YOGA CLASS: THE FIVE SPIRITUAL FACULTIES (Pañca Indriya)

Mantra:
“I trust.
I try.
I return.
I focus.
I see.”

Each phrase honors one of the five:

I trust → Faith (Śraddhā)

I try → Energy (Vīrya)

I return → Mindfulness (Smṛti)

I focus → Concentration (Samādhi)

I see → Wisdom (Prajñā)

OPENING REFLECTION – Aligning Our Inner Compass

The Five Spiritual Faculties, called Pañca Indriya, come from the Buddhist Pāli Canon. They’re like five inner muscles for spiritual growth — qualities we don’t just use on the mat, but in how we live.

Pañca = Five

Indriya = Faculties, powers, or spiritual strengths

Faith (Śraddhā): Trusting your path and your inner strength.

Energy (Vīrya): The courage to keep going, even when it’s hard.

Mindfulness (Smṛti): The kindness to return to the present moment.

Concentration (Samādhi): Steady, focused attention that brings clarity.

Wisdom (Prajñā): Insight into what truly matters — impermanence, compassion, and interconnection.

These faculties are like the five legs of a sturdy table — built with redundancy. When one feels weak, perhaps lacking in faith, the others help hold us up. Tonight, we’ll explore each one through movement, breath, and reflection.

TOPIC 1 – Trust the Process: The Strength of Faith (Śraddhā)

Reflection:
Sometimes we feel like we’re giving all we’ve got, and still… nothing is happening. In those moments, what keeps us going isn’t more effort — it’s faith. Not blind faith, but the quiet trust that says: This path matters. I may not see the results yet, but I know in my heart I’m growing.

Personal Note:
If you’ve ever planted something — a tree, a hope, a habit — you know it doesn’t sprout overnight. Today, I invite you to lean into that quiet faith. Trust the invisible work your heart is doing.

Metaphor – The Bamboo Forest:
Bamboo builds roots for years before it ever breaks the surface. Then one day — it shoots up. Your growth may be just like that.

Quotes:
“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” – Tagore

“To trust in the heart, even when the way is unclear — that is the essence of practice.” – Kornfield

“Do not dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.” – Elliot

TOPIC 2 – Don’t Give Up at the Edge of Breakthrough – Energy (Vīrya)

Reflection:
Sometimes we stop just before the good stuff happens. The truth is, many people quit right before something beautiful is about to bloom. In Buddhism, virya — energy — is the quiet devotion to keep showing up.

Personal Note:
Maybe there’s a dream, a healing, or a habit you’re working on. Be patient. You may be closer than you think.

Metaphor – The Miner and the Wall:
A miner gives up just three feet from gold. The next person digs a little more — and finds treasure.

Quotes:
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Edison

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

“A jug fills drop by drop.” – The Buddha

TOPIC 3 – Stay With It: The Power of Present Hope – Mindfulness (Smṛti)

Reflection:
Mindfulness doesn’t ask us to fix anything. It asks us to stay. To witness. To breathe. That’s how we transform pain into wisdom.

Personal Note:
If there’s something heavy in your heart, let it surface. You don’t need to drown in it — just stay present with it.

Metaphor – The Tea Kettle:
The kettle doesn’t panic when the water boils. It responds with a steady whistle. Mindfulness is your ability to stay steady even when the heat rises.

Quotes:
“Turn your wounds into wisdom; don’t cry to give up, but cry to keep going.” – David Scott

“Feelings come and go like clouds. Conscious breathing is my anchor.” – Thích Nhất Hạnh

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” – Rumi

TOPIC 4 – The Balance Within: The Power of Concentration (Samādhi)

Reflection:
Concentration calms the scattered mind. It doesn’t mean forcing stillness — it means entering it. In Buddhist teaching, samādhi is one-pointedness: the ability to rest your awareness so fully on something that everything else fades away.

It’s like an acrobat balancing high above the ground. One wrong move, one wandering thought, and it could all fall apart. But with focus, breath, and inner stillness, the balance holds — not from tension, but from trust in their body’s wisdom.

