You’re Not Doing It Wrong
I need to say this right up front because it’s the thing nobody tells you when you start meditating: if your mind races during meditation, you are not failing. You’re not bad at this. You don’t have some special deficiency that makes meditation impossible for you.
Your mind races because that’s what minds do. It’s literally their job. Thinking is to the mind what beating is to the heart, it doesn’t stop because you ask nicely. And every single person who has ever sat down to meditate, from the rawest beginner to Yogananda himself, has dealt with this.
“The mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate, and very strong, O Krishna, and to subdue it, I think, is more difficult than controlling the wind.”
– Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 6, Verse 34 (quoted frequently by Yogananda in his lectures)
That’s Arjuna talking, a warrior prince, someone with immense discipline and focus. And he’s saying, basically, “This is impossible.” If that doesn’t make you feel better about your own chattering mind, I don’t know what will.
The key isn’t to stop the thoughts. It’s to change your relationship with them.
The Two Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes
When thoughts arise during meditation, most people do one of two things. Both are wrong, and understanding why they’re wrong is half the battle.
Mistake One: Fighting the Thoughts
This is the most common response. A thought appears, and you clench down on it. “Stop thinking. STOP THINKING.” You try to force your mind into silence through sheer willpower, turning meditation into an arm-wrestling match between you and your own brain.
The problem is obvious once you see it: the effort to stop thinking is itself a thought. You can’t think your way to thoughtlessness. Every time you tell yourself “don’t think,” you’ve just produced another thought. It’s like trying to smooth water by slapping it.
Mistake Two: Following the Thoughts
This is subtler and more seductive. A thought appears, say, something about what you’re going to have for dinner, and instead of noticing it and returning to your practice, you follow it. Dinner becomes the grocery store, which becomes that thing your coworker said, which becomes a rehearsed argument you’ve been having in your head for three days, and suddenly fifteen minutes have passed and you’ve been meditating on your relationship with your coworker rather than anything useful.
There’s no aggression here, which makes it feel less like a failure. But the result is the same, you’ve lost the meditation.
Yogananda’s Approach: The Middle Path
Yogananda’s instruction was elegant and, once I actually understood it, changed my entire practice. He taught neither fighting nor following. He taught witnessing.
“Thoughts will come during meditation. Don’t be disturbed by them. Simply withdraw your attention. The moment you realize your mind has wandered, calmly bring it back. Again and again, patiently bring it back.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Notice the word “calmly.” Not forcefully. Not anxiously. Not with self-criticism. Just calmly, the way you’d redirect a small child who’s wandered toward the road. You don’t scream at the child. You don’t analyze why the child wandered. You just gently pick them up and point them back in the right direction.
That “picking up and pointing back”, that’s the entire practice. The thoughts aren’t the problem. The identification with the thoughts is the problem. When you can watch a thought arise, note it, and return to your point of focus without getting tangled up in it, you’re meditating correctly. Even if you have to do it five hundred times in a single session.
In fact, here’s something that reframed everything for me: each time you notice you’ve wandered and come back, that’s not a failure. That’s a repetition. That’s the mental equivalent of a bicep curl. The noticing, the moment of “oh, I was lost in thought”, is the actual exercise. Without the wandering, there’d be nothing to notice. Without the noticing, there’d be no strengthening of awareness.
Practical Strategies That Actually Work
Theory is great. But when you’re sitting on your cushion at 6 AM and your brain is producing thoughts at the rate of a firehose, you need specific things to do. Here are the strategies that have helped me most, all consistent with Yogananda’s teaching.
1. Shorten the Session (Seriously)
If you’re sitting for thirty minutes and spending twenty-eight of them lost in thought, you’re not training concentration. You’re training distraction. Cut the session to ten minutes. Or five. Find the length where you can maintain at least some awareness for most of the time, and build from there.
Five minutes of genuine attention is worth more than thirty minutes of mental wandering punctuated by two brief moments of clarity. Start where you actually are, not where you think you should be.
2. Use an Anchor Point
Give your mind something specific to rest on. Yogananda recommended several anchor points depending on the technique being practiced, but for general purposes:
The breath at the nostrils: Focus your attention on the sensation of air entering and leaving the nostrils. Don’t control the breath, just feel it. The slight coolness on the inhale, the slight warmth on the exhale. When you wander, come back to that sensation.
