Baron Baptiste Quotes

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning. KRISHNAMURTI I

There is a Turkish proverb that says, “No matter how far you have gone down a wrong road, turn back,” and that is exactly what I did. It was painful, but also one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced.

All the work you’ve done up until now has been to lead you to this precise moment, to face precisely what you’re facing.

Transformation comes not by adding things on but by removing what didn’t belong in the first place.

Yoga is a dance of dealing with what is, and allowing yourself to fully experience whatever you’re experiencing right here, in the moment. In life, we so often resist what we don’t like or don’t want to do. Here, on your mat, is a safe opportunity to see what’s on the other side of that. Physical asana is a measure of some higher possibility. Put your attention on what you want to have happen and be for it, and watch the magic unfold.

We live in a world that teaches the importance of ambition, efficiency, expediency, getting things done to produce the quickest results. It does not teach or encourage us to relax and just be where we are. In fact, if we are not crazy active and doing a million different things, we get labeled as lazy or unambitious.

Samadhi, which translates to 'neutral vision.' Sama means 'even' or 'neutral', and dhi means 'vision' or 'seeing.' Neutral vision means to see without judging. No appreciating nor condemning; simply looking.

When you focus on the problems, you get more of the same. What you focus on you create.

The less I'm in a hurry, the quicker the results seem to happen. With patience, the quality of my experience has a depth that can't be measured bon the clock, but by the timelessness of my experience.

the ones who get to the idea that resisting what is so is actually causing them greater emotional suffering than the illness itself. Accepting what was going on allowed them to flow with the new demands of their bodies in a much more empowered way.

Give up the stories you’ve made up about what’s “true” about your physical potential and just be with your breath and in your body, feeling what you feel. Give up trying to collect things in your practice. Give up the thought that whatever is happening within your body right now should not be.

I see a real yogi as a someone who is committed to growth and to being the best version of themselves, and, at the same time, is courageous enough to be fully present and authentic in each moment. Someone who is not afraid to get real about the whole mess of who they are - the good, the bad, and the ugly

Be a drop, a stream, or a raging river—it doesn’t matter which form you take, as long as you remain in the flow

If you want to reach someplace new, you have to do something different than you’ve always done. Same actions will only yield the same results.

the whisperings from the heart are always authentic and singular in their focus. The heart knows what it wants. The

The mind is a friend or it is a foe.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. JOSEPH CAMPBELL What

just remember that doing anything that begins to shift the pattern and lessen the gravity of suffering or frustration is a breakthrough.

Principle I: We Are Either Now Here or Nowhere

As Socrates said, “True learning is remembering.

the highest form of repentence is self-acceptance.

It requires something extraordinary for any of us to really get to a true and connected relatedness to our breath, and the impact of it on our bodies, energy, and movement. As

You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts—and they definitely don’t have to run the show. You

Drop into your body and give up any need to exert effort, to control, achieve, or accomplish. Give up any “shoulds.” Give up your to-do list. Give up any remaining resistance. Give it all up to get empty.

the end, if you dedicate your energies to detaching from struggle, giving up fear, taking right action, and practicing true patience within yourself, you will find that all the pieces of your life begin to radiate with the luminosity of whole and true health.

When you change your focus from limitations to boundless possibilities, from doubt and fear to love and confidence, you open your world in entirely new ways. You stop worrying about fixing what's wrong with you and start living from all that's right within you.

Yoga is a perfectly imperfect practice, and the very next day we may hit a plateau that can slow us down or even stall us indefinitely. You know you have flow in your practice when you reach such a plateau and don't automatically react with frustration and anger.

Ultimately, no yoga teacher can tell you what you need--not in a pose, not in a diet, not in a lifestyle. They can give you the principles, but it is up to you to use your intuition to find what is right for you. You have to practice your own naturalness, and that is what Baptiste Power Yoga is all about.

The Twelve Laws of Transformation LAW 1: Seek the Truth LAW 2: Be Willing to Come Apart LAW 3: Step out of Your Comfort Zone LAW 4: Commit to Growth LAW 5: Shift Your Vision LAW 6: Drop What You Know LAW 7: Relax with What Is LAW 8: Remove the Rocks LAW 9: Don’t Rush the Process LAW 10: Be True to Yourself LAW 11: Be Still and Know LAW 12: Understand That the Whole Is the Goal

what he meant by repentance wasn’t that we should dwell on where we lost our way and all the ways we are bad, but rather to have the courage to face the pure, unsweetened truth of ourselves so that we can move on and grow in more honest and authentic ways. It is simply the willingness to see in full truthfulness what we need to face within ourselves and our lives so that we may get into the right alignment.

