Purpose & Orientation Before Practice
Yoga of Attention is a practice for understanding and training attention across mind, body, and energy. It is rooted in classical yoga as articulated by Patañjali and oriented toward lived application rather than performance, identity, or belief.
Before yoga is something we do, it is something that clarifies how we see.
Patañjali begins the Yoga Sūtras by defining the aim of yoga rather than by listing techniques. He does this because, without a clear understanding of where we are going (and why), we risk using the very instrument that binds us to seek liberation through it.
Yoga is traditionally defined as the settling or sealing of the movements of the mind so that awareness is no longer misidentified with those movements. When misidentification occurs, attention is carried outward, pulled by habit, memory, desire, and fear. From this confusion arises distraction, suffering, and a sense of fragmentation.
Yoga does not remove thought.
Yoga reveals that we are not the thought.
This distinction matters deeply.
Much of what is spoken today as “awakening,” “oneness,” or “I am awareness” often remains within the realm of the mind itself… repeated, inherited, or imagined rather than realized. Without understanding how the mind evolves, how consciousness becomes entangled with experience, and how identification forms, such statements remain conceptual and can easily become another identity.
The journey inward that yoga points toward is not vague or symbolic. Patañjali describes this inward movement with great precision. It is a return through the layers of mind and perception toward their source. But to understand where we are going, we must first understand where we came from.
This is why the evolution of prakṛti (the unfolding of mind, ego-sense, and perception) is an essential context for practice. Without it, yoga risks being misunderstood as self-improvement, transcendence, or control, rather than liberation through discernment.
Yoga of Attention exists to restore this clarity.
