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You read a message and immediately wonder why it sounds cold. Someone does not reply and your mind starts filling in the silence. You scroll past a photograph and, without really noticing it, begin comparing your life to someone else’s.
We do this constantly: interpreting, anticipating, remembering, judging and filling in the gaps.
We rarely encounter the world without interpretation.
We experience it through a mind that is remembering, comparing, anticipating, protecting, judging and making meaning from what it sees.
Yoga understood something about this long before we had algorithms competing for our attention.
Patañjali speaks of the movements of the mind, the vṛttis. Some are based on clear perception. Others arise from misunderstanding, imagination, memory or sleep. The problem is not that the mind moves. That is what minds do. The problem begins when we mistake every movement for truth.
In the Yoga Sūtras, these movements are described with surprising nuance: pramāṇa, valid cognition; viparyaya, misperception; vikalpa, imagination or conceptualisation; nidrā, sleep; and smṛti, memory.
In other words, yoga does not suggest that everything the mind produces is false. But it does remind us that not everything the mind produces is necessarily true either.
Our minds fill in gaps because they have to. We interpret tone, facial expressions, memories and fragments of information in order to navigate the world. Much of this happens before we are even aware of it.
Yoga is not asking us to distrust the mind, but to understand its habits well enough that interpretation does not automatically become reality.
And modern life gives those movements endless material.
A photograph becomes evidence that someone else has a better life.
A headline becomes an entire worldview.
A comment becomes rejection.
Someone’s silence becomes a story about what they must be thinking.
A carefully edited thirty seconds becomes something we compare our ordinary Tuesday to.
Then the algorithm notices what keeps us looking and gives us more of it.
More outrage.
More beauty to compare ourselves with.
More certainty.
More fear.
More people who already agree with us.
Before long, it can become difficult to know where reality ends and our interpretation begins.
This is one reason the practice of yoga asks so much of our attention.
Not so that we become detached from the world, but so that we can meet it with a little more clarity.
Can I notice the thought without immediately believing it?
Can I recognise when I am projecting?
Can I stay curious when my mind desperately wants to be certain?
Can I distinguish what I actually know from what I have assumed?
Perhaps one of the most radical practices today is simply learning to see before we react.
To create a little space between what happens and the story the mind tells about what happened.
That space does not mean becoming passive or indifferent. It gives us the possibility of responding with more discernment.
We may still disagree, act, speak up, set boundaries or change our minds. But perhaps we can do so from a place that is slightly less entangled in assumption.
Yoga is not telling us to stop thinking.
It invites us to become intimate enough with the mind that we are no longer ruled by every thought it produces.
And in a world built to capture our attention, that kind of inner freedom feels increasingly important.
This is not coming from someone who always has her mind under control. I know very well how convincing a thought can feel once the mind has built a whole story around it.
Maybe that is exactly why this practice matters to me.
Not because yoga has made me immune to projection, assumption or overthinking, but because it keeps inviting me to notice them a little sooner. To question what feels certain. To create a little more space. And, when I can, to meet both myself and the world with a little more clarity.
See you on the mat for your urban exhale.
Namas-té,
Ine
