Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

“destiny.” It is a consoling word, but disempowering.

Your destiny is written by you unconsciously. If you have mastery over your physical body, fifteen to twenty percent of your life and destiny will be in your hands. If you have mastery over your mind, fifty to sixty percent of your life and destiny will be in your hands. If you have mastery over your life energies, a hundred percent of your life and destiny will be in your hands.

But whatever you do in unawareness, you can also do in awareness. That makes a world of a difference. It is the difference between ignorance and enlightenment.

The outside world will never happen a hundred percent your way, because there are too many variables involved. Wanting the outside to happen exactly the way you choose is the path of conquest,

yourself in such a way that, whatever the events and situations around you, you don’t get crushed by them; you ride them.

where every pebble, every rock, every tree, every atom, speaks to you in a language you understand. Every moment there are a million miracles happening around you: a flower blossoming, a bird tweeting, a bee humming, a raindrop falling, a snowflake wafting along the clear evening air. There is magic everywhere. If you learn how to live it, life is nothing short of a daily miracle.

do the right things if you want results.

is time to wake up to yourself as an existential being, a living being, rather than a psychological case.

Then your destiny will be your own. One hundred percent your own.

It’s a big question. Let’s put the question more precisely: who is responsible for the way you are right now?

Passing the buck is what you do in a hundred different ways each day. You have collectively refined the old blame game into a fine art.

The quality of our lives is determined by our ability to respond to the varied complex situations that we encounter. If the ability to respond with intelligence, competence, and sensitivity is compromised by a compulsive or reactive approach, we are enslaved by the situation. It means we have allowed the nature of our life experience to be determined by our circumstances, not by us.

Being fully responsible is to be ful...

You are the master of your own destiny. It is time to reclaim for ourselves the extraordinary transformative power of this single word: responsibility. Apply it to your life, and watch the magic unfold.

Responsibility simply means your ability to respond

If you decide, “I am responsible,” you will have the

ability to r...

If you decide, “I am not responsible,” you will not have the ...

Taking responsibility is not a convenient philosophy to reconcile you to the way things are. It is simply waking up to reality. This ability to respond to the entire universe is already a physical reality. It is only your thoughts and emotions that need to become conscious of the fact.

There is another choice. You could simply see the situation the way it is and take responsibility for it. Taking responsibility is not accepting blame instead of assigning it. It simply means consciously responding to the situation. Once you take responsibility, you will invariably start exploring ways to address the situation. You will look for solutions.

If you assume absolute responsibility within yourself for all that is around you, you will become the center of any situation at home, work, or even the universe.

Only if you realize you are responsible do you have the freedom to create yourself the way you want to be, not as a reaction to the situations in which you exist. Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom.

When you are able to create yourself the way you want, you can create your life the way you want as well.

Your outer life may not be a hundred percent in your control, but your i...

anger—usually provokes unintelli...

Anger is fundamentally self...

If you look at your life closely, ...

that you have done the most idiotic and life-negative things ...

If anger is a pleasant experience, blow your top.

What’s the problem? The point is it is singularly unpleasant—for you and for those at the receiving end. It is also counterproductive and therefore inefficient.

Once you take charge of your inner life, there is no such thing as stress.

The point is that anger is rooted in your false perception that you can change the situation by losing your temper with it.

But your life experience tells you time and again that the reverse is true, that you can never change any situation for the better by ...

You only mess up your situations by g...

substantial medical and scientific evidence to prove that in a state of anger, you are literally poisoning your system.

When you are angry, your very chemistry is altered, and your system turns toxic. Intense activity and sleep are times when this chemical mess can undo itself.

out of rage, you become one with the universe.

What most people forget is that the past exists within each one of us only as memory. Memory has no objective existence. It is not existential; it is purely psychological.

If you retain your ability to respond,

your memory of the past will become an empowering process. But if you are in a compulsive cycle of reactivity, memory distorts your perception of the present, and your thoughts, emotions, a...

The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to r...

There is a vast difference between the two. And it can make the w...

But if you habitually think, “I am the way I am because of someone

else,” you are using life situations merely as an opportunity for self-destruction or stagnation.

can be a source of nourishment if you accept, “I am responsible for the way I am now.”

take one hundred percent responsibility for the way you are now,

The wealth of life lies only in how you have allowed its experiences to enrich you.

Which is freedom? To have choices or to have none?

Your logical mind tells you, “Give up all responsibility and you will be free.” But in your experience of life, the more you are able to respond to everything around

you, the freer ...