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“A real teacher does not create dependence.”
“A real teacher creates capable, free students.”
“My job is to point. Yours is to walk.”
“Walk in the direction of the Self.”
“You are already That.”
“You are not becoming the Self. You are recognizing it.”
“All the practices remove what obscures the Self.”
“They do not create the Self.”
“The Self is uncreated, eternal, ever-present.”
“Be at peace.”
“Be of service.”
“Be useful to your community, your country, the world.”
“This is the way of a meaningful human life.”
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