Top Highlights

• There is no freedom in just repeating the words and rituals of the old masters—we must express freedom and interdependence through the actions of our whole being, and community, through mind, body, and speech.
• The world appears with much more clarity than it did when I was caught in ideas and fixations.
• Even in Buddha’s time, the body was used as the primary object of meditation so that one could study the universe not through books or theory but through one’s subjective experience. Likewise the Yoga postures, when practiced with breathing and sensitivity, become opportunities for deep meditative insight because they are designed to calm the nervo...
• The sages, seers, and yogis of ancient India or the poet-artist-students of medieval Japan did not develop their practices in idyllic conditions of peace and quietude. “And if you are born into a heavenly realm of peace and stillness,” one of my teachers once said to me, “it’s bad for your Yoga practice because there is not enough suffering to moti...
• Yoga shows up in times of distress, when the principal paradigms and religious practices don’t offer enough of a solution to our internal discord. Sometimes the dominant cultural institutions can’t offer us the answers we hope will put an end to our suffering,