By Grace Van Berkum, R.H.N. as featured on Sunwarrior.com
Inspirational yoga quotes can help build and strengthen your connection to your mat and your life. Read on and let these words of wisdom inspire you to enrich this practice and lifestyle and boost your well-being. RELATED: Yoga Will Change You, But Only If You Let It
Yoga Is More Than Just a Workout – It’s A Frame Of Mind
Yoga, with the help of a yoga instructor, is much more than a workout, a time to sweat, or a chance to increase flexibility. It’s an opportunity to work on you, an opportunity to find freedom in your body and freedom in your mind. It is a way to move and train the body and the mind with the breath to help us become more grounded, more centered, more energetic, and more loving. The mind is connected to the body, the body is connected to the mind, and the breath reveals our emotional states — it is all connected. When we can harness the power of breath and the power of the mind through the body, we flow through life with more ease and peace.
Yoga practice is a lifestyle that promotes love and compassion for all beings, including you. It is an opportunity to observe thoughts, thought patterns, and behaviors of the mind we have accumulated in our lives. With this opportunity to begin slowing down the mind and engage in non-judgmental observation comes the wonderful gift of witness, awareness, and potential for change.
In a nutshell, yoga provides openings and possibilities to change your life for the better so that you can live the life of your dreams – the life you deserve. Yoga provides us with an opportunity to connect with ourselves, connect with others, and also connect to our Earth by enabling us to think and act with more kindness, love, compassion, empathy, respect, honor, and dedication to a peaceful way of being with all human beings and living beings, including our environment.
27 Yoga Inspirational Quotes:
I have accumulated some of my favorite yoga quotes from enlightened individuals around the world who inspired me to look at my yoga and life journey with a focused intention. The intention of love and connection. Namaste.
1. “The most important pieces of equipment you need for doing yoga are your body and your mind.” ~ Rodney Yee
2. “When we do yoga, we put controlled stress on ourselves so that we can learn how to react to stresses of life." ~ Leslie Kaminoff
3. “You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state.” ~ Sharon Gannon
4. “We are familiar with moments of freedom, but we also know how it feels to be stuck, caught, as though there are obstacles in our way. We feel imprisoned by limitations. Limitations sometimes manifest on a physical level – inflexibility appears in our body or a rigidity of the mind – we keep bumping into ourselves and other people and things. Nothing seems to work. It feels as if the sky has collapsed and clouds are hanging around us, and our limitless potential seems far away. The goal of yoga is liberation from all limitations. So how do we overcome limitations? Look what happens when you do Hatha Yoga: a stiff and inflexible body will stretch, release and relax. In the same way, if you use the other tools of yoga you will stretch your mind and bring your essential self into the Light.” ~ from Living the Practice by Swami Radhananda
5. “What we want out of yoga is ourselves, not something better than ourselves.” ~ Douglas Brooks
6. "Whatever you do in life, yoga shows you how to do it better." ~ Chuck Miller
7. "Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are." ~ Erich Schiffmann
8. "You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it." ~ Ken Keyes, Jr.
9. “Through sustained focus and meditation on our patterns, habits, and conditioning, we gain knowledge and understanding of our past and how we can change the patterns that aren’t serving us to live more freely and fully.” ~ Yoga Sutra III.18
10. “Healthy plants and trees yield abundant flowers and fruits. Similarly, from a healthy person, smiles and happiness shine forth like the rays of the sun.” ~ B.K.S. Iyengar
11. “The body is actually a reflection of the mind, a symbol in flesh and blood of everything you think and feel.” ~ Deepak Chopra 12. “The success of Yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships.” ~ T.K.V. Desikachar 13. “The ultimate goal of yoga is to always observe things accurately, and therefore never act in a way that will make us regret our actions later.” ~ T.K.V. Desikachar 14. “Every cell in our body suffers or grows, receives a life impulse or a death impulse, from every thought that enters the mind. You tend to grow into the image of the thing you think about most.” ~ Swami Sivananda
15. “Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even into your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.” ~ Swami Sivananda 16. “Yoga takes you into the present moment, the only place where life truly exists.” ~Patanjali 17. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl 18. “The rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, & the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life.” ~ B.K.S. Iyengar 19. “Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.” ~ Eckhart Tolle 20. “You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.” ~ Dr. Wayne Dyer 21. “The pose begins when you want to leave it.” ~ B.K.S. Iyengar 22. “Remember, it doesn’t matter how deep into a posture you go – what does matter is who you are when you get there.” ~ Max Strom 23. “Make an attitude to be in gratitude, you will find the whole Universe will come to you…. Gratitude is the highest form of yoga.” ~ Yogi Bhajan, Guru of Kundalini 24. "We have never arrived. We are in a constant state of becoming." ~ Bob Dylan 25. “You are the universe in motion.” ~ Rumi 26. "You are very powerful, provided you know how powerful you are." ~ Yogi Bhajan 27. “Let your asanas be a prayer to yourself. Let it be a prayer of self-love. Let your breath lead the way towards loving everything about yourself.” ~ Gracious Living Lifestyle
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