Top Highlights

• Therefore, Patanjali defines yoga in the second sutra of his book as the ability to selectively eliminate all extemporaneous thoughts or movements that occur in the mind and to choose where you want your mind to be, or where you want to focus it.
• Any solution that might end mental suffering would be greeted with wild hope and relief—or so you would think. It’s possible for the mind to get so lost in itself that a person’s very identity becomes confused, conflicted, and obscured.
• To accept healing is difficult, and mental healing the most difficult of all. Rumi confronted a mind filled with teeming, seemingly random thoughts, and our mental landscape today, distracted by video games, social media, and the Internet, would be totally foreign to medieval Persia or ancient India. Yet Rumi and every other fully conscious person ...
• The underlying vision rests on yoga as union, which means overcoming the divided self. Separation is the opposite of union, and the ultimate separation, which has affected all of us, is the mind in separation from its essential nature.
• Yet in the end, it is the self divided against itself that yoga fundamentally addresses. The mind would not be its own enemy except for the divided self; the body would not be abandoned as a thing to be ignored, shunned, or ashamed of (except for those gifted with superb and beautiful bodies, and even they must face the specter of time and aging).