To activate the law of success, we needed to remain open to what God was trying to teach us and attune to His will, not our personal desires.

Quiet Bodies is simply sitting cross-legged, with eyes closed, and not moving for a few minutes. In order to get the children to do Quiet Bodies, I needed to create an aura of specialness around the experience; making an activity “magical” and fun gets them to saying “yes.”

I was reflecting on how it had been such an unusually stressful afternoon that I could have easily keeled over with a heart attack. Yet I knew my current job was exactly what God wanted of me. I had hung in there and seen to it that each patient received the proper treatment. As much as possible, I had acted with the sense that God was the Doer. That was a victory.

In this 40th anniversary commemorative issue, we review events and developments that have shaped Ananda’s 40 year history and look ahead to future directions.

Parents and children should understand that their relationship is not fortuitous, but is due to a divine plan. Family life is the laboratory in which human love can be transformed into God’s perfect love.

I recall a time when I felt like I was being crushed by a certain experience. Then it suddenly occurred to me, “Well, what did you expect? As a devotee, you’ve ‘signed on’ to go through this process, and others like it, to become more spiritual and of course it’s going to be challenging.”

The heart generates the most powerful vibrations in the body – it sends out electrical signals roughly 60 times as strong as those emitted by the brain.

God is the Master Painter. His infinite beauty is creeping in the beauty of the flower.

The emotional and spiritual challenges of an illness are perhaps even harder than the physical. There’s the temptation to fall into self-pity or to be hurt by other people’s impatience or lack of understanding.

For us, Gurupod’s visit was a thrilling message from God.

We don’t get upset when we keep our consciousness aligned with the Divine. The divine energy flows through us and automatically uplifts our consciousness and everything goes right.

Imagine you are drifting into a state of deep relaxation and then WHAM! a loud piercing sound jolts you back into your body, now tensed for flight or fight!

The first duty of every soul is to release the hold of ego consciousness, whether one is a renunciate, a householder, or living for God in some other way.

By developing your concentration and creativity, you can learn to succeed in any field. But it is better to work in a field to which you are instinctively attracted.

When one faces a challenge on any level, what’s important is not the solution but knowing that the guru’s blessings are tangibly at hand.

If you pray, “Make my family more spiritual and draw them into oneness with Thee,” this will have a greater impact on them than anything else.

Impersonality, when rightly understood, means to love others for their own good rather than one’s own.

Redirected to the point between the eyebrows, the creative force awakens one’s powers of spiritual perception.

I became a yoga teacher because my back hurt. At the height of my problems, I had sciatica and pinched nerves that kept me from turning my head in a normal fashion.

Love is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The power of attraction holds families together and keeps the planets in their orbits.

To flow with life means being able to adapt to everything that happens. When you live at your center, you can flow with life.

The main obstacles to changing ourselves come from within.The mind has a wonderful way of tricking us into doing what is not in our best interest spiritually.

A diminished flow of life-force is the root cause of disease. If we wait until we’re sick and then address only the symptoms, we will be caught up in a pernicious cycle of disease.

My first role model in learning how to give was my father. He donated money to charities and would unhesitatingly give away anything he wasn’t using.

Fear is a pernicious problem that shuts down our life-force, and starts a negative cycle that becomes self-reinforcing. Fortunately, there are ways to reverse this cycle.

It is easy for a man to go down a deep, gradually descending subway, but when he tries to climb back out, he finds resistance.

There is a refreshing and inspiring quality of joy in the Indian culture that pops up in everyone from cab drivers to professors.

Over the last two decades, scientists have done considerable research on what makes people happy. These studies have yielded interesting results.

Remember that whatever peace you bring must
begin on that little piece of earth where you live.

To live less at your periphery, more at your
heart center.