Where is my mind?

The Journal · Practice · Editorial N° 7

The roots of our problems?

You are standing in the kitchen, and you are not in the kitchen. You are in tomorrow’s meeting. In last night’s argument. In a message you have not answered yet. Your hands are cutting vegetables. Your mind is everywhere else.

Most of us live like this most of the time. And most of us have stopped noticing.

So let me ask the question that I have learned to ask myself many times a day: where is my mind? Because wherever it is, that is where I am actually living.

The mind makes the world you live in

Two people can walk through the same day and live in two completely different worlds. One sees threat, the other sees possibility. One hears criticism, the other hears feedback. The facts are the same. The reality is not.

The Indian traditions understood this long before neuroscience did. The very first verse of the Dhammapada says that mind comes before everything; we speak and act from the mind, and suffering or happiness follows like a shadow. Patañjali defines the whole of yoga in a single line:

yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ
Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.2 

Not the stilling of the body. Not the perfect posture. The mind. Because the mind is the lens, and whatever is on the lens colours everything we see.

Consciousness, contracted

The Tantric masters of Kashmir went one step further, and I find their view deeply freeing. In his Heart of Recognition, Kṣemarāja writes that the mind is not separate from pure awareness at all. It is awareness itself, contracted:

citir eva cetana-padād avarūḍhā cetya-saṅkocinī cittam
Consciousness itself, descending from its expanded state and contracting around its objects, becomes the mind.

Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, sūtra 5 (own rendering)

Read that slowly. Your worrying, looping, planning mind is not the enemy. It is the same infinite awareness that you are, only squeezed into a small space, clinging to its objects. The work is not to destroy the mind. It is to let it expand again into what it always was.

A world that is struggling

We need this teaching more than ever. According to the World Health Organization, around one in eight people worldwide was living with a mental health condition in 2019, and in the first year of the pandemic, anxiety and depression rose by about a quarter. In my own work with women, I see it every week: brilliant, capable people who cannot switch off, who sleep badly, who feel a constant low hum of tension they have long stopped noticing.

There are many causes: economic pressure, isolation, grief, illness, the speed of modern life. But one root runs underneath many of them. We have lost the capacity to be where we are.

Researchers at Harvard asked thousands of people, at random moments of their day, what they were doing and what they were thinking about. Almost half the time, people were thinking about something other than what they were doing. And they were measurably less happy when their mind wandered, even when it wandered to pleasant things. The title of the study says it all: A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Now add a phone that interrupts us dozens of times a day, a news cycle designed to keep us alarmed, and a culture that rewards constant productivity. The mind never lands. And a mind that never lands lives in a body that never rests.

The body keeps the mind

This is where the conversation often goes wrong. We try to fix the mind with the mind: more thinking, more analysing, more self-improvement. But the mind does not float in space. It rides on the nervous system.

When the nervous system is in survival mode, the mind scans for danger. It anticipates, rehearses, worries. No amount of positive thinking can convince a body that believes it is under threat. But when the body feels safe, the mind softens all by itself. Thoughts slow down. Space opens up between them. We become present again, not because we forced it, but because the body finally allows it.

The yogis knew this. That is why they gave us not only philosophy, but practices that work through the body: breath, movement, sound, stillness.

A natural medicine

The practices of Yoga and Tantra are, at their core, technologies for bringing the mind home.

• Breath. Slow, deep breathing, especially with a longer exhale, is one of the most direct ways to signal safety to the nervous system. Prāṇāyāma is not an exercise. It is a conversation with your body.
• Movement. Āsana, shaking, dancing and somatic practice let stored tension move instead of looping in the head.
• Sound. Mantra and chanting give the mind something to hold while the vibration calms the body from the inside.
• Stillness. Meditation teaches us to watch thoughts instead of becoming them. Again and again, until the watching becomes home.
• Ritual and community. Doing this regularly, and with others, gives the nervous system what it needs most: rhythm and belonging.

I want to be clear: these practices are not a replacement for professional support when someone is in real crisis. They work beautifully alongside therapy and medical care. But for the everyday overwhelm so many of us carry, they are some of the oldest and most reliable medicine we have. And they cost nothing but your attention.

Presence is the doorway

Here is the paradox. The thing we have lost is the very thing that sets us free.

Every tradition I have studied points to the same place. The past exists only as memory. The future exists only as imagination. Life, the only life you will ever actually live, happens here. In this breath. In this body. In this room.

The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra says it simply: wherever the mind goes, outside or within, there itself is the state of Śiva. Not somewhere else. Not after you have fixed yourself. Right where you are, the moment you are fully there.

Liberation, in this view, is not an escape from life. It is the end of our escape from it.

A small practice

Try this three times today. Set a reminder if you need to.

• Stop wherever you are. Ask yourself, honestly: where is my mind right now?
• Name it without judgment: planning, worrying, remembering, here.
• Take three slow breaths, each exhale a little longer than the inhale.
• Feel your feet on the ground. Notice three things you can see, two you can hear, one you can feel on your skin.
• Come back to what you were doing, and do only that.

It takes one minute. And every time you do it, you cut a new groove: from somewhere else, back to here.

Come home,
Alexia

References

• Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.2
• Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (The Heart of Recognition), sūtra 5
• Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, verse 116
• Dhammapada, verses 1–2
• World Health Organization, World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All (2022), and WHO scientific brief on the impact of COVID-19 on mental health (March 2022)
• Matthew A. Killingsworth & Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”, Science 330 (2010)

If you are struggling right now, please reach out to a doctor, a therapist or a local crisis line. Practice and professional support belong together.