The mind the texts begin with is not peaceful
Patanjali opens the Yoga Sutras with a definition, not an instruction. Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah, yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. The word chitta covers the entire field of mental activity: memory, ego, intellect, the restless surface that registers every sensation and immediately begins interpreting it. The vrittis are these fluctuations, not thoughts exactly, but the movement that generates thought, the constant modifying of awareness by whatever it touches. The texts do not frame this as a problem to fix. They frame it as the default condition of a mind that has not yet been trained. You are not broken. You are simply unsteady, the way a lamp is unsteady in wind.
