The Three Root Desires : 6.

You can adopt one method if you are students of yoga who are intent on real practice for self-development. Have a diary, and when you wake up in the morning, write down the first thought that occurs to your mind. As far as possible, write down all the thoughts that arise in your mind throughout the day until you go to bed at night. When you are busy working, you may not be able to do this always. But if you sit quietly for a few minutes in the evening, you will be able to gather a general idea of the processes of thought that occurred to your mind throughout the day.

Let there be a list of all the thoughts that arose in your mind on one particular day, from morning to night. Do this for one month. Let there be thirty pages of your diary, giving a list of thirty sets of ideas that occurred on thirty days. You can strike a common denominator of the whole process, and you can know something about yourself. "This is the kind of person that I am. For one month I have been basically thinking this kind of thing. I encountered this. I faced that. I handled this in this manner."

When I speak of your need to make a checklist of your thoughts, I also mean the things that you faced, encountered, and had to deal with in your daily life: how many people you met, and your reaction to them; how you felt; how you handled it, etc. After a month's practice like this, you will be able to take the cream of your thoughts from this large assemblage of various bits of thinking. The whole of yoga practice is a psychological process. A student of yoga has to be a good psychologist. It is not that you have to teach psychology to somebody; rather, you have to teach yourself how your mind is working.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ...