Patanjali: Quieting the Mind

58.3-3.10 Framing Series, Set 3 of 3 (Ancient Philosophers): Essay 10

Welcome

Today is different from most publication Mondays. Shortly after this essay goes live, Hanna and I will take our twins to their first day of first grade. Almost exactly one year ago, we took them to their first day of kindergarten, and the following morning I published the first essay in My Life Under Construction. I did not know then what this project would become. I only knew that I wanted to leave our daughters something more lasting than advice offered in passing, a record of what I had learned, misunderstood, questioned, inherited, and was still trying to figure out.

A year later, the girls are carrying backpacks into another classroom, and I am beginning another year of essays. The timing has made me unusually aware of how much can happen while ordinary weeks keep arriving. They have learned to read more confidently, developed friendships, asked harder questions, and become more themselves. One has even lost her first teeth. I have spent the same year writing through the foundation beneath my life, the load-bearing pillars that support it, and the parables, thinkers, and philosophers that have helped frame how I understand the world. Every time I finish an essay, I realize that the person most changed by writing it is me.

Last week, Lao Tzu led me toward harmony with what already exists. I had originally tried to fit many of the notes for this essay into his. Eventually I realized I was combining two different questions. Lao Tzu challenged my instinct to force the world around me. Patanjali turns the question inward. He asks what happens when the movement that needs discipline is not the circumstance in front of me, but the mind interpreting it.

That distinction is especially personal because my mind has never been particularly quiet. I was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia as a child. I can move quickly from one idea to another, replay conversations, anticipate possibilities, become deeply absorbed in something that interests me, and struggle to give the same concentration to something that does not. I have learned ways to work with that mind, but I have never mistaken it for stillness. Patanjali therefore meets me at an uncomfortable starting point: What if one of the greatest obstacles to peace is not everything happening around me, but what I keep doing with it inside my own head?

In Conversation with Patanjali

We know remarkably little with certainty about Patanjali. Scholars continue debating when the Yoga Sutras reached their present form and whether the Patanjali associated with them should be identified with other ancient authors who carried the same name. Estimates vary widely, generally placing the text in the centuries surrounding the birth of Christ. Compared with Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, or Confucius, the person behind the philosophy is almost invisible.

What survived is the work. The Yoga Sutras are a compact collection of aphorisms concerned with the mind, suffering, disciplined practice, perception, attachment, and liberation. The second sutra is often translated in language describing yoga as the stilling, restraint, or cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. Different translations choose different English words, but the challenge is recognizable. We experience thoughts, memories, fears, judgments, desires, and expectations so continuously that we can begin treating whatever appears in the mind as though it were reality itself.

This is also where the modern Western picture of yoga can become misleading. I often encounter yoga as a physical practice, something adjacent to stretching, strength, flexibility, breathing, or Pilates. Patanjali’s framework is much larger. Physical posture, asana, is only one of eight interconnected limbs. The others concern ethical restraint, personal observances, regulation of breath, withdrawal from sensory distraction, concentration, meditation, and deep contemplative absorption. The body participates, but the larger project is freedom from being pushed and pulled by every movement of the mind.

Patanjali’s eight limbs helped me understand that stillness does not begin with sitting silently. Ethical conduct comes first. Then personal discipline. Physical practice and breath follow. Only after that does the framework move more deliberately toward withdrawing attention, concentrating, meditating, and deeper absorption. I find the order significant. Inner freedom is not presented as an escape from how we live with other people. The quality of the inner life is connected to truthfulness, restraint, contentment, study, and what we repeatedly practice before we ever close our eyes.

The Question

I have spent much of this series examining the world outside me. How should I respond to change? What belongs within my stewardship? What do I owe other people? How should power affect character? Those questions have carried me through philosophers, parables, and much of my own life. Patanjali does not dismiss them. He simply asks whether I have overlooked the question beneath them all. Before I can consistently answer any of those well, I first have to understand something much closer to home.

