Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, written at least 2,500 years ago—some say much earlier—are the most profound and influential work on the subject of Yoga. The Sutras contain many concepts familiar to those who have dabbled in Yoga philosophy, such as the Eight Limbs of Yoga. In just 196 short sentences, divided into four books, Patanjali offers a complete roadmap out of our current, limited state of mind and a description of the mysteries that lie beyond it.
The word Sutra means “to sew,” and thus the Sutras can be thought of as a thread of interconnected teachings, each connected to the other. It is also said that each one contains the entirety of the work – so it’s kind of like a fractal tapestry of wisdom that will profoundly change anybody who seriously engages with it. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Of all the sutras, the most popular is the second sutra of the first book:
योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोधः
Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah
This is often the only Sutra anybody knows from memory and can often be found on the walls of Yoga studios or even tattooed onto wannabe Yogis. These four words have been written about, meditated on, and put into practice for at least 2,500 years. But what do they mean?
Lost In Translation?
Translating Sanskrit into English isn’t easy. Each Sanskrit word has many meanings, and some express concepts that do not exist in English. Also, as with any spiritual texts, translators are keen to weave their own spiritual ideology into the translation. Patanjali deliberately made the Sutras terse, to encourage personal reflection, but this also left them open to a lot of misunderstanding or willful misinterpretation. So, we recommend working with a number of different translations and trying to uncover for yourself what the great sage was getting at.
An ultra-simple way to translate Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah would be “Yoga mind movement, stop”. Already from this, we get some sense of the meaning, but let’s take a look at a few well-respected translations:
“Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness” – Chip Hartranft
“Union, spiritual consciousness, is gained through control of the versatile psychic[mental] nature” – Charles Johnston
“Yoga is the neutralization of the vortices of feeling” – Swami Kriyananda
“Yoga is the suppression of the modifications of the mind” – Swami Aranya Hariharananda
Stilling the Mind
From this, you get the idea that Yoga is about gaining control of the infinitely powerful – and infinitely troublesome – mind that each one of us possesses. In translations and commentaries of the Sutras, the imagery of waves is often used to describe the mind: the highs and lows of various emotional states. But Swami Kriyananda uses the word “vortices” to describe the movements of the mind as he finds this a better way to imagine the mind. When confronted by something you like, or don’t like, be it a memory, a thought, a person, or a situation, it creates a kind of vortex or whirlpool of thoughts and sensations in the mind. When this ceases, there is Yoga. Or to put it another way, Yoga is the practice of bringing an end to these seemingly endless whirlpools of consciousness.
If that sounds strange, one way to understand it is that Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah gives both the method AND the end result of Yoga (as pointed out by Iyengar in his book “Light on Yoga”). To illustrate this, we could translate it two ways:
1. Yoga is the neutralization of the vortices of feeling
2. To achieve Yoga, neutralize the vortices of feeling
Union or Yoke?
So now we have a definition and a method of Yoga, but there is some debate regarding the direct translation of the word. Often you hear Yoga translated as “Union”. This can be the union of the mind with the soul, the union of the individual with God, the union of the individual consciousness with the higher self, and lots of other lofty concepts which we will discuss below. But some argue that a more accurate translation is “Yoke”. When you want to keep a cow under control, you do this by placing a yoke on its neck. A Yogi is learning to yoke their wandering mind, and gently lead it back to the object of meditation.
A nice way to combine these two definitions is to consider that when you yoke your attention to a certain object, there is a degree of union (your attention meeting the object). This union can become complete: a Yogi deep in meditation may yoke his mind to his breath, and eventually there will be no distinction between the two.
Why?
Why did the ancient sages advocate this practice? Patanjali sheds some light on this in the next two Sutras:
1.3 Then pure awareness can abide in its very nature.
1.4 Otherwise awareness takes itself to be the patterns of consciousness
Our true nature is beyond the everyday hopes and fears, likes and dislikes of worldly life. It is pure awareness, which is unconstrained by duality. But if we don’t bring the mind under control, we will identify with its various patterns and take them to be our reality, forgetting our true nature as we identify with the vortices of feeling.
