Stability Yoga Quotes

At every level of consciousness, the masculine and the feminine, Shiva and Shakti, steadiness and dynamism, awareness and bliss, stability and transformation, being and becoming, complete and complement each other.

Stability-The Physical Body (Asana)

We can develop a small space between ourselves and our bodies and minds. In this way, even if we are suffering something physically or mentally, it will not have such an impact on our inner stability.

The fact that each being has its own accordant suffering means that no matter who we are, whether we have a prominent place or the humblest place in society, we all experience suffering. Reflect on all of the ordinary suffering that each and every living being experiences. Many of us face the unbearable suffering of the death of a child. All of us will experience being separated from our parents, either by emotional estrangement or by death. If we are married or in a long-term relationship, that relationship will either break up or end with the death of one of the partners. Many of us have families that do not behave like families due to alcoholism or other kinds of addictions, and we grow up lacking stability and intimacy. Even if we do have a more stable family life, we will still experience the suffering of disagreements, arguing, and fighting.

It was in Warrior Pose that I understood that my role as a mother must include both deep-rooted stability and openhearted freedom. Practicing the Warrior, my feet press firmly into the earth. My core is stable. I am grounded while my torso floats free, vulnerable, open and welcoming to the fates. The morning after sending my twenty-year-old daughter back to college, I went to my yoga mat and realized that this is precisely the balance I was seeking with her quest for independence and my desire to support and protect her. Instead of a tug-of-war between protecting and letting go, I saw that practicing the union of these two essential qualities is the way to love my daughter completely.

Adiyogi’s yogic mastery allowed him the pleasure of being internally drunk and completely aware, fully stoned and fully conscious, at every moment of his life. This, he reminds us, is possible for each one of us. We can generate our own peace and joy internally, without any external stimulus. The path of yoga makes us the masters of our own chemistry, the authors of our own bliss. Once we find access to our own inner intoxication without losing our stability, our lives become an exuberant expression of our joy, rather than a pursuit of happiness. Intoxicated and alert; dynamic and still; superbly formed and yet in tune with lunar mysteries where things lose all shape and definition; larger-than-life and yet covered with the ash of death – Adiyogi embodied many contradictions all at once. When

Sadhana Sit in any comfortable posture, with your spine erect, and if necessary, supported. Remain still. Allow your attention to slowly grow still as well. Do this for five to seven minutes a day. You will notice that your breath will slow down. What is the significance of slowing down the human breath? Is it just some respiratory yogic acrobatics? No, it is not. A human being breathes twelve to fifteen times per minute, normally. If your breath settles down to twelve, you will know the ways of the earth’s atmosphere (i.e., you will become meteorologically sensitive). If it reduces to nine, you will know the language of the other creatures on this planet. If it reduces to six, you will know the very language of the earth. If it reduces to three, you will know the language of the source of creation. This is not about increasing your aerobic capacity. Nor is it about forcefully depriving yourself of breath. A combination of hatha yoga and an advanced yogic practice called the kriya, will gradually increase your lung capacity, but above all, will help you achieve a certain alignment, a certain ease, so that your system evolves to a state of stability where there is no static, no crackle; it just perceives everything.

Here are a few things yoga nidra can do: Activate the relaxation response and deactivate the stress response (which improves functioning of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and the endocrine system). Increase immunity and the ability to fight germs and infections (Kumar 2013a, 82–94) Improve heart functioning by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol (Pandya and Kumar 2007) Decrease pain Improve control of fluctuating blood glucose and symptoms associated with diabetes (Amita et al. 2009) Significantly improve anxiety, depression, and well-being in patients with menstrual irregularities and in those having psychological problems (Rani et al. 2011) Manage pre- and postsurgical conditions (Kumar 2013a, 56) Reduce insomnia and improve sleep: while not intended as a substitute for sleep, one hour of effective yoga nidra practice is equivalent to about four hours of sleep (Kumar 2013a) Increase energy, especially when needed most Reduce worry and enhance clear thinking and problem solving Improve and refresh your outlook Replace mood swings and emotional upsets with greater emotional understanding and stability Develop intuition and increase creativity Improve meditation and enhance its benefits Integrate, heal, and revitalize your body, mind, and spirit Enhance your Self-awareness and ability to experience witness consciousness (defined later in this chapter) Transform thoughts and feelings of separation into a direct experience of wholeness Finally, one of yoga nidra’s prime benefits is that it brings yoga’s essential teachings to life that have been handed down to us over the ages from the Upanishads, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Bhagavad Gita, Tantric texts, and others.