I can blame a difficult conversation for ruining my afternoon, but the conversation may have lasted 10 minutes while I replay it for six hours. I can worry about something that has not happened, become irritated by an interpretation I have not verified, or allow one disappointment to recruit several older disappointments into the same argument.

My mind is remarkably capable of turning a moment into a story. Sometimes that ability serves me. It helps me write, connect ideas that might otherwise remain unrelated, and imagine possibilities I might never have considered. The same habit can also exaggerate a concern until it feels larger than it is or keep a problem alive long after the actual event has ended. The difficulty is not having thoughts. It is forgetting that a thought is often not the same thing as a fact.

How do I become less governed by every thought that passes through my mind?

This is where discipline begins to mean something different to me. I grew up hearing the word discipline used in connection with punishment, rules, and self-control. Patanjali presents something closer to liberation. Without some ability to direct my attention, almost anything can take possession of it: a notification, an insult, a fear, an unfinished task, a memory, an opinion, or the possibility of what might happen next. Discipline does not guarantee peace, but it gives me a better chance of deciding what deserves another minute of my life.

That is different from trying to suppress every uncomfortable thought. If I tell myself not to think about something, I can almost guarantee it will return. The work seems closer to recognition without immediate obedience. Anger does not have to speak first simply because it appears. Worry does not become prophecy merely because it feels convincing. Even my own judgments deserve a second look before I allow them to harden into verdicts. The space between what appears in my mind and what I do next may be small, but much of my freedom seems to live there.

Where I Meet This Question

I first learned to work with my own mind long before I had heard Patanjali’s name. As a young boy, I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. My mom decided against medication for me at the time. That was the path she believed was best for me, and while another family facing the same circumstances today might reasonably make a different decision, what she gave me instead was a phrase I have mentioned elsewhere in these essays: Drive your own bus.

She used it when I was becoming too wound up, distracted, frustrated, or overwhelmed. She would remind me to take a breath and recognize that I still had some responsibility for what happened next. We also changed practical things, including reducing sugar because she believed it made my energy harder to manage. I cannot honestly separate what helped because of biology, expectation, maturity, structure, those small adjustments, or simply having a mother who never stopped believing I could learn to work with the mind I had. What I do know is that I never saw ADHD as only a limitation. Some of the same mental movement that complicated school later became useful in connecting ideas, traveling, building relationships, solving problems, and writing.

Breathing remains one of the simplest examples. When our daughters were in preschool, they learned something called starfish breathing. A child traces the fingers of one hand with the index finger of the other, breathing in while moving up a finger and breathing out while moving down. I have watched a very upset little person concentrate on the movement long enough for the intensity to begin changing. The problem has not necessarily disappeared. The body and mind have simply been given enough room to stop racing each other.

My grandma had another practice. She prayed the rosary so often that the corners of the amethyst beads became rounded from use. I still think about that physical evidence of repetition. Prayer was not an occasional emergency measure for her. It was something her hands and mind had practiced thousands of times. My dad has his own version. When he is home, mornings find him in the same chair with the latest issue of Give Us This Day, praying, reading, and reflecting before the day begins. As I write this, I can almost picture him reading this very essay from that same chair. Neither of them would have described these practices as Patanjali’s yoga, nor would I. Yet they taught me that returning the mind to something deliberately, day after day, changes the way we inhabit our lives.

My dad gave me another lesson when I first entered the working world. He told me that if I could avoid the proverbial water cooler, I would become significantly more productive than many people around me. I do not remember whether his estimate of 30 percent was serious or simply designed to make the point memorable. The lesson was not that colleagues should never talk. It was about how much time and energy can disappear into gossip, complaint, speculation, and conversations that repeatedly describe problems without moving toward anything useful.

The physical water cooler has become less important, but the gathering place is everywhere. It can be a group text, social media thread, comment section, lunch table, Teams meeting, or conversation that begins with one legitimate frustration and gradually turns into a rehearsal of everything wrong with a person or organization. I have participated in enough of these conversations to know how quickly the mood changes. Saying something aloud can recruit agreement, produce another example, and give the original irritation a much longer life than it might otherwise have had.

