Yoga Raja B.K.S. Iyengar

B.K.S. Iyengar died today in Pune, India, at 95. Namaste, Guruji. R.I.P.

Iyengar was a master of the art and science and philosophy and spirituality of yoga. He painstakingly wrote and taught so that the West could take advantage of its healing and blessing attributes.

Here are some quotes I gathered from today's news.

“Yoga saved my life. I took it for my health, and then I took it as a mission. Practice is my feast.”
— B.K.S. Iyengar (died Aug. 20, 2014 in Pune, aged 95)

“At 84, Mr. Iyengar's hair is gray, his face shrunken, his body both softer and stiffer than when he was at his muscled, fantastically limber prime. He must guard himself now, he acknowledges. But the goal is the same: to illuminate and discover, through physical movements, new corners of the body and the mind.”
— Amy Waldman, nytimes.com, 14 Dec. 2002

“I can't say, 'I'm old, so I don't want to do it.'"
— B.K.S. Iyengar

“I had to bring my mind and my intelligence to spread as I stretch, to contract as my muscles contract. Yoga is a science which makes one to associate the body to the mind, and the mind to the intelligence, and intelligence to the consciousness and consciousness to the self.”
— B.K.S. Iyengar in 2007 CNN interview

“The best one can hope to do in life is to leave this world a little better than when you arrived. BKS Iyengar has left this world a lot better!”
— reader comment in The Guardian online