Patanjali's yoga sutras

योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोध – yogaś-citta-vr̥tti-nirodhaḥ
yogaś = yoke
citta = mental
vr̥tti = vortex
nirodhaḥ = stop

Stop being yoked to mental vortexes.

It’s through chitta, individual consciousness, that the Universe observes itself. Your individual consciousness is one with Cosmic Consciousness. To observe itself, it has endowed you with infinite ways to experience creation, but the paradox is, that the constant rush of sensations, emotions, thoughts, and actions can be overwhelming—even before the judging mind starts complicating things. That’s chitta vritti, consciousness consumed by mental vortexes.

“Every unfulfilled desire, every wave of like or dislike, every karmic action creates a subtle vortex of energy, which the ego spins around itself. They are held together by the centripetal thought: ‘I want this; I reject that; I like this; I don’t like that; This is what I have done; That is what I failed to accomplish.’”  – Swami Kriyananda

Pantanjali says to stop (nirodhaḥ) being yoked (yoga) to the mental vortexes (chitta vrtti). When you stop identifying with the mental vortexes and deprive them of your attention, they start to slow and eventually come to stillness.

Nirodhaḥ is often translated as stopping the mental vortexes, but that isn’t so easy. If you’ve ever been frustrated during meditation with the difficulty of trying to stop the chattering voice in your head, you know how counterproductive this can be. It’s like trying to stop a whirlpool of water by splashing your hand around in it. The only thing that works is to put a stopper in the drain and wait for the water to calm itself.

Yes, one of the peak experiences we seek in yoga is when the whirling vortexes of the mind still long enough to reveal the unvarnished bliss of conscious existence, but that is less likely to arrive by slamming the breaks on an excitable stream of consciousness, than by patiently allowing it to run its course, not paying it much mind, and diverting your attention to a neutral fixed point, like the breath, the third eye, or a mantra. Eventually, the mind will become calm.

The Wizard of Oz is the perfect parable of yogaś-citta-vr̥tti-nirodhaḥ. At the beginning of the movie, Dorothy is terrified by her neighbor Almira Gulch who was bitten by her little dog Toto and is now threatening to have him euthanized. When the cyclone comes, Dorothy sees Gulch riding her bicycle become a wicked witch riding a broom—her mental vortexes are in full-on catastrophy mode. Nirodhaḥ of the chitta vrtti finally comes when the cyclone drops Dorothy’s house on the witch.

The moral of the story is that the cyclone of experience might lift your house off its foundation, but no matter how crazy things get, there’s calm at the eye of the storm that you can retreat to.

This is the gift of the Ruby Slippers, a symbol of the Muladhara Chakra’s power to bring us back to safety and belonging whenever we feel uprooted. Dorothy goes off to see the Wizard to find it before realizing it she had it all along. All she has to do is close her eyes, click her heels together, and chant, “There’s no place like home.”

If you keep going inward toward the peace of Cosmic Consciousness, you will free yourself from the cyclones of the mind and crush those wicked-witch thoughts!