Modern physiology gives part of this discussion a physical dimension, although I want to be careful not to turn Patanjali into neuroscience. The body’s acute stress response is useful when danger requires rapid action. Cortisol and catecholamines such as adrenaline help mobilize energy and prepare us to respond. Problems arise when stress becomes chronic and the systems designed for temporary protection remain repeatedly activated. Research associates prolonged stress with effects on sleep, cardiovascular function, inflammation, immune regulation, concentration, and other parts of health. That does not mean complaining about a bad meeting directly causes disease. It means the distinction between temporary activation and repeatedly living in a heightened state is not merely philosophical.

One piece of advice I have returned to many times came from my friend Mary Lynn, who once reminded me that sometimes we can do our talking with our feet. We can walk away. That does not solve every conflict, and there are conversations we have a responsibility to enter. It does remind me that participation is sometimes optional. I do not have to add the next complaint, repeat the rumor, answer every provocation, or remain inside a conversation that is training me to become someone I do not particularly like.

I also want to draw a careful boundary around this idea because mental discipline can become cruel when it is offered as an answer to mental illness. My sister Mary battled depression, and my dad helped me understand decades ago that ordinary blues and clinical depression are not interchangeable. It is not simply a failure to choose better thoughts. Mental health conditions can involve biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors, and appropriate care may include physicians, therapists, medication, family support, and other treatment. Patanjali interests me because of the habits available within ordinary moments, not because I believe disciplined thinking can cure every struggle of the mind.

My mom’s death taught me something else about attachment that I am still trying to understand. I was extraordinarily close to her, yet at her funeral I did not initially cry. The tears came while I was reading a poem and looked out at cousins who were struggling to catch their breath. I felt their sorrow almost physically. I did not experience my lack of tears as an absence of love for my mom. Some part of me already believed that her influence had become inseparable from me and that, through faith, death was not the final end of our relationship.

I hesitate to call that detachment because the word can sound cold. I felt deeply connected to my mom. I still do. Perhaps the distinction Patanjali helps me explore is between connection and possession. Love does not require pretending I can keep another person from changing, leaving, becoming ill, or dying. My faith gives me confidence that I will be with my mom again, but even without trying to solve the mystery, I know I did not need to stop loving her in order to release the demand that she remain physically present.

Parenting is where connection and fear can become tangled most quickly. Before the twins began kindergarten, they completed a series of school assessments. One observation was that they were unusually trusting of unfamiliar adults. I understood why that could raise a safety question, but Hanna and I did not experience trust itself as something we wanted to frighten out of them. Our responsibility is to teach judgment, boundaries, and how to seek help while remaining appropriately vigilant ourselves. I do not want fear of strangers to become their default relationship with the world.

We faced a similar decision when kindergarten began. The girls were initially placed in separate classrooms because separating twins can make sense in many families. Our daughters, however, are very different from one another, and one began exhibiting anxiety when she could not easily see or physically connect with her sister in class. After conversations with the school, they were brought into the same classroom. This year, the possibility of separating them came up again, and Hanna and I declined. We are not promising they will always remain together. We are simply trying not to create a difficulty merely because a general practice suggests we should.

Coaching has been teaching me the same discipline from another direction. Recently, my coaching mentor reviewed one of my sessions and kept pressing me to consider whether there was a deeper question I could have asked. I naturally want to understand the who, what, when, where, and how of a person or situation, but I can also move too quickly toward interpretation. Listening requires more than remaining silent until it is my turn to speak. It asks me to notice the answer I am already preparing and decide whether I can set it aside long enough to hear what the other person is actually saying.

Writing has become another practice of concentration. These essays now take longer to develop than they did when I began. Part of that is because I am trying to avoid turning a philosopher into a collection of quotations and lessons. Before I can write, I often need some quiet to ask where the idea actually meets my life. There is a point when more research stops helping. I can read another article, open another book, or create another note, but eventually I have to sit with what I already have and discover whether anything honest is there.

