“Bhakti Dhyānam uses Japa to build a bridge
over the fear bringing streams of the mind.”
– Personal Commentary to Yoga Sūtra Chapter One verse 28

“There are essentially three causes for fear….
desire, disease and death.”
– T Krishnamacharya commentary to Yoga Sūtra Chapter Two verse 9

“Abhiniveśā is the extra-ordinairy instinctive urge to survive at any cost.
No one is spared. In a way it is a dislike about one’s death.”
– T Krishnamacharya commentary to Yoga Sūtra Chapter Two verse 9

“Fear and Insecurity feed on the leftovers
from the meals of past experiences.”
– Commentary around Yoga Sūtra Chapter Two verse 9

“Attachment comes through pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure, but when we no longer have what gave us pleasure, or if there is some threat of losing it, attachment often appears.
Negation is a tendency to resist or reject after something bad has happened. It could be a fact, an idea or whatever, but if we were not comfortable with it, we resist. There is a strong relationship between attachment and negation, like heads and tails of a coin. Strangely, the more we are attached to something the more there is a likelihood to reject it later – when what we were expecting is not forthcoming heads becomes tails!
Fear is a very fundamental emotion which seems to have some special energy that can make it survive on its own. Fear exists independently of objects, they just give it something to fix on, like the wolf in Western fairy tales. There are two types of fear : fear of something, an earthquake, an illness, a wolf etc., and fear of losing something, a job, a loved one, prestige etc.
Fear, negation, attachment and association either alone or together create the conditions for suffering to erupt again and again. Suffering appears, disappears and re-appears forcing us to admit that something is missing and this pushes us to seek how to find it.”
– TKV Desikachar from unedited manuscript for ‘What are We Seeking?’

“Yoga is about looking inwards,
at what we fear most.
Rather than looking outwards,
at what we desire most.”