Swami Satchidananda
Indian-born Integral Yoga master and founder of the Integral Yoga Institutes (1966) and Yogaville (1979) — and the man who, on August 15, 1969, opened the Woodstock Festival with a brief invocation that introduced yoga and Eastern spirituality to a generation of Western seekers in a single televised moment. Born C. K. Ramaswamy Gounder in 1914 in Tamil Nadu, he took monastic ordination as a swami of the Saraswati order under Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh in 1949 and was sent to teach in Sri Lanka, then to America in 1966 at the invitation of artist Peter Max. From there he built a worldwide network of yoga centers, an interfaith retreat at Yogaville (Buckingham, Virginia) crowned by the Light Of Truth Universal Shrine (LOTUS) honoring all faiths, and authored canonical commentaries on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita. He died in 2002. His Integral Yoga synthesizes Hatha, Raja, Karma, Bhakti, and Jnana yogas into one unified spiritual life-practice.
quotes in library
Quotes by Swami Satchidananda
114 quotes“This is the vision: that all paths are honored as paths to the One.”
“Be vegetarian if you can.”
“Eating meat involves taking life. The yogi tries to minimize harm.”
“Speak only what is true, kind, and necessary.”
“This is not a moral judgment. This is a practical observation.”
“Ahimsa is the first yama. Non-harming.”
“Ahimsa applies to thought, word, and deed.”
“It is the foundation of all the yamas.”
“Without ahimsa, no spiritual progress.”
“In the presence of one established in ahimsa, hostility ceases.”
“Even animals lose their aggression in the presence of a true ahimsa-practitioner.”
“This is the test.”
“The mind is restless because it is not at home.”
“Bring it home through meditation, and it becomes still.”
“A still mind is not a dead mind. A still mind is a deeply alive mind.”
“In stillness, the mind hears the heart.”
“In hearing the heart, life becomes clear.”
“Be peaceful in the storm.”
“The storm is outside. Peace is inside.”
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