Yogash Chitta Vritti Nirodhah — Yoga is the Cessation of Mental Fluctuations
The most famous definition in all yoga literature: yoga is not a posture or a breathing technique but the complete stilling of the mind's constant movement.
Patanjali's second sutra delivers the most precise and radical definition of yoga ever formulated: 'yogas chitta vritti nirodhah' — yoga is the cessation (nirodha) of the modifications (vritti) of consciousness (chitta). The mind is like a lake: when the wind of thought, desire, memory, and imagination disturbs its surface, nothing can be clearly reflected. When it becomes perfectly still, the pure light of consciousness is reflected without distortion. This definition immediately distinguishes Patanjali's yoga from physical culture or stress management: yoga is a technology of consciousness whose ultimate aim is complete mental stillness, not relaxation. The vrittis Patanjali enumerates in 1.6 — knowledge, error, imagination, sleep, and memory — are the mind's habitual, self-referential activity that stillness dissolves.
Yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind-stuff.
Swami Vivekananda's commentary on this sutra remains the gold standard: he explains that all suffering arises from the mind's restlessness, and that every spiritual practice — whether Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Sufi — ultimately aims at this same stillness through different methods.
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Written about in
- What the Yoga Sutras say about a steady mind
Patanjali defines yoga itself as the stilling of the mind's movements. The ethics, the posture and the breath all exist in this text to serve that single aim.