As we gather for various events celebrating the 50 year anniversary of Integral Yoga in San Francisco, we are reminded again and again of the importance of spiritual community. We have committed ourselves this month to making good use of the support and inspiration...
Continuous meditation is meditation in daily life. It reminds me of the well-known tea ceremony in Japan. It’s a way of welcoming a guest into your home. And when the guest comes, you just give them a cup of tea, which we normally do, but in Japan, giving a cup of tea...
How can you experience joy in life and love passionately if you are practicing non-attachment? The best way to enjoy life, if you really want to enjoy life, is not to have any attachment to anything. Attachment never brings you permanent joy. It may begin with a...
When people think about meditation, often an image of a blissed-out figure sitting cross-legged on a soft pillow comes to mind... Ahh, total peace, quiet, and comfort. Wouldn’t that be nice! While meditating in a quiet place without distraction is an amazing...
In this exclusive excerpt from her book Yoga Mind — Journey Beyond the Physical, 30 Days to Enhance your Practice and Revolutionize Your Life From the Inside Out , Suzanne Saraswati Colón shares the inspiration that led her to become an Integral Yoga teacher, apply...
Question: What is success and failure? Swami Satchidananda: There’s no need for failure in the worldly sense. If you really work hard, if you know the way, if you gather enough strength, nothing is impossible to achieve. But remember: that, even if you have the whole...
I sat on the bench outside the Integral Yoga Institute (IYI) in New York City yelling into my cell phone at my boss, “Forget it, I’m done. I can’t take this anymore. I quit!” People coming out of the IYI stared at me in horror. An ashram is not exactly the place to be...
Yoga means to control the mind, to master the mind. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras begins by saying: Control of thoughts is Yoga—Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah (Sutra 1.2). But how is it to be done? Even the ideal disciple, Arjuna, says to Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: “My...
When I think of what it means to really live Yoga, I recall a special visit in late December, in the mid-1970s. I was serving as director of the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute, and Swami Satchidananda (Sri Gurudev) was coming to California for the celebration...
Yoga is something that you live. If you want to be a Yogi you should be a Yogi always, not just while you are standing on your head. If you are a Yogi only when you stand on your head, then what are you when you walk on your feet? If you are a Yoga teacher, you are...