07/12/2025
“Yoga is meant for everyone. Nobody is excluded from it. Whether they are men, women or children, elderly or aged people, diseased or disabled, the path of yoga is open to everyone. However, you have to practise according to your physical, mental and spiritual capacity. Yoga is meant to give us a way to discover or rediscover ourselves. It teaches us how to find the great margin of maximum capacity that we have inside us so that we are able to expose ourselves to ourselves and find out what we really are. When I say that you have to adapt according to your capacity, I mean that you have to find out the potentiality, or the potential energy, that you all have inside and how to bring it to the surface in order to utilise it properly. Yoga exposes inner hidden potentialities. In fact, there is nothing in yoga which dictates who has to do what. Yoga is universal in this sense. It is inappropriate to say, “Do and do not do”. We do not say that this is not to be done or that is to be done. To make such differentiation there has to be some cause. Patañjali says that we have to find out what stage we are at and what our level is. We need to know what our energy is, what our po-
tency is, what we can do and so on. As we proceed further, we have to see that we achieve every step gradually.
In other words, there is no barrier, there is no restriction, no demarcation as such. The words Patañjali uses like potentialities or capacities, are certainly very meaningful, since not everyone has the same energy levels, not everyone can put in the same amount of effort. The power to grasp is not the same in everyone. The practitioner has to understand subjectively the potentialities he or she has and try to expose them to the yogic path rather than exploit them.”
~ Geeta Iyengar
(7 Dec 1944 - 16 Dec 2018)
