from How to Awaken Your True Potential by Paramhansa Yogananda.

This summer, our staff has been doing a book study group together, using How to Awaken Your True Potential, by Paramhansa Yogananda. We have discussed many wonderful ideas for cultivating our true potential- and one key element (not surprisingly!) is meditation. Here are some quotes on meditation that inspired us!

 

~ Meditate regularly for half an hour every morning and half an hour before going to bed at night. Then sit quietly after meditation, feeling a calm peace. The feeling that makes you enjoy peace during or after deep meditation is called “intuition”. If you keep exercising this power daily, it will grow and be ready to help you.

 

~ Don’t think of your problem during meditation. Meditate until you feel a sense of calmness that fills the inner recesses of your body; your breath becomes calm and quiet. Then concentrate simultaneously at the point between the eyebrows and the heart. Ask God to direct your intuition, so that you may know what to do about your problem.

 

~Every day you should sit quietly and say: “I am not the earth, nor the sky. No birth nor death have I. Father, Mother, have I none; I am infinite Happiness.” If you repeat this often and think about it day and night, you will realize what you really are. Only those who meditate realize that in the superconscious mind is a land of eternal happiness.

 

~Practice the art of silence. The tigers of worries, sickness, and death are running after you, and the only place you can be safe is in silence.

 

~The more you are silent, the more you will find happiness. Those who meditate deeply feel a wonderful silence, which should be maintained when in the company of people. What you learn in meditation, practice in activity and conversation, and let no one dislodge your calmness. Hold on to your peace.

 

~The moon’s reflection in a pot of swirling water looks ruffled, but the moon is never distorted—it is the disturbed water that produces the illusion. Calm the water in the pot, and you will find the perfect, undistorted image of the moon.

The perfect image of Spirit within you is distorted by your mental restlessness… Learn to calm your mental waves by the magic wand of super-concentration, and you will behold, undistorted, your perfect all-conquering ability.

 

~Meditation means constant thinking of the vastness within and without, so that the soul may forget its attachment to the little body and may remember its vast body as God.

 

~If we meditate on our blessings, on what we have to be thankful for rather than upon the trials, ills, and worries that beset or disturb us, we shall begin to know God.

 

~Enter into absolute silence every morning, and banish thoughts for several minutes each time. The more you meditate, the more you will realize that nothing else can give you that refined joy but the increasing joy of silence. 

 

~The minutes are more important than the years…Take care of today and all the “tomorrows” will be taken care of. Do not wait until tomorrow to meditate. Do not wait until tomorrow to be good. Be good now. Be calm now. It will be the turning point of your life.