Our minds are the same. When we bring steady attention to one thing — a breath, a pose, a mantra — we find calm in the midst of motion.

Personal Note:
Let this part of your practice be about returning to one thing. Let the distractions fall away. You don’t have to stop your thoughts — just keep balancing your awareness, moment by moment, breath by breath.

Metaphor – The Acrobat on the Wire
Imagine an acrobat walking a tightrope. Every step requires full presence. If their focus drifts for even a second, they waver. But when their awareness is sharp and centered, they glide with grace.

Concentration is that awareness — not rigid, but fluid, alert, and alive.

Quotes:

“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” – The Buddha

“Concentration is the root of all higher abilities in man.” – Paramahansa Yogananda

“Stillness is what creates love. Movement is what creates life. To be still and still moving — this is everything.” – Do Hyun Choe

“When you focus on what’s in front of you, the noise around you fades.” – Unknown

TOPIC 5 – See Clearly: The Wisdom to Know What Matters (Prajñā)
Reflection:
There are two types of Wisdom. Book Smart Wisdom and Street Smart Wisdom. Prajna, is street smart wisdom, learned only through experiencing life. Wisdom is the fruit of lived experience. It helps us see past illusion into truth — everything changes, and everything is connected.

Personal Note:
Wisdom isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about seeing what really matters — and living from that place.

Metaphor – The Foggy Glass:
Wisdom doesn’t create truth. It reveals it — like wiping clean a foggy window.

Quotes:
“When we see clearly, we act wisely.” – Kornfield

“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, love is knowing I am everything.” – Nisargadatta

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison

Edison and his team tested over 6,000 materials for the filament alone before finally succeeding with a carbonized bamboo filament that proved effective.

At age 12 Thomas Edison came home from school and handed a sealed envelope to his mother. He told her, “My teacher gave this to me and told me to give it only to my mother.”

As his mother Nancy read the note here eyes became full of tears… “What does it say mother?” She then took a breath and read it out loud to her child: “Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers for training him. Please teach him yourself.”

That she did and the rest it seems… is history. Thomas Edison became one of the greatest inventors of the century.

Many, many years, after Edison’s mothers death, Edison was looking through old family things. Suddenly he saw a folded paper in the corner of a drawer in a desk. He took it and opened it up. On the paper was written: “Your son has a severe learning disability and is mentally deficient. We won’t let him come to school any more. He is expelled.”

Edison cried for hours and then wrote in his diary: “Thomas Alva Edison was a mentally deficient child with severe learning disability that, by a hero of a mother, became the genius of the century.”

“The tragedy of many is not that they lose, but that they almost win. Success is often just over the next horizon, People often don’t fail, they just quit trying.” – David Scott

“Hope is the last emotion to die in a human. The yogi that has a why can endure any experience. Turn your wounds into wisdom; don’t cry to give up, but cry to keep going.” – David Scott

“Some people are lost in the fires of life, others are forged by them. Some fall into the flames and are consumed, other’s fly out victoriously, with their wings on fire, but forever transformed, purified and forged stronger by the experience.” – David Scott

“If love appears, boundaries will disappear.” – Osho

“What you love, you empower and what you fear, you empower and what you empower, you attract ~ unknown

“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you took me in.’ Hungry not only for bread – but hungry for love. Naked not only for clothing – but naked for human dignity and respect. Homeless not only for want of a room of bricks – but homeless because of rejection.” ~Mother Teresa

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“Perhaps the biggest mistake I made in the past was that I believed love was about finding the right person. In reality, love is about becoming the right person. Don’t look for the person you want to spend your life with. Become the person you want to spend your life with.”

“The well-worn, easy path is the one usually leading to mediocrity. Take the more difficult, less traveled path or create your own. The greater the challenge, the greater the joy experienced in overcoming it.” – David Scott

“Some walks in life, you just have to take alone,” – David Scott

“It was when she walked alone, that she discovered her strength. It is hard to walk alone, but sometimes that is the walk that makes us the strongest.”

