Of course, not all desires lead to happiness. Desires can and do lead to pain and frustration.

Thank you, restlessness, as challenging a traveling companion as there could be. In the end, my embrace of you was what sent me on the only search that really counts. Responding to you was the stirring that led me to sit every morning and to venture into that invisible terrain where seeker and sought merge and rest together, once and for all eternity.

Indeed, much to my parents' surprise, the first word I spoke in this lifetime was "light." Prior to uttering its name, however, I was already searching for light - for my source. Yet despite my preternatural kinship with that spark that lights this and all worlds, for the first two or three decades of my life, I resisted it.

The quality of your practice is ultimately measured by its effect on the quality of your life. In other words, mastery in yoga is mastery of life.

According to the yoga tradition, fear is the source of disease, decay - physical harm, when we're not thriving. And then finally, it's even the cause of death.

My hope and my prayer for people would be to find and gather themselves such that their self-understanding, their willingness to act in the face of fear, [imbibes and imbues them] with enough faith [that] is bigger than their fear.

The point of yoga is to develop a level of clarity and self-understand ing so that when we’re done doing our yoga practice we make really good decisions, because that will determine whether we’re fulfilled. Not the quality of our poses. But really the yoga is what happens when we’re done practicing yoga.