In this meditation session Swamiji begins by quoting from three of the worlds greatest teachers to draw your attention to the importance of the mind. While asking you to sit with eyes closed, shoulders relaxed, practicing steady rhythmical breathing, he guides you through spoken wisdom to go deeper into the nature of the mind, showing you how to bring out qualities that uplift and inspire you.

Spirituality is immensely practical, it must be, otherwise it’s useless. If it is just some esoterically, theoretical thing that we keep up in the sky and never touch, then what’s the value to you? Understand that, just as you know the importance of daily feeding your body healthy food, you should place the same value in nurturing your spirituality energy, your power. Why? Because all of your anger, frustration, jealousy, anger, misery, self-loathing, depression - arise because you are a stranger to your own self.

The divine nature, the Paramatma lives within the heart of every individual soul, and therefore any thought that you as an individual has, the divine laws, the spiritual laws, gives you the exact, appropriate consequence to the way that you thought. So your fate, your destiny, your future, is determined by the way that you are thinking now, and how you are now is determined by how you have thought in the past.

You have to respect anger in the same way you respect electricity. You have to learn to use your mind in such a way that it doesn’t harm you – as you have to learn to use electricity so that it doesn’t harm you. But the benefits of electricity, and the benefits of thought – how amazing are they! What you can achieve with thought! It’s extraordinary! That’s what the Vedas, the Gita, and the great Sages talk about.

Yoga philosophy then is to help us put things into perspective. It is to help us become the master of our destiny, instead of being a slave to our destiny … And yoga actually originates from the Vedas. There are many great philosophical writings from India that I am sure you are aware of, but the Vedas stand above them all because they are ‘the breath of the eternal.’

There is a stigma here, because when we talk about mental health it implies ‘something is wrong with me’, but actually, according to the Sages of India there is something wrong with all of us – from the point of view that very few of us actually know who we are. Vedic philosophy explains that we have been in the wheel of birth and death and offers insight into the big picture of life.