Yoga - the journey to wholeness, inner peace and ultimate freedom.

I want to share this extract from Light on Life by B. K. S. Iyengar with you all. If you have only just started your yoga journey, I hope you see this passage as a source of inspiration—how yoga will free your body from physical discomfort and your mind from mental instability. How practicing yoga, making time for yourself and your body, will improve how you live your life. For those of you who have practiced for many years, reflect on your yoga journey and observe the physical and mental progress you have made. Let us pay thanks to Sage Patanjali and Guruji Iyengar for their contributions to what we know as yoga today.

“What most people want is the same. Most people simple want physical and mental health, understanding and wisdom, and peace and freedom. Often our means of pursuing these basic human needs come apart at the seams, as we are pulled by different and often competing demands of human life. Yoga, as it is understood by its sages, is designed to satisfy all these human needs in a comprehensive, seamless whole. Its goal is nothing less than to attain the integrity of oneness - oneness with ourselves and as a consequence oneness with all that lies beyond ourselves. We become the harmonious microcosm in the universal macrocosm. Oneness, what I often call integration, is the foundation for wholeness, inner peace, and ultimate freedom.

Yoga allows you to rediscover a sense of wholeness in your life, where you do not feel like you are constantly trying to fit the broken pieces together. Yoga allows you to find an inner peace that is not ruffled and riled by the endless stresses and struggles of life. Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known even existed. To a yogi, freedom implies not being battered by the dualities of life, its ups and downs, its pleasures and its suffering. It implies equanimity and ultimately that there is an inner serene core of one’s being that is never out of touch with the unchanging eternal infinite.”