There was another unexpected connection while I was finishing this essay. Just over a month ago, while volunteering at the Struthers Parkinson’s Center Golf Challenge through the Park Nicollet Foundation, I met an 83-year-old photographer named Nancy. She told me about her interest in photographing people practicing yoga from different cultures around the world. After seeing a photograph of my daughters, she asked whether she might someday photograph them as well. I already knew Patanjali was coming later in this series, but at the time I made no connection between the essay I had planned and the conversation taking place on that golf cart.

A few days before this essay was finished, Nancy photographed our twins practicing yoga for a book she is creating. I do not pretend Patanjali explains coincidences, and I do not believe every unexpected connection carries hidden meaning. Still, the timing made me wonder whether slowing down sometimes allows us to notice connections that busyness would otherwise bury. I have always loved discovering those invisible threads between people, places, and experiences. Perhaps attention does more than help us concentrate. Sometimes it helps us recognize what was already there.

What I Hope My Daughters Remember

As the girls begin first grade today, I know the world competing for their attention will only become louder. There will be screens, advertisements, friends, assignments, opinions, entertainment, expectations, notifications, and eventually pressures that Hanna and I cannot yet imagine. I do not want to raise them frightened of those things. I want them to develop enough inner steadiness that everything asking for their attention does not automatically receive it.

I hope they learn that concentration is not a personality trait some people receive and others miss. It can be practiced. They may need different tools from one another, and they may need different tools from me. One may work best in silence while another needs movement. One may need to write something by hand before it becomes clear. I would rather help them discover how their minds work than force both minds into one definition of what focus is supposed to look like.

I also hope they understand that an emotion can deserve attention without automatically deserving power. Anger may have something to teach them, fear may sometimes protect them, and sadness may invite them to slow down long enough to notice what needs attention. Even excitement deserves wisdom. None has to become the driver every time it appears. Perhaps my mom’s old instruction will become useful to them too: Drive your own bus. They cannot choose every passenger that climbs aboard, but I hope they gradually learn to remain intentionally behind the wheel.

Faith belongs here for me as well. I do not want our daughters to confuse conviction with pretending every mystery has been solved. The word faith itself requires trust in what cannot be completely seen or proved. I hope they know what they believe and understand why they believe it, while preserving enough humility to recognize that God is larger than their explanation of God. Prayer should not make them less curious. I hope it gives their curiosity room to breathe.

Most of all, I hope they learn that stillness is not empty. A quiet room can initially feel like nothing is happening, especially to a mind accustomed to input. Yet some of the most important work may be occurring there. A thought settles enough to be understood. A fear begins to lose some of its urgency. An apology that seemed impossible becomes obvious, or gratitude quietly returns where frustration had been. Sometimes even the question itself changes. The girls will spend much of their lives being told what deserves their attention. I hope they remain capable of deciding for themselves.

Leadership Through This Lens

Leadership often rewards visible action. A problem appears, and someone wants an answer. A customer calls, a deadline moves, a project slips, an employee struggles, and the person in authority can feel pressure to respond before the situation has even been understood. There are genuine emergencies when speed is necessary. Far more often, I have seen a problem become larger because the first response was designed to demonstrate control rather than produce understanding.

I have used the phrase Busy is the enemy of progress for years because activity can create its own evidence of importance. Calendars fill, messages multiply, and leaders become skilled at responding to motion. Patanjali complicates that idea for me. Busyness is not only an organizational problem. It can become an internal habit. When my mind expects constant stimulation, quiet consideration can begin feeling inefficient even when it is exactly what a decision requires.

This is one reason coaching has become such useful leadership training for me. My instinct is frequently to offer experience, examples, and possible solutions. Coaching requires the discipline to stay with another person’s journey. A pause that once felt awkward can become productive. A question can remain unanswered for a few seconds without needing rescue. The person across from me may be doing work I cannot see, and filling that silence because I am uncomfortable can interrupt the very process I am there to support.

