Question - Gurudev, what is Yoga and how is a Yogi different from a common man/woman?
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar ji - Yoga is being established in your own nature. Pleasure always keeps you on your toes, it makes you run. First pleasure makes you run towards it and then it makes you run away from it. Yoga on the other hand makes you stay stable. It brings stability to your life. A yogi is one who is strong and stable in his body, mind and emotions. This is very important. If your emotions keep going up and down it is because you are running towards something. And what is that something that you are running towards? It is pleasure, and once you are there, it makes you run away from it. You can see in your life, whatever you ran towards, at some point or other, it pushes you away from it because you cannot handle it anymore. So all the people who at some point of time feel that ‘I want to run away’, you should know that it is because you are enjoying it. When you are enjoying something, you will definitely want to run away from it. So if you change that attitude of your mind from seeking pleasure to just being stable, then nothing becomes too much. You should feel, ‘I am here to give comfort to others, not seek comfort’. This one attitude will arrest that tendency of ‘Oh, this is too much, I want to run away’. Only enjoyment of pleasure will make you feel, ‘It is too much’. When you are stable, you always give what you can. The Sun never says, ‘I am shining too much and now I want to run away’. Gold never says, ‘I am glittering too much’, because it is stable in its nature. It has not gone out of its niche.