If you want to live yoga, you have to sacrifice whatever is a barrier to spiritual life. If you want to live in a room that has been closed for years, you have to open the doors and windows, clean out all the grime and dust which has accumulated, light some incense and make it a pleasant room to live in. You have to allow the fresh air in.

If you don’t like it then change your apartment, change your city, change your association, yet be true to yourself. This message is applicable to everyone: to the sannyasins, to the new students and the old students, as only when you experience this principle of yoga will you know what yoga truly stands for.

You have to make the effort to become the self-observer, to become somebody who experiences yoga.

The possibilities are endless and the mind has to be open. This is the journey of yoga that has received the blessings of Swami Sivananda and Swami Satyananda, two great sages of our time. Yoga will become the world culture one day, and the acceptance of yoga throughout the world is proving it.

As you begin to experiment with the wholeness of yoga and look upon it as something that can bring out the potential inside, rather than as something you do externally to feel good and relieve your stress, it will provide you with something deeper than you bargained for.

29 July 2003

From the book “On the Wings of the Swan, Volume VI”, pg. 171-172, Sw. Niranjanananda Saraswati