According to Patanjali, if you follow the path of Yoga as laid out in the Sutras, you’ll no longer be stuck in your tiny, self-centered mind with its endless dramas and suffering. Instead, you see yourself for what you really are: inseparable from the divine cosmic intelligence that created you and everything else. What did the Yogi say when he ordered a pizza? “Make me one with everything”.
The greatest case of mistaken identity in the Universe is when we mistake our conscious experience for our true nature. This is beautifully explained by Chip Hartranft in his translation and commentary on the Yoga Sutras:
“…he [Patanjali] examines what he believes to be the fundamental predicament of existence and then offers a solution. The predicament, he says, is that consciousness and the pure awareness underlying it are separate, but generally feel like the same thing.”
Hartranft invokes the imagery of “yoking” to explain the process of awakening from this mistaken perception:
“Patanjali states from the outset that pure awareness is overshadowed by the modulations of consciousness, which is continually transformed from one pattern of thought to another and rarely sits still for long. This characteristic of consciousness requires deliberate, consistent, and intensive inner work, or yoking, if one is to awaken from its automaticity and see through its incessant, limiting definitions of reality.”
So we take our conscious experience to be the ultimate reality, but it isn’t. We can’t see the wood for the trees, we mistake the wave for the ocean.
At this point, you may be a little concerned if you came to Yoga hoping to get your body more flexible and lose a few pounds, but now it turns out you’ve accidentally found yourself on the path to infinity via the annihilation of everything you thought was real! But don’t worry, there are plenty of practical applications to yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.
Practical Application
“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds”
― Thomas Merton
This is a quote from nearly 60 years ago! Can you imagine how much more urgent the need is in the current information age?
The modern world seems to be designed to do the complete opposite of Yoga. The digital world is a prime example. We are bombarded by information that stirs up the vortices of our minds. Online content creators have learned that the most emotive content gets the most engagement (aka money), and the owners of the large platforms have tweaked the algorithms to serve you content that’s going to hit your emotions hard, so that you remain glued to the screen (aka more advertising for them). At our Yoga retreat in Cambodia, we do not enforce a digital detox, but we strongly recommend it. Read a book, go for a walk, meditate or practice Yoga… anything but picking up the anti-Yoga device and doomscrolling yourself into a mental whirlwind.
Social media is relatively new, but even before that, the stresses and information-bombardment of modern life filled our minds with a lot of nonsense. Spiritual traditions advocates we let go of endless desires and fears. But the we are bombarded by advertising creating endless desires, and newscasters keeping us in a state of perpetual fear. There are all sorts of forces out their working to stir-up our mental whirlpools. If you are not careful, you’ll be living in your mind and missing out on the wonder of reality.
One study showed that we have around 60,000 thoughts a day, and almost all of them are recycled thoughts from the previous day that add no benefit to our lives. Often, reliving the past, or worrying about the future. At these times it is good to remember Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.
Even if you are not going to become a full-time Yogic master, and escape the confines of the physical world, you could still benefit from getting your mind under control. Nothing can be achieved without focus. People often dream of changing their lives with new habits or projects, but nothing changes since their thoughts remain stuck in the same old loop. We are aware of the new-age corruption of Eastern mysticism into a kind of commercial self-improvement program, so maybe it isn’t good to go too far down this road – but still, literally anything you want to achieve in life requires the ability to focus on it.
It is said that when Newton was asked how he solved the problem of gravity, he said “by thinking about it all the time”. If he had been doom-scrolling on 17th Century Instagram, he wouldn’t have figured out so much.
Learning to still and focus your mind will improve your mental health, calm you down, allow you to appreciate life and be grateful for what you have. As you learn more about the Sutras, you will start to see they all come back to yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.
The Yoga Palace
At our retreat center in Kampot, Cambodia, we hold regular workshops on the Philosophy of Yoga and other traditions. We do not claim to be great practitioners or even teachers of this material, we simply aim to make these ancient teachings accessible, hoping to spark a flame of understanding in the hearts of our students.