By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Yoga warns about living in the pairs of opposites, and offers you another way to live — see God in everyone and everything. 

You go through stages as you become able to see what is already in front of you, the Divine fully present within the mundane. Your process speeds along when you cooperate with it, and even more smoothly when you understand it.

Begin by considering that others have good reasons for doing what they do, thinking the way they think and living the way they live.  While you don’t have to agree with them, you feel better within yourself when you allow them to have their perspectives. 

When you invest your mental and emotional energy in seeing others as wrong, or in seeing yourself as wrong, you are the one who is churning over it.  You are the one listening to your negative thoughts. You are the one who has to live with your mind.

The condition of your mind is of the greatest importance, yoga says. It is not your own Self that you need to worry about. Your svaroopa, your innermost essence, is already Divine.  You don’t have to uplift your own Self.  

Yoga is about finding your Self, not perfecting your Self.  Yoga’s practices give you the experience of your own inherent divinity.

– Excerpt from A Yogic Lifestyle, page 7