Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

people have assumed that stress is an inevitable part of their lives! They do not see that it is entirely self-created and self-inflicted. Once you take charge of your inner life, there is no such thing as stress.

false perception that you can change the situation by losing your temper with it.

Intense activity and sleep are times when this chemical mess can undo itself.

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, and actions become disproportionate to the stimulus.

The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. There is a...

The most horrific things in life can be a source of nourishment if you accept,

No adversity is an impediment if you are in a state of conscious response. No

But in your experience of life, the more you are able to respond to everything around you, the freer you are!

Responsibility is not reaction but it is not action either.

Responsibility and action belong to different dimensions. The ability to respond gives you the freedom to act. It also gives you the freedom not to act. It puts you in the driver’s seat of your life.

Responsibility is not compulsive action; it offers you th...

Can you act upon everything in the world today? No, but you can respond to everyt...

Your ability to act is always limited, but there are no limitations on your ability to respond. If you are willing, you can respond to just about anything.

So, responsibility does not mean unbridled action. Far from it.

If you make this ability to respond into a willing process, that marks the birth of a tremendous new possibility within you. Your inner genius begins to flower.

Many think responsibility means capability.

Wrong again. When it comes to action, capability could play a role. But when it comes to response, it is just a question of willingness.

Your ability to respond is the way you are. Only your ability to act is connected with the outside world.

Responsibility is about being.

That’s the way life is—not an independent, self-contained bubble but a moment-to- moment dialogue with the universe. You don’t have to work at making it that...

every subatomic particle in your body is responding in a limitless way to the great dance of energies that is the cosmos. The only reason you are not experiencing the life process in all its majesty and profundity is your current state of mental resistance.

Your psychological structure is a stone wall. If you are willing, every moment of your life can be a fantastic experience. Just the act of inhaling and exhaling can be a tremendous love affair.

Someone said, “Knock and it shall open.” You don’t even have to knock, because there is no door. It is open. You just have to walk through, that’s all.

Being responsible is taking ownership of your life. It means you have taken the first radical step to becoming a complete human being—

“My ability to respond is limitless,

but my ability to act is limited. I am one hundred percent responsible for everything I am and everything I am not, for my capacities and my incapacities, for my joys and my miseries. I am the one who determines the nature of my experience in this life and beyond. I am the maker of my life.”

It is the simplest and easiest way for you to express your own divinity.

The aim is to unshackle yourself from the limited identity you have forged, as a result of your own ignorance, and live the way the Creator made you—utterly blissful and infinitely responsible.

The access for everything is here and now. And it lies only in one’s ability to respond—in one’s ability to experience and express the divine.

Sadhana

This fruit, this egg, this bread, this vegetable—they are all a part of life themselves, but they are willing to become you. Would you be willing to do this for anyone? You are not willing to lose your identity and merge into anyone. You are not even willing to surrender your little finger for someone else. Momentarily, you surrender just a little, usually when you need something. Your love affairs are the product of very calculated surrender. But food, which is a life unto itself, gives itself up completely to become a part of you. Later, without even uttering the sentence aloud, take the simple idea—“My responsibility is limitless; if I am willing, I can respond to everything”—

If you sustain this awareness of your limitless nature for just one full minute, you will achieve a tremendous transformation.

Conscious response brings you to a profound and enduring state of connectedness with life—

In this willing, active involvement with life, you are embraced by it and that embrace takes you to the very source of creation.

This is because you arrive at yoga only when you realize that your desire is essentially for the limitless, and that absolutely nothing else will settle you.

Most people are not aware of the nature of their longing. When their longing finds unconscious expression, we call this

greed, conquest, ambition. When their longing finds conscious expression, we call this yoga.

The science of yoga is, quite simply, the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony, in complete sync with existence.

The many fluctuations of the outside world have their impact on each one of us. But yoga is the science of creating inner situations exactly the way you

want ...

When you fine-tune yourself to such a point where everything functions beautiful...

the best of your abilities will flo...

One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings—to preserve and to expand—are not opposing

One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict.

But if you are identified with the physical, then instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental fo...

The human desire to transcend the limitations of the physical is a completely natural one. To journey from the boundary-based individual body to the boundless source of creation—this is the very basis of the spiritual process.

Because your self-preservation instinct keeps telling you, “Unless you have walls you are not safe,” unconsciously you keep building them. Later, you struggle with them. This is an endless cycle. But creation is not unwilling to open to you the

It is not creation’s

unwillingness that you are struggling with. You are struggling with the walls of resistance that yo...