The point between the eyebrows: Yogananda frequently instructed students to focus at the “spiritual eye”, the point between and slightly above the eyebrows. Gently direct your closed eyes upward toward that point. Don’t strain. Just hold a soft focus there.
A word or phrase: Silently repeat a word, “peace,” “Om,” or any word that holds meaning for you, in rhythm with your breath. This gives the thinking mind a bone to chew on, something simple and repetitive that occupies it without feeding it new material.
3. Count Your Breaths
This is dead simple and remarkably effective. Inhale, count “one.” Exhale, count “two.” Inhale, “three.” Continue to ten, then start over. If you lose count (and you will), start back at one without judgment.
The counting serves two purposes. It gives the mind a task, which reduces the likelihood of it going on freelance adventures. And it gives you a clear, unmistakable signal when you’ve wandered, the moment you realize you don’t know what number you’re on, you know you were gone.
Some days I make it to ten easily. Other days I can’t get past four. Both are fine. The practice is the same either way: notice, return, begin again.
4. Name the Thought Category
This is a technique from the Buddhist tradition that pairs well with Yogananda’s teaching. When a thought arises, silently label its category. “Planning.” “Remembering.” “Worrying.” “Fantasizing.” Don’t elaborate, just name it and return to your anchor.
The labeling creates a tiny gap between you and the thought. Instead of being inside the worry, living it, feeling it, reacting to it, you’re observing it from a slight distance. “Oh, that’s worrying.” It becomes an object in your awareness rather than the entirety of your awareness.
Over time, you’ll start noticing patterns. Maybe 80% of your meditation thoughts are planning. Maybe worry dominates. This isn’t psychoanalysis, you don’t need to do anything with the information. But the awareness itself is valuable. You start to see the mind’s habits rather than being unconsciously driven by them.
The Patience Problem
Here’s the hard truth: none of this produces instant results. You’re rewiring patterns that have been running for your entire life. The restless mind didn’t develop overnight, and it won’t quiet overnight.
Yogananda was compassionate but honest about this. He compared the process to taming a wild horse. Not by breaking it, but by patient, consistent handling over time. The horse (your mind) has been running free for years. It’s going to resist the bridle. It’s going to buck. That’s not a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It’s a sign that you’re doing something important.
The meditators who succeed aren’t the ones with naturally calm minds. They’re the ones who keep showing up, who sit down day after day, face the chaos, and practice coming back. Again and again and again. Not perfectly. Not even well, some days. But consistently.
A Practice: The Three-Breath Reset
Before your next meditation session, try this. It takes thirty seconds and sets the tone for everything that follows.
Sit down. Before you begin your formal practice, take three deliberate breaths.
Breath one: As you exhale, silently say, “I release the need to control my thoughts.”
Breath two: As you exhale, silently say, “Thoughts may come. That’s okay.”
Breath three: As you exhale, silently say, “My only job is to notice and return.”
Then begin your meditation with whatever technique you use.
This tiny ritual does something important: it disarms the performance anxiety that makes racing thoughts worse. When you sit down expecting silence and get noise instead, the gap between expectation and reality creates frustration, and frustration creates more thoughts. The three-breath reset adjusts the expectation before you start. You’re not sitting down to achieve perfect stillness. You’re sitting down to practice noticing.
That’s a much gentler container. And paradoxically, the less you demand silence from your mind, the more likely it is to offer some.
After the Storm
There will be sessions, maybe not today, maybe not this month, but eventually, where the thoughts slow on their own. Where you’re watching the breath and there’s a gap between thoughts, and in that gap is something spacious and quiet and deeply restful. It might last two seconds. It might last twenty.
When it happens, don’t grab for it. Don’t think, “This is it! I’m doing it!” That thought will shatter the stillness instantly. Just be in it. Let it be what it is for as long as it is.
Those moments are what all the patience was for. And they’ll come more frequently the longer you practice. Not because you’ve gotten better at stopping thoughts, but because you’ve gotten better at not caring about them. The thoughts are still there, still doing their thing. You’ve just stopped giving them your attention. And without your attention, they lose their power, like a television playing in an empty room.
Nobody’s watching. And the silence underneath has been there the whole time.
