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.
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Quotes by Swami Satchidananda
114 quotes“Use it. Be in it. Receive it as the gift it is.”
“Tomorrow may not come. Yesterday is gone. Today is your only certainty.”
“Spend today wisely.”
“In every action, ask: is this loving?”
“If yes, proceed. If no, pause.”
“This single question reorganizes a life.”
“Mantra is sound infused with consciousness.”
“To repeat a mantra is to align with that consciousness.”
“Choose a mantra and stay with it.”
“Don't keep changing.”
“A friend you keep changing is not really a friend.”
“A mantra is a friend you let know you over years.”
“Live simply.”
“More possessions, more anxiety.”
“Less possessions, more freedom.”
“This is not poverty. This is conscious choice.”
“You can be wealthy and live simply.”
“You can be poor and be enslaved by craving.”
“Inner state is not a function of outer condition.”
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