Self-regulation also changes difficult conversations. When I feel challenged, I can become faster, louder, or more certain. None of those reactions necessarily improves the quality of my thinking. Sometimes the most useful leadership action available to me is physical and almost too simple: breathe, lower my voice, ask another question, or wait until I understand what the other person believes happened. The goal is not to become emotionless. It is to prevent my first emotional response from making every later response harder.

Patanjali therefore gives leadership a starting point that is easy to skip. Before asking how I influence the room, I have to consider what is happening within me while I am standing in it. Am I listening for understanding or confirmation? Am I reacting to the actual problem or to something it reminds me of? Am I protecting the work, or am I protecting my pride? I will not always answer those questions well, but I am less likely to ask them at all if I never become quiet enough to hear them.

Reflection Point

Inner freedom begins when not every thought receives permission to lead.

The Invitation: Practice Returning

Spend 10 minutes without a screen, music, podcast, or task, and notice where your mind goes.

When a difficult thought repeats, ask what you know to be true and what your mind has added.

Use one deliberate breath before responding in a conversation where you feel yourself becoming reactive.

Leave one conversation, thread, or digital space that repeatedly trains your attention toward contempt or complaint.

Choose one practice of prayer, reflection, meditation, writing, or quiet that you can return to consistently.

Give one person your full attention without preparing the answer you intend to give them.

Two Questions to Explore

Which thoughts, distractions, or habits most often take control of my attention?

What might become visible if I became quiet long enough to stop reacting to the first thing my mind tells me?

Further Resources

Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary. A detailed translation and scholarly commentary that places Patanjali’s ideas within the broader history of Indian philosophy and yoga.

B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. A modern interpretation of the sutras from one of the most influential teachers in twentieth-century yoga.

Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. An accessible translation and commentary emphasizing the practical and spiritual dimensions of Patanjali’s teaching.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are. A modern introduction to mindfulness and the practice of returning attention to present experience.

Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety. A contemporary exploration of anxiety, habit loops, curiosity, and the ways repeated mental patterns can be interrupted.

Daniel Goleman, Focus. An examination of attention, distraction, self-awareness, and why the ability to direct focus influences performance and relationships.

A year ago, when I published the first essay in this project, I thought I was beginning a collection of lessons for my daughters. With this, my 52nd weekly essay, I still believe that. What I understand better now is that before I can honestly offer those lessons, I have to live them first. Every philosopher has turned some part of the question back toward me.

Patanjali may do that more directly than most. I can create a quiet room and still bring a noisy mind into it. My phone can be on the other side of the room while my thoughts remain fixed on it. I can find myself praying while mentally editing tomorrow or listening to someone while quietly preparing the story I intend to tell when they finish. Removing the distraction is useful, but it does not automatically create attention.

That is why I am drawn to the idea of practice rather than mastery. My grandma did not smooth the edges of her rosary beads in one extraordinary night of prayer. My dad’s morning chair has its own quiet beauty because he keeps returning to it. My daughters did not learn starfish breathing because one breath solved childhood frustration forever. The practice becomes available because it has been practiced.

I suspect the same is true for me. I will continue to become distracted, react too quickly, replay conversations, worry about things that never happen, and occasionally mistake an opinion for a fact. Patanjali does not interest me because I expect to eliminate any of that. He interests me because I may be able to recognize those patterns sooner and return more deliberately to whatever deserves me now.

In a few hours, I will watch two first graders walk into school while I stand on the outside trying not to manage every possibility waiting for them. They will carry their own minds into that building, just as I carried mine into first grade decades ago. I cannot make their inner lives peaceful. I can help them develop faith, practices, language, judgment, and enough confidence to understand that the first thought, fear, opinion, or distraction to arrive does not have to become the one they follow.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of beginning year two beside Patanjali. After a year of asking what I want to leave my daughters, I am being reminded to pay closer attention to the mind doing the leaving.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Live. Lead. Love.
Billy

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