In the late 1800s a certain man taught Sunday school for over 20 years in a Baptist church; he eventually became the wealthiest man in the world. He also did not pay tithes. He was not generous toward anyone, quite the opposite, he was the reason that journalists came up with the term, "Robber Baron." The man was John D. Rockefeller. He engaged in ruthless and illegal business practices and built an oil company called Standard Oil that was so large that, when it was broken up by antitrust laws, several major oil companies were created from that one company. Over one hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller was worth over one billion dollars, which would be 50 to 100 billion dollars in today’s money. If he did pay tithes it would have meant an income of 100 million dollars (5 to 10 billion today) to his local church. It was not God that "blessed" him with great wealth; it was Satan, the god of greed. God does not lead people to engage in ruthless and illegal business practices in a desire for more, more, more. Even in his old age, he displayed his greed by giving away dimes. He always had dimes in his pocket so he could generously give one to people he met! What lessons are we to learn from this? One very important thing is that very often Satan will give people lots of money because Satan knows that money is very deceitful and can make even the most devout Christian materialistic and greedy. Let's take a look at another example. There is today a man who planned to become a missionary when he was young, but he not only turned against his calling, he turned against Christianity. Do you suppose that God has blessed this man? He is today a multi-billionaire, media-mogul. The man is Ted Turner, who started CNN and is a partner in Time-Warner and other media companies. Can we use him as an example that God blesses a righteous man? No, actually, the opposite is most likely true, that Satan prospers those who turn from the straight way.

As a teacher, I started seeing that we don't have to take dogma so seriously. When we start to take it too seriously, outer mastery becomes the goal, and we are then chasing the illusion once again. Spiritual masters often teach that tradition is holy, and that we must follow it to the letter if we are to be enlightened. Do it their way or it won't work. But how can that be? If we tune out the inner voice of wisdom in favor of what someone else is telling us, how can we ever really be in our own power? That just puts us in the shadows of someone else's power, of someone else's courage to look within for the answers.

I'm not teaching you anything you don't already know somewhere deep within your being. Your genetic systems are encoded with this knowledge. My role is to awaken you to what you have simply forgotten along the way.

Journey into Power is about excavating the amazing, radiant self already inside you. Within you is a power that is already perfect, and the true essence of seeking on this journey is accepting.

The yogis say you can never step into the same river twice, because the current is always shifting and changing. You've never stepped into this exact river before today. Not with this body, not with today's particular energy, with the specific number of bites of breakfast in your belly, with the earth tipped on its axis. Perhaps up until now you haven't had a breakthrough in this pose, but that was then. What's possible today?

(inhale)

On the surface, we may look polished and “perfect,” but hiding our true self in all its dimensions saps our life energy and robs us of the freedom to express ourselves genuinely, from the heart. Hiding leaves you with the experience of feeling splintered and having lost yourself. You can have the fabulous yoga outfit; know the name of every pose in Sanskrit; and even have a beautiful, super-flexible, strong practice. But the real question to ask is “Where are you in all of that?” And, even more, “What is hiding behind all those trappings costing you?” So

My fresh perspective provided her with a new alternative that had always been available to her; she just wasn’t seeing it.

As you surrender to the completing pose, be a yes for openness. Be a yes for being yourself. Be a yes for giving yourself over to something greater, to allowing for something new, to holding nothing back. Be a yes for the rising and falling of your chest with each breath, for that natural ebb and flow of life force in and out of your body.

As you sit there dealing with your own mind, remember this: when interacting with thoughts in your head, or when interacting with another person in life, and something is thought or said to you that upsets you and makes you want to fight or flee, wait twenty-four hours before you respond.

When you do that, you are operating from your center, from cause rather than effect.

Baron Baptiste, Beryl Bender Birch, and Bryan Kest all studied traditional styles of yoga and melded their studies with their personal practices as they aimed to make yoga more accessible to a wider audience

Of course we want to perform the poses with a focus on intelligent mechanics of body movement ... and push ourselves to the point of discomfort in order to create new results. But, at the same time, we want to be detached from insatiably perfecting that form and instead seek and create a depth of experience.