to the reality of the moment.
Stephen Cope
Many of us ordinary folk have tasted these moments of "union" - on the ladder, in the pond, in the jungle, on the hospital bed. In the yogic view, it is in these moments that we know who we really are. We rest in our true nature and know beyond a doubt that everything is OK, and not just OK, but unutterably well. We know that there is nothing to accept and nothing to reject. Life just is as it is.
Stephen Cope
Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit. When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.
B.K.S. Iyengar
What we see in the world around us is just a reflection of what is inside of us.
Sharon Gannon
Ethical vegetarians eat only plant-based food in order to show compassion toward animals and other humans and to benefit the planet.
Sharon Gannon
Without education, confidence does not come.
B.K.S. Iyengar
Yoga practices shift our identity away from the ego-personality and its struggles so that we can begin to reconnect with the essential nature of our being, which is bliss.
Sharon Gannon
We create the world we live in. If we want to change what we don't like in the world, we must start by changing what we don't like about ourselves.
Sharon Gannon
Through the deeply theraputic practice of asana, we begin to purify our karmas, thereby healing our past relationships with others and reestablishing a steady and joyful connection with the Earth, which means all beings.
Sharon Gannon
Overall, always strive to be genuine — about who you are, what you offer, and why you do what you do.
Amy Ippoliti
Some students are in a hurry to begin "real" pranayama. They go right to the later stages without first laying a quality foundation, and their practice often suffers. First find out what is. This is also part of the answer to the question Who am I?
Richard Rosen
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
Become a vessel for the divine.
Amy Ippoliti
Carve out and claim the time to care for yourself and kindle your own fire.
Amy Ippoliti
Every day you face two important decisions: what effect you want your speech and actions to have on the world around you, and what impressions and vibrations you want to be receptive to.
Kalashatra Govinda
Peace is not only the absence of war, but also a way of seeing the world, and the choices we make are how we express and manifest that vision of the world.
Max Strom
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
Richard Rosen
You can say no if that is more truthful than a resentful yes.
Judith Lasater
Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.
Sharon Gannon
Don't wait for a better world. Start now to create a world of harmony and peace. It is up to you, and it always has been. You may even find the solution at the end of your fork.
Sharon Gannon
Yoga teaches us that we can have whatever we may want in life if we are willing to provide it for others first.
Sharon Gannon
I've never known someone to become more at home in his or her own body, in all of its flaws and its grace, without becoming more compassionate to all of life.
Matthew W. Sanford
Living on the verge is not about doing more, but about being more. It isn’t about achieving more; it’s about experiencing more. It’s not about being someone different, as there ’s no “better versionof you” on the horizon. Everything you’re searching for is available to you in this moment. Everything you need is right here on the verge.
Cara Bradley
As I explore the wilderness of my own body, I see that I am made of blood and bones, sunlight and water, pesticide residues and redwood humus, the fears and dreams of generations of ancestors, particles of exploded stars.
Anne Cushman
The yogis say you can never step into the same river twice, because the current is always shifting and changing. You've never stepped into this exact river before today. Not with this body, not with today's particular energy, with the specific number of bites of breakfast in your belly, with the earth tipped on its axis. Perhaps up until now you haven't had a breakthrough in this pose, but that was then. What's possible today?
Baron Baptiste
Carezza, like Tantra, considers the sex act to be a true feast of love, and ejaculation is seen as a clumsy, crude incident-something quite banal which kills sexual desire. The man who, a few minutes before was seized by a frantic sexual desire, changes as soon as he has ejaculated and turns away from his wife, damaging her in her self-respect and her love as well.
André Van Lysebeth
Be inspired but not proud.
B.K.S. Iyengar
You must purge yourself before finding faults in others.When you see a mistake in somebody else, try to find if you are making the same mistake.This is the way to take judgment and to turn it into improvement.Do not look at others' bodies with envy or with superiority.All people are born with different constitutions.Never compare with others.Each one's capacities are a function of his or her internal strength.Know your capacities and continually improve upon them.
B.K.S. Iyengar
Watch how your enthusiasm can light up another’s fire. This is how we wake up the world.
Amy Ippoliti
Why do we need money beyond a point? If we are free of ill health, enmity, and debt, is that not enough? Too much money only leads to less peace.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Amy Ippoliti
I came to understand that belief is a preconception about the way reality should be; faith is the willingness to experience reality as it is, including the acceptance of the unknown. An interesting way to understand the difference is to use the words interchangeably in the same sentence: I believe in Santa Claus. I have faith in Santa Claus. Belief can impede spiritual unfoldment; faith is supremely necessary for it.
Judith Hanson Lasater
Quoting from Thomas MertonDialogues With SilenceThe true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. (17)
Stephen Cope