We still remain fully engaged in living, including all its ups and downs, but with moment-to-moment awareness, mental clarity, emotional stability, and intuitive wisdom. Even when stressful things are challenging us and need our attention, there is a deep reservoir of inner peace inside that is based on a solid, joyful foundation rather than one built on stress. Persistent practice, patience, detachment, and time are needed to develop this understanding. Yoga nidra gives us the practical means for quieting mental ruckus and opening our heart for this to happen.

By focusing at a point six to nine inches away from the region between your eyebrows for twelve to forty-eight minutes, with your eyes open, you can realize the nature and structure of your individual chakras (depending on the duration and your level of focus). This perception can help in stabilizing the random movement of chakras in the human physiology due to stressful external situations. This is just one aspect of a very sophisticated form of kriya yoga that allows you access to your inner akashic, or etheric, dimension.

To put it plainly, having modern ethics means having "your ducks in a row" or having your act together. It means creating basic stability in your life so that when lila (the unpredictable) happens you can roll with the play of the universe rather than getting run over by it. Being prepared for any possibility means that you can create opportunities out of challenges rather than being a victim to them

I have stability and know that where there is stillness, there is great strength

The body is not perfectly still; it is always in dynamic motion. The mind is a changing process as well. But the motion has a sense of stability to it when the sheaths are in balance.

When we practice a yoga posture designed to challenge our balance, the use of a gazing point or drishti is a most effective way to maintain physical equanimity. The act of gazing without judgment or attachment is easily the most effective way to bring stability and balance to the pose. Likewise, when the poses of life rob us of our equanimity, gazing at the situation without attachment—without judgment—is the most effective tool we have to restore the mind to harmony.

Suffering persists when we resist accepting the complementary polarities of emotions like grief and joy. Every conflict contains the seeds of its resolution. As the Hindu sage Patanjali stated in one of his Yoga Sutras, 'By experiencing the pairs of opposites, suffering ceases. When distress arises, ride opposing thoughts back into nondual awareness. By reversing instability into stability, from refusing into non-refusing, suffering is relinquished. Through disidentification, the pairs of opposites cease their noxious effect. By reversing the pairs of opposites stability and the release of suffering are quickly achieved.

Yoga meditation is the process of cultivating and stabilizing the awareness of one’s real nature, through definite spiritual and psychophysical methods and laws by which the narrow ego, the flawed hereditary human consciousness, is displaced by the consciousness of the soul.

Commitment holds a solid, grounding energy that provides stability and structure to our lives.

Standing positions have the highest center of gravity of all the starting points, and the effort of stabilizing that center makes standing poses by definition brhmana (see chapter 1, page 20).

When all the usual, visible, external breath movements have been stabilized, something deep in the core of the system must mobilize through a new pathway. That pathway is commonly referred to in yogic literature as susumna—the central channel.

While meditation and yoga certainly have their benefits, this retreat into the sanctum of the self reflects a scaling down of our ambitions. With no definitive vision to guide and structure action on an individual or societal level—with perpetual self-optimization replacing the hope for transcendent redemption and the promise of salvation—this shift toward interiority means there is no exit from an “eternal present.” 66 The return to more individualized modes of spirituality and therapeutics may even be a symptom of a broader cultural form of collective depression: A large-scale study of 14 million works of literature published over the past 125 years in English, Spanish, and German found that over the last two decades, textual analogs of cognitive distortions, including disorders such as depression and anxiety, have surged well above historical levels—including during World Wars I and II—after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. 67 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the use of antidepressants and the practice of self-medicating via hallucinogens and pacifying drugs like cannabis are steadily on the rise.