Rod Stryker quotes:

Clear perception is the cornerstone and an absolute necessity for living your best life - and that's exactly what the focus of a yoga practice should be all about.

Few things are more powerful than learning to trust that your path to a fulfilled life - and the glorious destiny that you are meant to share with the world - is part of your soul's blueprint.

There is no doubt that the foundation of being a great yoga teacher is being a great yoga student.

I am grateful for the unending hunger to rest in the mind of Buddha, the heart of Krishna, a domain where all yogis, sages, and saints abide, waiting for those whose real self has emerged from the searing pilgrimage of Spirit's flames.

I am passionate about learning to most fully embody the spark that is the source of life, the hidden glory of the Creator.

In the end, yoga has less to do with what you can do with your body and more to do with the happiness that unfolds from realizing your full potential.

Desire, instead of being an obstacle to an inspired and fulfilled life, is the very thing that propels you toward it.

If yoga is about life, this means ALL life, not just part of it. Together, the spiritual and the material constitute the whole you, the whole of the experience of being human, and the nature of the universe in which you live. There may be no step more important to achieving ultimate fulfillment than accepting what the Vedas teach us about desires--that some desires are inpsired by your soul.

Everyone who has ever overcome hardship or adversity has done so in large part because he or she has chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to "let go" of their past hardship and pain by embracing, what I call, a Miracle Angle - a way of seeing their circumstances that allowed them to transform their circumstances into a spark for positive change.

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.

Aligning yourself with the intelligence of the universe means coming to understand your life's purpose and applying it fearlessly to life's circumstances.

Collect the power. Because our fear has power. And our fear is paralyzing, and our fear sets us off course. So it's about gathering and collecting that power, waking it up. And dedicating your life to honoring it.

In the same way that the physical practice of yoga so effectively benefits your body and mind, the larger science of yoga is similarly powerful in unlocking the vast potentials of your body, mind and spirit to help you achieve your best life imaginable.

Once you know yourself as a genuine seeker, and when your own inner chamber is quite enlightened, then comes the natural unfoldment of pure love and compassion and a genuine desire to serve others.

Stop trying to distinguish the joy of meditation from the messiness of life. Begin to see the divine in everything. She is in the joy just as much as the misery.

A little exposure to the philosophy of many Eastern spiritual traditions - including yoga - could easily lead you to conclude that if you aspire to achieve goals in the material world you cannot fulfill yourself spiritually, or vice versa. However, since all of us, at some level, long for fulfillment in all aspects of our life, it is essential to understand that these two aims are not mutually exclusive.

Any individual or society that fails to honor or provide the opportunity for women to fully exert their power can never truly prosper. All creativity, growth, imagination, nurturing - All possibilities are born within the female womb of the Devine Feminine. To deny Her a rightful place, either within ourselves or in the world in which we live, is to do irreparable harm and endure the loss of countless joys.

Beautiful women, wealth, sensations, celebrity, substances capable of distorting my perception, and even forcing my body into positions ready for the covers of important yoga magazines - I pursued them all, some wholeheartedly, but none would satisfy my real longing.

Being able to recognize which of your desires are vital to pursue and which ones are not is often less than easy. This is precisely why the ancient sages counseled that we practice yoga. Their point was a very practical one: You are best able to discern which of your many desires should (and should not) be responded to when your mind is calm and tranquil.

Despite its widespread acceptance and the number of lives it has improved, what most of us in the West commonly associate with yoga represents only the tip of the iceberg that is yoga, a tiny fraction of what is a vast and profound science.

Do yoga in order to know what to do when you're not doing yoga.

Fear is what inhibits us moving forward.

For some people it may be kind of off-putting. But the idea that fear accompanies us at every step: the point is that our courage has to be bigger than our fear.

From a yogic perspective, stillness, coupled with expanded awareness, is by far the most powerful medium by which you can affect your destiny.

I am moved by the desire to see and to be seen, to grow and to unveil the mysteries of life and, at the same time, by the aspiration that life will continue to reveal new mysteries and new possibilities.

