Bringing Yoga to Life Quotes

“When we practice asanas from an interior perspective, we bring our minds back into the body. Instead of directing the body as a separate entity, we relocate our minds within our body and begin to listen to the nonverbal, nonmental information contained within the soma. As we give our full attention to every breath, movement, and the subtlest of sensations, the body becomes mindful, and the mind becomes embodied.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“The same force that moves the tides, opens a flower, or creates lightning in a storm animates our bodies. This life force moves the breath, the fluids, and the current flowing through our nerves as well as the inner workings of each and every cell. This animating principle is the force behind all the organs of perception: hearing, touch, taste, smell, and sight. Although not itself a solid substance, this life force infuses the body and manifests as the light shining from our eyes, the glow of the skin, and the timbre of the voice. As this force moves through the body, it influences the shape and form of our structure, creating our posture, the rhythm of our walk, and the character of our faces. Everything that has ever happened to us—our birth, the fall from a tree at the age of six, our thoughts and feelings, what we eat, the climate in which we live—is inscribed upon our body, creating a living archaeological record. When we develop an awareness of the interior movement that permeates the body, we gain access to the movement of our minds. Yoga is a means of reviving our connection to this natural wisdom.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Interesting things happen when we give up struggling with a situation or problem outside of our control.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

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― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Without a larger purpose, we are just stretching our hamstrings. But in the context of the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga, this simple action can serve the purpose of steadying the mind (dharana, the seventh limb) and developing acceptance for where we are (santosha, one of the ethical precepts, the first two limbs of the yamas and niyamas). We can be testing our honesty (satya): Are we willing to work with clear alignment and integrity even if it takes a little longer, or do we just want to get our head down on our leg so we can look good? We can be noticing all the thoughts and distractions that percolate up as we’re holding the posture and patiently bring the mind back to our breath and the immediate content of the moment (pratyahara, the fifth limb). Or we can just stretch our hamstrings. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with just stretching our hamstrings, but if we are really interested in practicing Yoga, we can give our actions an umbrella of intention and achieve so much more with the same basic materials.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“We can assess our practice by asking only whether Yoga practice is building our integrity as a human being and helping us live as an expression of our most noble virtues. Whether our practice strengthens our ability to be present with all that we experience is the only criteria we need for what we do or don’t do on the mat.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“we are practicing to live, not living to practice,”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“When we cease to identify ourselves with things outside our control and when we cease to wrongly attribute our success or failure to these things, we are well on the way to finding a place of inner ease that no one and no thing can take away from us.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“When we offer ourselves unqualified compassion, we start to make positive associations with our practice time. We become the kind of person we’d like to hang out with.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“For many years I actively imagined that each practice session was a meeting with someone special. When we know we are meeting a loved one, we take extra care dressing and grooming ourselves and we want to bring the very best of ourselves forward. We make the room fresh and sparkling and take special care that it is beautiful and inspiring. Eventually that special someone we invite to our practice becomes us: we start to value ourselves so much that we want to treat ourselves in the best possible way.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“When we’re not busy being somewhere else, more often than not what we participate with is our past or future version of ourselves and our life. Instead of seeing how things actually are, we continue to see them as they once were or as we imagine they will be.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“the purpose of Yoga, which is to realize a unitive state, concentrated asana practice, the third limb of Ashtanga Yoga, will naturally involve each of the other seven limbs of practice, especially the ten ethical precepts of the yamas and niyamas (the first two limbs).”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Since our Western cultural inheritance precludes a whole relationship to the body, it is not at all surprising that hatha yoga here has often been reinvented as a sophisticated form of calisthenics whose sole purpose is to make the body beautiful and to increase longevity. These things hatha yoga does well, but such goals are not the primary goal of yoga practice, and when we practice in a way that causes this unhealthy identification with the body, we are merely doing exercises with Sanskrit names. The practice becomes bent to accommodate the perception of the body as an “it” rather than requiring us to bend our minds and stretch beyond our objectified perceptual leanings. When our primary imperative shifts from attaining a form to developing an intimate connection with the life force moving through that form, we are reclaiming the only part of the practice that ultimately can have any relevance for us—finding out who we really are.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Yoga postures, were traditionally practiced very slowly, with each movement synchronized to the breath, in order to balance the nervous system and open a perceptual gateway to the parasympathetic nervous system. This makes us available to our feeling function.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“fitness of the gross, or annamaya kosha, layer of the body is inferred from the inner health of the subtle body. Health, a light body, freedom from craving, A glowing skin, sonorous voice, fragrance Of body: these signs indicate progress In the practice of meditation. Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2.123”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“When the body is viewed as an apparatus for carrying the head around, we leave ourselves prone to the tyranny of our intellect and the justification and defense of the rational mind.