I prepared these notes for  a seminar I taught for Edinburgh and Lothians Yoga Association in November 2014.  The whole of Yoga is of course about balancing the mind, with many different pathways, so I gave myself an impossible task!

Here are some extracts from the background material:

What is the mind?

How does the brain,  that 3lb mass of tissue inside our skulls, relate to the mind?  This problem has exercised philosophers (including spiritual masters of many traditions) for thousands of years. 

Cogito, ergo sum:  I am thinking, therefore I exist.  (Descartes, 1637)

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1738).

Psychologists and other scientists have joined the search in the last 150 years or so.  In modern western thinking, the mind is...