I came into this world restless despite many appearances to the contrary. Does that make me unique? I doubt it.

If a man is to become fully himself - and this is not something that happens automatically just because you arrive at a particular age - he is going to have to give up some things in the process. Be it drugs, infidelity, childishness, lying, fear of intimacy, violence - none of these things contribute to being a man

If you make time for silence, the sacred will unfold.

In fact, many people, including some who practice yoga, assume that yoga is nothing more than a form of exercise, or they believe that only the physical aspects of yoga have relevance to their lives. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In the end, yoga for me is all about three things: more joy; being able to collect your capacity so you can have more of what you want in real terms; and ultimately - this may be the most important of it all - less fear.

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.

It is attachment to desire, not desire itself, that is the underlying cause of practically all of our pain and suffering.

It's vital to understand that while you are alive, there is no end to desire, since the seed of your every thought and your every action is a desire.

Learning to honor all four of your soul's desires compels you to thrive at every level, leads to lasting happiness as well as a complete and balanced life.

Looking back, I see that I was born with the subtle sense that material treasures alone, no matter how grand, would never be enough to satisfy the longing in my heart to see the light, to know the truth.

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.

No matter how long you practiceyou sense there will always be something to learn,something more to embrace about yourself & life.

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

Our self-acknowledgement, our dedication has to be bigger than our fear.

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.

That part of us that is meant to lead us in life, from which we are meant to lead, and from which we are meant to have guidance. The very thing that compels us to breathe, compels us to find hope in the midst of darkness - that part of us gets buried and overshadowed by fear.

The more you insist on improving who and what you are, the more you become master of your destiny.

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.

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.

The yoga tradition addresses how to live and how to shape your life with a commanding sense of purpose, capacity and meaning.

The yoga tradition asserts that lasting happiness is dependent on prospering both materially and spiritually.

The yoga tradition provides one of humankind's most effective systems for achieving enrichment and happiness in every aspect of life.

There is this expectation that as January 1st dawns, we're going to do it differently. Moreover, there's this kind of pressure, that even if I've been trying to be different for a while, January 1st, from here on in - I have to be different. There's a cultural expectation, there's a personal expectation. I think it's worth just taking pause for a minute and talking about that.

We are already complete. All we need is the clarity to recognize the wholeness that is us.

What does "living your best life" mean to you? Does it mean accumulating wealth and fulfilling all your material wants? Or, does it mean turning away from the material world in order to fully realize the gift of spirit? We often tend to think of these objectives as being mutually exclusive: material fulfillment or spiritual fulfillment, not both together.

When it comes to desire, it's not a matter of avoiding desire, but rather learning to discern those desires that are helpful and necessary for your growth - those that serve your soul and help you continue to thrive - from those that do not.

When yoga is understood in its totality, it is neither a form of exercise, nor is it an esoteric philosophy or religion; it is a practical and comprehensive science for realizing life's ultimate aims.

Yoga is about life, this means all of life, not just part of it.

Yoga's supreme objective is to awaken an exalted state of spiritual realization, yet the tradition also teaches you how to live and how to shape your life with a commanding sense of purpose, capacity, and meaning. In the end, yoga has less to do with what you can do with your body and more to do with the happiness that unfolds from realizing your full potential.

Yoga's most sublime objective is to awaken an exalted state of spiritual realization; however, the tradition also recognizes that this state does not exist in absolute isolation from the world and worldly matters.

Yoga's ultimate intent is to achieve something far deeper and more meaningful than just a better body or less stress and tension. Its ultimate aim is to help you hear your soul's call so that you can be consistently guided to make the best decisions - the ones that serve your highest state of wellbeing. In the process of doing so, you will necessarily be made more whole and act in such a way as to support the larger world of which you are a part.

Your long-term happiness and fulfillment depend on your ability to fulfill your soul's unique purpose and to fill the place in the world that only you can fill, making the contribution that only you can make.

Your soul is boundlessly impassioned and always prepared to impart to you whatever you need to thrive.