The Yamas & Niyamas Quotes

“I have found three ways of thinking that shift me out of a feeling of powerlessness: practicing gratitude, trust in the moment, and thinking about others.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“We are captured in a culture where our very identity is tied up with our accomplishments. We wear all we have to do like a badge on our shirt for all to see. In this rush to get to the next thing, we have left no time for ourselves to digest and assimilate our lives; this may be our biggest theft of all. We need time to catch up with ourselves. We need time to chew and ponder and allow the experiences of life to integrate within us. We need time to rest and to reflect and to contemplate.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Balance is like this. Spreading ourselves thin looks impressive, but in the end, we are the first to lose.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“When we expect the world to meet our needs, we turn outside of ourselves to find sustenance and completion. We expect our partners to fulfill us, our jobs to meet our needs, and success to solve all of our problems. And when it doesn’t, we continue to play the “if only” game, looking for that one more thing. Or we play the “planning” and “regretting” game. We let our contentment be managed by all these uncontrollable variables. As long as we think satisfaction comes from an external source, we can never be content. Looking outward for fulfillment will always disappoint us and keep contentment one step out of reach.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to be afraid without being paralyzed.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Living the life that cries to be lived from the depth of our being frees up a lot of energy and vitality. The juices flow. Everyone around us benefits from the aliveness that we feel. On the other hand, suppressing that life, for whatever reason, takes a lot of our life energy just in the managing of the pretending.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“When we don’t know what we want or we don’t have the courage to pursue it, everything that everyone else is doing looks tempting to us. We begin to lust after others’ accomplishments and others’ possessions. We get sidetracked from our own dreams and our own realness.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Carl Jung understood the fluidity of truth when he made the statement that what is true at one time for us, at some point no longer serves us, and eventually becomes a lie. He understood that truth changes over time;”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Worry is another way violence gets masked as caring. Worry is a lack of faith in the other and cannot exist simultaneously with love. Either we have faith in the other person to do their best, or we don’t. Worry says I don’t trust you to do your life right. Worry comes from a place of arrogance that I know better what should be happening in your life. Worry says I don’t trust your journey, or your answers, or your timing. Worry is fear that hasn’t grown up yet; it is a misuse of our imagination. We both devalue and insult others when we worry about them.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Being an audience for God also means we have to get off center stage. We don’t need to be the center of attention and activity all the time. I think it might surprise us to realize how much crazy activity we create in our days just so we can feel important. We wear our busyness like a badge, like our busyness would somehow impress the rest of the world, or impress ourselves. How many of us go to bed with a sense of accomplishment because we checked a lot of things off our task list or someone told us how “great” we were, or we “helped” others? What if walked off stage altogether and put God there instead. Maybe then we could go to sleep at night, not with a sense of accomplishment, but with a sense of wonder, because all day we had been an attentive audience to the divine play.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Discontentment is the illusion that there can be something else in the moment.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“There is a Japanese proverb that states, “The noise does not disturb you, you disturb the noise.” I admit, as a lover of silence, I had to think about this for a long time. I have always viewed loud noises as disturbances of my “calm, peaceful” nature. What this proverb so brilliantly taught me is the reality that when I am upset by noise, I am the one who is disturbing the flow of life, not the noise! There is no escape; we can always trace our emotional disturbances back to ourselves. We keep ourselves out of contentment.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“There is a Chinese proverb which states, “People in the West are always getting ready to live.” There is a remarkable truth to this proverb. When we are little we can’t wait to get big, when we are big, we can’t wait to get out of the house, then we can’t wait to get through college and get a job, then we can’t wait until our vacations, and finally, we can’t wait until retirement. As the Chinese proverb states, we never really live, we just get ready.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“When we run from life, try to manage life, or leave our energy scattered here and there, we feel differently than when our whole self shows up with our thoughts, words, and actions congruent and unified. When we are centered in the moment, we can fully meet the ordinariness of life as well as the challenges of life.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Yogiraj Achala reminds us, “What are you not seeing because you are seeing what you are seeing?”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“I often hear people say, “I just don’t know what to do.” I think more often than not, we do know what to do; the cost of our realness just seems too high at the time.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“and grow gentle eyes that are not afraid to see reality as it is. We learn compassion as we stop living in our heads, where we can neatly arrange things, and ground ourselves in our bodies, where things might not be so neat.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“We can’t save people, or fix them. All we can do is model, and that points the finger back at us.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Like the body, the mind and soul need time to digest and assimilate. Like the body, the mind and soul need time to rest. We create this rest by allowing space that we can breathe in. Not more clutter, but more space, space to reflect, space to journal, space for closure, space for imagination, and space to feel the calling of the life force within us.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“I think more often than not, we do know what to do; the cost of our realness just seems too high at the time.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Feeling powerless leads to outward aggression in the form of frustration and anger, or withdrawal inward into depression and victimization.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“know that in embarking on nonviolence
I shall be running
what might be termed
a mad risk.
But the victories of truth
have never been won without risks.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“The compassion of nonviolence keeps truthfulness from being a personal weapon. It asks us to think twice before we walk around mowing people down with our truth, and then wonder where everyone went.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“This week, set aside one undisturbed hour where you take the entire time to eat one orange. Give this orange, and the delight of eating it, your full attention for the whole hour.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“The difference between being pure with something rather than trying to make something pure is a subtle and tricky distinction. We can easily find ourselves in an arrogant position, sitting on our high horse thinking we are bringing something better to the moment, or perhaps thinking that the moment isn’t worth our attention, or maybe even finding ourselves feeling that the moment owes us something. When our thoughts or actions are presumptive like this we actually stain the purity of the moment. We are not to bring our idea of purity to the moment; we are simply to be with the moment as it is.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Nonattachment does not mean that we don’t care or that we somehow shut ourselves off from the pleasures and joy of life and each other. In fact, nonattachment frees us up to be immersed in appreciation of life and one another.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“If we can fall back to the breath and watch the belly rise and fall with each inhalation and exhalation, we can feel the truth of the transience of all things.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“When we get the real nourishment that divine mystery gives us, the pretend nourishment of excess becomes less and less interesting to us.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Our inability to love and accept all the pieces of ourselves creates ripples–tiny acts of violence–that have huge and lasting impacts on others.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

“Self-study asks us to look at the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and realize that these stories create the reality of our lives. Ultimately, this tenet invites us to release the false and limiting self-perception our ego has imposed on us and know the truth of our Divine Self.”
― Deborah Adele, The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice