Let us know that in Truth you are the Divine Image, the image of God. Somehow the veil of the ego prevents you from realizing this. Just remove that veil. It is that veil that is the basis for all these mental dramas. It creates all kinds of problems, troubles,...
The essential teaching and goal of Yoga is to make the mind calm. “Yoga chitta vritti nirodha,” says the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. That means that Yoga is the calming of the waves created in the chitta, the mind by keeping the mind balanced under all conditions. In...
Live in the golden present, then you won’t have any anxiety or any fear of losing anything. Look at the sparrows, they just fly around. If they are hungry they just go and pick up a grain from anywhere. They are not constantly worried about what will happen tomorrow,...
Yoga Nidra is yogic sleep. But, it’s a sort of sleepless sleep. You are awake and at the same time you are sleeping. The scriptures call it “jagrat sushupti,” awakened sleep. You sleep, but you don’t sleep. During regular sleep, you sleep but you don’t know that...
Someone asked me the question: “I feel selfish and troubled all the time. Why is it so hard to feel peaceful all the time if it’s my true nature?” Well, that question cannot be answered with words but can be realized. How? By knowing the Knower, being the Be-er. Now,...
Q: In the Ramayana and Mahabharata, it’s clear that there was killing. The Gita itself takes place on a battlefield. How is this explained and justified in terms of ahimsa (non-violence)? Swami Satchidananda: In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna talks about non‑violence to...
I crunched through the leaves toward the trailhead. A chill wind chased the clouds from the turquoise face of the sky. I paused under the maple tree to chant Om before my morning walk. In the branches overhead, yellow leaves fluttered like prayer flags. One released...
In the early 1970s, I was in the dance department at the University of California, Berkeley, and right when I passed from my apartment to the campus, there was the Integral Yoga Institute. I went in there, long story short, to take a Yoga class. The postures were...
We all look for excitement, thinking that it is a plus. But what is a plus? A minus crossed. A pendulum won’t swing to the plus side and remain there. When it swings to one side, it automatically has to come back to the other. When you want excitement, and swing to...
We should all remember that a main aim of Yoga practice is self-mastery. When we follow the Yoga precepts and practices this leads to more self-mastery—the body and mind become more relaxed and sattvic so we can more easily recognize and abide in our True Nature....
I don’t know about you, but the spirit of sacrifice and service has never come easy for me. In the early days of my spiritual journey, due to my self-absorption in “taking care of Number 1,” I used to cringe whenever Swami Satchidananda (Gurudev) talked about Karma...
The Himalayas are indeed a crown and spread their victory flag in the sky. The Indian Ocean, in the south, acts as though it washes the feet of the emperor. In between, a thriving sun of culture has been shining for thousands of years over the waves of the Ganga and...
A questioner asks: Swamiji, what about Gurus like Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa? We read that he touched his disciple Swami Vivekananda and Vivekananda had a spiritual experience. Was Vivekananda just opening up something from within himself or did Sri Ramakrishna...
Independence implies a freedom from being controlled or unduly influenced by an outside source. Spiritual independence suggests the freedom to live in harmony with the spiritual truth at the heart of our being. It implies freedom from depending on any outside source...
One fine spring morning I stood on the deck as the sun crested the trees. Tucked into the raised beds, cabbages, and leaf lettuce glittered with dew. As if on cue a Mourning Dove landed on the topmost barn gable. I half expected a butterfly to land on my shoulder and...
A meditation teacher of mine once quoted a Burmese teacher as saying “When everything that can go is gone, what’s left is the truth.” That sentence resonated with me. I heard it maybe 20 years ago and I still reference it and repeat it a lot. And I think that’s...