“be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

1.2 Yoga cittah vrtti nirodhah ~ “Yoga is the cessation of movements in the consciousness.” ....“Stillness is concentration (dharana) and silence is meditation (dhyāna). ....(from the Commentary on this Sūtra)

1.3 Tadah drastuh svarupe avasthanam ~~ “then the seer dwells in his own true splendor.” Yogacārya B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali.

Showing up to class despite all the conflicts is one stage of effort and discipline (tapas). Showing up to one’s practice , facing one’s feelings (physical, energetic, mental, intellectual) for longer and longer periods with more and more regularity takes courage and commitment that gradually grows from a small flame...

Iyengar Yoga practice cultivates the sensitivity and strength to penetrate and understand oneself from the outside in: to see and ask and face who and what we are. Uncovering the layers, we see all that we are not. It doesn’t happen all at once. We may want it to, but it doesn’t work that way. The more we grasp the more we distort ourselves. Through long, dedicated inward practice, gradually one experiences transformations of being and actions.

Daily, attentive practice is the stilling of the fluctuations (both the old patterns and the new troubles), so that the inner radiance shines out