Yoga and the Quest for the True Self Quotes

“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, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“The feminine comes to us in nature. Go outside. Look at the amazing waves of green, of lilacs, of blue mountains. We are in the presence of the manifestation right here. And she's reaching for you.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“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, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“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, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“To some extent, most of us are unconsciously driven by our ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is simply a set of ideas in the mind about how we should show up, how we should look, feel, behave, think. This collection of ideas and mental images is created out of fragments of highly charged experiences with important love objects in our lives, and out of the messages we receive in our interactions with the world as we grow. It remains mostly out of our awareness. The blueprint for the ego-ideal is first laid down by parental injunctions about how to be, or how not to be. These highly charged messages are taken in whole. They become the foundation of our scripts for life. The ego-ideal is certainly capable of modification and change, but for most of us it's deeply hardwired into our unconscious by the time we enter early adulthood, and it matures only marginally in later life.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Our true self remains deeply hidden, incognito, submerged beneath a web of mistaken identities.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Just let go of all the rest of the day, now. Let all of your worries roll off your shoulders; let’s just enjoy being home in the body for the next hour and a half.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“And there is that wonderful, haunting voice of the true self that calls to us, that keeps us company as we stride deeper and deeper into the world, determined to save the only soul we really can save.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Yogic practice intentionally re-creates the physical structure: the musculoskeletal, neurological, digestive, respiratory, circulatory, and immune systems are all literally remade through the regular practice of postures and conscious breathing.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“The fundamental experience of human suffering is the experience of alienation from the self, from the source—from God.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“The great Theravadan monk Ajahn Chah used to teach that the whole world is teaching the dharma (the truth) to us all the time. . . . In order to hear the teaching, we must slow down, cultivate awareness, and tune in. Most of all, we have to drop our hopes and dreams and preconceived notions of how it should be. We must look at how it is. We must look with a mind that lets go. Then we will see.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Whenever we relinquish our craving, clinging, and grasping, whenever we stop the war with reality, whenever we are totally present and undivided, we are immediately in union with our true nature.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Love is at the core of all true dharma. The enactment of our vocation in the world stands in the stream of love that flows from the divine Self to the individual soul.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Now we have become exclusively identified with our physical bodies, with our possessions, with our thoughts, with our personalities. We think we’re our ideas, our careers, our families, our countries. We live our lives in utter ignorance of the vastness of our real nature, estranged from our true selves. This is the source of our suffering. . . .

The soul gradually becomes completely identified with the material plane of existence, even though this “gross material plane”--the physical body and the personality–is only the most outward and visible aspect of her true home. This is a disastrous misidentification because, in addition to the body, mind, and personality, yoga teaches that the true home of the soul is also beyond time and space, in the eternal now of consciousness. When we live disconnected from these vast roots of the Self, we suffer.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Yogis see the world saturated with the spirit of the divine. In this view, all aspects of the divine manifestation are celebrated. All are listened to. When we pay close attention to the world of the many, we inevitably discover the One.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Desai talked that morning about the preciousness of a human life. “In the world of yoga,” he said, “you must remember there are hell realms and heavenly realms and animal realms and other realms where souls abide.” But the human realms, he said, are most precious. Here in the human realms we suffer, but we also have the tools to wake up. And unlike the heavenly realm of the devas and brahmas, celestial beings, we have the desire to wake up. The human realms have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain to prod us toward the path of liberation.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“In yoga,’ said Sarita, ‘the fully alive human being is created on a daily basis by what we eat, how we breathe, how we sleep, how we move, and what we say and don’t say.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“In the classical traditions of yoga, I discovered that morning, the practice of yoga postures never stands alone, but is meant to be done in a context of ethical practices, lifestyle practices, dietary practices, meditation and breathing practices, chanting, and the repetition of mantra. Together, these practices literally transmute every aspect of daily life into a transformational activity.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Carl Jung had come to the same conclusion fifty years before: Among my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a spiritual outlook on life.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“….[O]ur lives only make sense when understood as a sacred quest for the true self. The practices of yoga. . . are organized around the belief that all humans have the innate capacity and longing to mature to full aliveness, that all humans are born with the seed of the awake, conscious mind. . . . [W]hen we finally commit to the quest for the true self, we will discover that we are not alone on our journey. One day, to our astonishment, we will find that the true self for which we are searching is also searching for us.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“however painful the truth may be, its recognition is accompanied by a visceral sense of relief”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“we are already inherently perfect; we have already arrived; and we have the potential in each moment to wake up to our true nature.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“at one point, out of the blue, i sobbed as if with a lifetime of accumulated burdens. and throughout it all i just painted.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“What is the use of being able to dissolve the body into lights, to lose subject-object separation in deep states of samadhi, if we cannot even bear to see our true face in the mirror? Why do we think we can, or should, penetrate the most refined aspects of the five kleshas and the four erroneous beliefs, when, in the most gross kinds of ways, we are having trouble acknowledging, experiencing, and bearing the reality of our simple daily life?”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Living in the moment, however, is the most dangerous situation anybody ever faces in life, because everything you have ever avoided is revealed to you when you live in the moment. You get to face all the denied contents of your subconscious as they reappear again and again through the events of your life.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“When all is said and done, most of the stages of spiritual practice are stages of grief work. We have to let go of our deeply cherished dreams and illusions. And there’s no way we’re going to let them go until we have pretty much worn ourselves out trying to make them work. As Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The shoe of ego is only worn out by walking on it.” The moment of raising the white flag, then, is a precious one, one that usually comes only as the fruit of exhaustion. Finally, we step deeper and deeper into the reality project not because we should or because we want to, but because we have to. The shoe is worn out.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“Yogic practice intentionally re-creates the physical structure”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“In itself, the apparently dualistic nature of our phenomenal world is not a problem. We can live with hot and cold, love and hate, gain a loss, light and shadow, sacred and profane. The problem is that we human beings inevitably tend to choose for one side of the polarity and against the other side, artificially attempting to split life down the middle.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“the voices of the “buried life” only reveal themselves with utmost clarity when opened to the consciousness of a loved other.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self