“Do not judge her, you have no idea the storms I have asked her to walk through.” – God

“Monsters are real, ghost are real, they live inside us and sometimes we allow them to win.” Steven king

“They laugh at me because I am different, I laugh at them because they are all the same.” – Kurt Cobain

“You need a level of darkness, to see the stars.”

“She conquered her demons and wore her scars like wings. Love her but leave her wild.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

“What good are wings without the courage to fly? Sure she was afraid of heights but she was much more afraid of never flying.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

“From the moment I saw her I knew this one was worth the broken heart.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

“There’s too much risk in loving, the young boy said, ‘no,’ said the old man, there’s too much risk in not.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

“Strength does not come from doing what you can do, it comes from overcoming what you first thought was impossible.”

“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.” – Albert Einstein

What is your passion… “If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs

“Success isn’t the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”-Thomas J. Watson (IBM CEO)

“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be brave enough to stand for what you believe in, even if it means you stand alone

“The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.” – Anthony Robbins

“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”

“Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.” – Will Rogers

Just because the war is lost, it does not mean that you must be conquered.

The one who falls and gets up is so much stronger than the one who never fell.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” –Thomas Edison

“Everything in life that is “worth achieving,” requires risk and should scare you just a little bit.” – David Scott

“Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” – Bill Bradley

“Success is not the absence of failure; it’s the persistence through failure.” – Aisha Tyler

“Success is sequential, not simultaneous. It is the last stoke of the pick ax that finally cracks the rock.” David Scott

“Adversity causes some to break, others to break records.” William A. Ward

“We have not crossed that subtle line from childhood to adulthood until we stop saying “It got lost” and instead say “I lost it.” – Sydney Harris

“The confident person admits to their mistakes, honoring them like hard fought battle scars; the cowardly must instead blame others, learning nothing but shame from their experience.” – David Scott

“You must not allow your long term goals and dreams to be derailed off track by short term defeats. A stumble can often prevent a fall.” – David Scott`

“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” – Margaret Thatcher

“Every path has a puddle.”

“Buried within every problem are the seeds of its own solution. Often it is not that the solution that cannot be seen, but that the problem is never first fully understood.” – David Scott

“The block of granite, that was an obstacle for the weak, becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.” Thomas Carlyle

“Only he who does nothing, makes no mistakes.” – French Proverb

“Everything is going to be difficult. In order to build muscle you have to first feel the burn.” David Scott

“If you get tired along the way, rest don’t quit.”

“To reach our goals, we must first learn to focus. If you aim your arrow at two birds you will bring down none.” – David Scott

“He that cannot endure the bad, will not live to see the good.” Yiddish Proverb

“It is always easier to start well than to finish well. The tiny drops of rain, create holes in rock, not by brute force, but by soft perseverance.” David Scott

“Determination is the wind in our sails, pushing us onward, over and through the waves of fear and doubt.” David Scott

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” – Beverly Sills

“Victory belongs to the most persevering” – Napoleon Bonaparte

“The two hardest things in life to handle, are failure and success.”

“Happy the person that gets up every morning with enthusiasm and falls asleep with satisfaction in their heart.” David Scott

“Determination is the wind in our sails that pushes us onward, over and through the waves of fear and doubt.” David Scott

“My biggest struggles have been my biggest teachers.” – Kathryn Budig

“The amazing untapped power you have within you is of a force and quality that you cannot fully comprehend. Therefore, do not let yourself be a victim of the dismal concept of self-assumed personal limitation.” – Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

“When our talents meet perseverance, opportunity presents itself. The door of opportunity will not open unless you do a little pushing. The person that does nothing except wait for their ship to come in, has already missed the boat.” – David Scott

“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney.

“There lies within each person a huge reservoir of untapped potential for achievement, success, happiness, health and greater prosperity. It’s like an ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.” – Jim Rohn