These 52 affirmations and prayers—one for each week of the year—will help you strengthen positive qualities in yourself such as good health, will power, forgiveness, security, happiness, and many others.

Health care professionals know that our thoughts influence our physical, mental, and emotional health, for better or for worse. We routinely enlist the help of psychologists and medications to overcome our deeply rooted, harmful thoughts. But we also have the power to change our thoughts ourselves, in ways that complement or offer an alternative to these often only marginally effective, and sometimes side-effect laden, treatments.

Paramhansa Yogananda's classic Autobiography of a Yogi was more about the saints Yogananda met than about himself, in spite of the fact that Yogananda was much greater than many he described.

Now, one of Yogananda's close and direct disciples tells the untold story of this great spiritual master and world teacher: his teenage miracles, his challenges in coming to America, his national lecture campaigns, his struggles to fulfill his world-changing mission amid incomprehension and painful betrayals, and his ultimate triumphant achievement.

About 2200 years ago, a great spiritual master of India named Patanjali described this process, and presented humanity with a clear-cut, step-by-step outline of how all truth seekers and saints achieve divine union. He called this universal inner experience and process “yoga” or “union.” His collection of profound aphorisms—a true world scripture—has been dubbed Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.