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“It is the third limb. Important, but not the whole.”
“Posture without ethics is gymnastics, not yoga.”
“Pranayama is the bridge between body and mind.”
“Master the breath, and you master the mind.”
“The mind moves at the speed of breath.”
“Slow the breath, and the mind slows.”
“Stop the breath, and the mind stops.”
“This is the secret.”
“In meditation, the meditator, the meditation, and the object of meditation become one.”
“This is samadhi. The eighth limb. The completion.”
“Don't worry about samadhi. Practice the first seven limbs sincerely.”
“Samadhi will come on its own.”
“At Woodstock, I told the half-million people that the future of America rests in their consciousness.”
“That was true then. It is true now.”
“You shape the future by shaping your consciousness.”
“You are not powerless. You have the most powerful tool — your mind.”
“LOTUS is the temple of all faiths.”
“In its sanctuary, all the world's religions are honored.”
“Truth is one. Paths are many.”
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