Ashram Quotes & Sayings

I don't think of the ashram world as being any more spiritual than the corporate world. — Karan Bajaj

The elderly man from the ashram, explained to me, if the villagers wanted peace, they would feed and house the peacemakers. If they didn't want peace, no outsiders could help anyway. As we started on our journey, I noticed that without possessions, I felt oddly free. — Gloria Steinem

When I started on the path, too, I really thought I would become a yogi in a cave, but I didn't have clarity about my path. When I evolved in the ashram for six months, I learned a lot, but I realized that it was not my natural state of being. So, I came back to the world. — Karan Bajaj

If we argue that since all bodies are perishable, one may kill, does it follow that I may kill all the women and children in the Ashram? Would I have in doing so acted according to the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, merely because their bodies are perishable? What, — Mahatma Gandhi

Ashram means a community of men of religion. I feel that an ashram was a necessity of life for me. — Mahatma Gandhi

Try to spend at least 2 or 3 days every month in an ashram. Just breathing the pure air there will purify and strengthen our bodies and minds. Like recharging the batteries, even after returning home we will be able to continue our meditation and japa. — Mata Amritanandamayi

I think to be in a monastery or an ashram is not always the answer because we don't fight, we kick back. We don't listen to Sri Krishna. — Frederick Lenz

The ashram is Mother's body. Mother's soul is in Her children. Children, all the service done for the ashram, is done for Mother. The ashram is not anyone's private property. It is the means to provide peace and quietude for the entire world. — Mata Amritanandamayi

When talking of political addresses in Bihar, two of them stand out. One is that of Sadaqat Ashram, the famous Congress address of yore, and the other that of Patna house of the three-time Congress chief minister, Dr Jagannath Mishra, perhaps the last vestige of the grand, old party in Bihar. — Santosh Singh

Once a sadhu offered me some land that he had, so that I could have an ashram for fellow Westerners. I asked Maharajji about it. He said, "He wants to give you his attachment. It's not a pure gift. If it were pure he'd just give it to you instead of talking about it." (R.D.) — Ram Dass

Yet anything less ecstatic than the singing of today's widows in Vrindavan would be hard to imagine. At the back, the madwomen are shrieking. In the foreground, the exhausted old widows struggle to keep up with the cantor's pitch, many nodding asleep until given a poke by one of the ashram managers walking up and down the aisles with a stick. It is difficult to think of a sorrier or more pathetic sight. Vrindavan, Krishna's earthly paradise, is today a place of such profound sadness and distress that it almost defies description. — William Dalrymple

I suffer snakes to be killed in the ashram when it is impossible to catch them and put them out of harm's way. — Mahatma Gandhi

The ashram is where everyone lives in the same building or on the same grounds. You feel that it's selfish for you to devote your life to one person. You don't just love the one, you love the many also. — Frederick Lenz

That is the challenge of a spiritual teacher: not to take on board the projections of specialness people have. This is especially dangerous for spiritual teachers who only have contact with disciples or followers, who may live in an ashram. — Eckhart Tolle

So this was the Ashram's final joke on me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my inner Key Hostess - only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, after all? — Elizabeth Gilbert

I told [Bill Gates] I believed every word of what I said but that I should never have said it in public. I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger. — Steve Jobs

Ashram Cat
When the guru sat down to worship each evening, the ashram cat would get in the way and distract the worshipers. So he ordered the cat be tied up during evening worship. Long after the guru died, the cat continued to be tied up during evening worship. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be dutifully tied up during evening worship. Centuries later, learned treatises were written by the guru's disciples on the essential role of a cat in all properly conducted worship.
That's often the way we operate in the church. We don't ask the right questions, and we overlay our past experiences-or reactions
against them-on what we think we should do for the future. — Mark Pierson

I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram. — Meryl Streep

I went through times of self-hate, thinking how undeveloped spiritual I was. Everyone else in the ashram, a thousand people, nobody had a girlfriend or boyfriend. I did. — Frederick Lenz

I have just instructed Laxmi to make a small temple for smoking here in the ashram. But you have to go very alert, aware, meditative! If you can smoke meditatively, it is perfectly beautiful. If it stops by being meditative, that too is perfectly beautiful. Life is sacred. — Rajneesh

I lived in a community where celibacy was the rule. My I saw many people asked to leave the ashram for so much as looking intensely at a member of the opposite sex. — Frederick Lenz

My parents were hippies. They met at an ashram, where they were studying how to be enlightened. — Paulo Costanzo

I realized that my friends in the ashram needed to be celibate because, for them, sexuality was a very tacky issue. — Frederick Lenz

The Maharishi had invited us all to go to India to his ashram in the Indian Himalaya. We were there studying meditation for two and a half months. While the other three Beatles went back to London to start the beginning of their Apple empire, George and I went to Madras for a week's relaxation. I took this photograph of George one morning, as I thought the light on his face was lovely. I think this was the last time that I saw him looking so calm. — Pattie Boyd

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. — Nicole Krauss

My parents both renounced their material lives and were living as monks at an ashram in L.A. when they met each other. So we were always raised in this environment and when we moved to the ashram in Florida it was just like, "Oh, wow, now all of a sudden there's more people like us," because we were growing up in the middle of Texas with our parents, always being the weirdos. — Taraka Larson

I don't like the idea of spirituality done the way it's done. The only way I could understand it was through creativity, not by going to an Ashram, or finding a guru or joining a temple. I made work out of it. — M.I.A.

My wife and I took a sabbatical and we went from Europe to India, where we lived in an ashram for six months and did meditation and yoga vigorously, like from 5:00 in the morning until 10:00 in the night in very austere circumstances. I think then my practice became less superficial, more like the traditional definition of what meditation was: to truly find oneness. — Karan Bajaj

I am a karmayogi-someone who becomes conscious of herself and the Divine through work, not through meditation in some ashram or saying Hail Marys — Kelly Cutrone