A wandering mind is an unhappy mind (2010) [pdf]
wjh.harvard.edu
wjh.harvard.edu
But the author then inverts this causally and states "mind-wandering is likely a cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness".
Behind this opinion are the assumptions that unhappiness is a nuisance causally disconnected from your environment, that it should to be avoided with a mental trick, and that mind-wandering is an otherwise unproductive side effect of having an undisciplined mind.
On a fundamental level I think it's wrong to advocate against the wandering mind, because wandering brains are exploring brains. We definitely want that. Not enjoying the status quo is what drives progress. Worries, anxieties, regrets, those all have a valuable place in a well-rounded life and they're a part of learning, too.
The idea of optimizing superficial enjoyment by hacking your mental state only instead of hacking the environment which makes you unhappy is not a good solution overall. It certainly isn't a valid problem solving strategy. Hacking your mental state may work if you suspect you're unusually unhappy without a good reason. Outside of clinical depression there is actually a good external reason for unhappiness more often than not.
Telling people their unhappiness is a purely mental defect they need to overcome strikes me as particularly insidious. Instead of making yourself more compliant and passive, why not go out and change things?
Being unhappy is first and foremost a signal how something about your situation needs to change. In most cases, the answer "stay in the moment, citizen, and carry on" strikes me as the kind of self help content that doesn't help anybody. Contantly and single-mindedly maximizing happiness is shallow and ultimately meaningless.
- The quality of their claims is directly related to the quality of their input. There is no discussion on the quality of their input.
- They by no means justify their causal relation assumption
- They make weird claims, for example they call their method a "gold standard", but there does not exist a gold standard for this kind of pseudo-science at all. And their method has the same flaws they mention other methods have.
and yes, the default mode of the mind is to wander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
The difference is about 10%, it might be a very solid 10% more happy, but god, scratching my back can make me 10% more happy :-D
As a side-effect it calms the mind due to proper physiological balance (better saturation of hemoglobin, less tension in muscles, which in turn influences other sub-systems. such as digestive, etc.)
Yoga is the same kind of a necessary training routine as when children learn how to read before they could read "serious" books. But this is so-called non-verbal skill.
More accurately, it is acquisition of set of skills of remaining in a proper balance, very similar to bicycle riding. Once the body learns (new habits of keeping balance has been developed) you could ride any kind of bicycle and will never forget how to do it.
The bicycle you're leaning to ride (by doing) with yoga is your own mind whose states you lean to control "non-verbally" via states of your body.
Disease, inertia, doubt, lack of enthusiasm, laziness, sensuality, mind-wandering, missing the point, instability- these distractions of the mind are the obstacles
Those are the obstacles to Yoga. In some ways we can say, then, in a very simple way, that Yoga is not only stopping the mind-wandering, but nonetheless, ceasing the mind-wandering is Yoga.
More interesting questions are how it works and why it works. Modern human physiology and cognitive neuroscience has some nice models. Homeostasis and the ability of one "sub-system" influence others via feed-back loos from physiology is just another name for Eastern notion of "proper balance", while Minsky's "society of mind" gives you insight about multitude of pseudo-independent, highly-specialized "competing agencies", non-verbal ones.
There is no other scientifically studied mechanisms but training of neural networks which is another name for "habituation" and these physiological feed-back loops.
Apart from parables, scientific study of yoga physiological effects is obviously a good thing. Only, it's something culturally very far from the kind of knowledge that made yoga possible.
This is an artistic impression of how "body and mind" works, and this notion is as ancient as Vedas, but it does not happen to be expressed in such clever graphical form. Instead, it has been expressed in verbal form, in short snippets across Upanishads and, perhaps, Vedas.
This artistic impression also captures fundamental concepts of feed-back loops and recursion, which could explain lots of Nature's phenomena, from weather to circuits in your iPhone.
"Self-awareness" is just another name for recursion - like "to focus your attention on the contents/state of your consciousness" which could be verbally expressed as "that third eye which is looking inside one's own skull".
Btw, you cannot draw that on a tanka, so ancient Indian and then Tibetan artists render it as a eye in the forehead "looking outside", which, of course, should not be interpreted literally, like so many do.)
Technically, these two hands depicts so-called Mutual Recursion where two "processes" are "feeding" each other. This is a crude "high-level" model (a body-mind mutual recursion) of what happened in Yoga.
In your quote it has been stated that you should "calm your mind and remove all distractions first" because they are obstacles to Yoga, and then, that "Yoga is that state of unity (within yourself and with the Whole) without any impurities". So, where shall we start? The answer is - looking at these two hands - it doesn't matter. It is a mutual recursion.
Extend it with notion of multiple agencies (processes) so it will be n-process mutual recursion, to complex to be grasped by mind at once, like this clever but naive picture.
One side note. You might think that you are having a conversation with someone with superficial understanding, based on some popular memes, but no, I am cultural guide and mountaineering instructor in Himalaya regions and North India for years.)