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Yoga tells us that our biggest obstacle in perceiving reality as it is is our habit of identifying with and participating in the stuff that fills our mind. And what is this mind-stuff? Latent impressions are left in our minds from past experiences in the form of memories, which tend to dictate our way of seeing things in the present and thus further determine the shape of our future. As if our minds are not already filled to the brim with these past impressions, we further complicate our mind state by making things up, filling the mind with fantasies and fears about things that haven’t yet happened. The habit of participating in all of this tomfoolery itself forms more latent impressions, which strengthens our conviction that this is who we are. It is as if we have become so used to dressing in masquerade that we start to see ourselves as our fantasy character.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“What we discipline, then, is this movement of awareness, training ourselves to stay with rather than run from all that we experience. When we choose to stay with our practice despite the inevitable highs and lows in our lives, we are actively choosing to focus our awareness on that part of us that is unchanging. With each practice session, we start to identify with this steady part of ourselves. When we’re feeling sad, we practice anyway. When we’re happy and excited, we practice anyway. When we’re in the depths of grief, we practice anyway. When we have a thousand things to do, we practice anyway. We do not practice to rid ourselves of these feelings or to suppress them. Neither do we practice out of stoic denial. When we practice through thick and thin, happy and unhappy times, we are saying, “Sadness is moving through me, but sadness is not who I am; excitement is moving through me, but excitement is not who I am; grief is moving through me, but grief is not only who I am.” When we practice anyway, we make room to fully experience all our feelings while at the same time not allowing those feelings to paralyze or solidify into our identity.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“When we contain rather than constantly discharge our feeling state, we allow ourselves to feel completely. In feeling completely, we reexperience our aliveness and the source of that aliveness. When we cultivate the discipline to pause, it becomes possible for us to make a choice that is outside our normal habit pattern. And it is in breaking through these entrained patterns that we can begin to experience a more liberated state of being.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“This is a potent moment that many of us experience daily, if not hourly—the moment of feeling a longing for happiness. If we can get comfortable in being in that pause, however it manifests for us physically, psychologically, and emotionally, we have a better chance of responding to our longing in a way that is not simply a stopgap measure.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“We may assume a false sense of liberty and feel an initial resistance to putting reins on a life that we believe to be free. Yet this false sense of freedom almost always moves us further away from our true self and from real happiness.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“time acts as an invisible mortar for our experience; it is what stands between potentially discordant elements and, through finding their correct relationship, brings all into a unified whole.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Yoga is thus not something we can make happen but something that happens to us. But it does not happen by accident.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“We establish a calm abiding center, not to fortify ourselves against the chaos of life, but to help us become resilient, tolerant, and accepting of the inevitable, perplexing, and often agonizing losses we all go through. A calm abiding center and a fully engaged life, therefore, go hand in hand. This inner tempering through the fire of practice allows us to live at higher and higher levels of charge: to feel intensely, love intensely, and work intensely without fracturing in the process. We make firm this abiding center of equanimity, but not to sequester ourselves from life or to make life less “lively.” Rather, as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said about capturing life through the lens of his camera, we “discipline reality.” Cartier-Bresson did not lessen the poignancy of his subject matter through being attentive to it. In the same way, when we practice Yoga we do not dampen the fiery nature of life: if anything, we place ourselves right in the fierce heat of the center.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Very simply, we set aside time and a quiet place to engage in inquiries that will remind us of who we really are. We do this practice as often as necessary for this understanding to become an implicit part of our being. For most of us this means practicing from the first breath to the last.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“By anchoring our spiritual practice always within everyday life, we remove the arbitrary barriers between what is considered spiritual and extraordinary and what is material and ordinary.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“The sixteenth-century treatise Yoga-Sara-Samgraha (“Compendium on the Essence of Yoga”) makes a distinction between aspirants who “think” about and would like a spiritual life (arurukshu) and those who are actually practicing (yunjana). This succinct categorization tells us that not much has changed in human nature since time immemorial.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Rather, we can regularly ask ourselves these questions: Who am I becoming through this practice? Am I becoming the world in which I wish to live?”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“Yoga is an ongoing participatory experiment in which the world and every part of our life becomes our laboratory. It is a hands-on practice that can work only with our fullest and most complete participation at all times, every minute of the day, every day of the year, from our first breath to our last. It is this active inquiry that will gradually change our point of view. We will undoubtedly discover that what we take to be our “normal” state of being, and what we defend and tenaciously cling to, is the very source of our misery. This suffering is self-generated, and by the same logic, we are the only ones who can generate our own inner freedom.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

“This is why working with our most deeply held resentments and grudges can bring about the greatest change, because it is here that we start to deconstruct the scaffolding upon which all our other points of view are based.”
― Donna Farhi, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living