Tapas – Discipline and Austerity
Tapas can be translated into ‘discipline’ or ‘burning enthusiasm’. This Niyama helps us cultivate a sense of self-discipline, inner fire, passion and courage. Tapas has many meanings. How it is expressed in you can be different to someone else’s experience. It is your inner wisdom that you sometimes ignore and it’s the fiery passion that feeds your sense of purpose!
Tapas is about overcoming desires and impulses to achieve a greater goal. It therefore follows nicely from Santosha where you are cultivating contentment and releasing cravings. You need a level of tapas to stop the habits you form through your cravings.
Tapas is also often associated with the practice of fasting or self-restraint and the willingness to endure hardship for the sake of spiritual growth.
“Through ascesis or training of the senses (tapas), there comes a destruction of mental impurities and an ensuing mastery or perfection over the body and the mental organs of senses and actions (indriyas).”
Tapas is doing something you do not want to do that will have a positive effect on your life. When your will conflicts with the desire of your mind an internal “fire” is created which illuminates and burns up your mental and physical impurities.
Tapas transforms and purifies you as well as enabling conscious awareness and control over your unconscious impulses and poor behaviour.
Tapas builds the willpower and personal strength to help us become more dedicated to our practice of yoga, and other aspects of life.
It is Tapas that enables you to come to class each week, or to roll out your mat and do yoga at home. It is Tapas that enables you to plan your meals each week to ensure you eat healthy and wholesome foods. It is Tapas that ensures that you let go of your cravings and cultivate an attitude of gratitude.
On your mat you can practice tapas by committing to making the time to get on your mat to meditate or to move. For some being still and observing the mind will be tapas, whereas for others it might be working on strength and balance. It might also mean practising poses that you usually avoid.
Off your mat the practice of tapas might be learning to breathe through challenging situations, just like you do in challenging poses on the mat. It might be having the discipline to say “no” to ensure your diary isn’t over busy.
Take time to think about where and how discipline, commitment and will power are needed in your life, what one change would you like to achieve, write it down and use tapas to help you realise it.
Tapas for me is making sure that I take time to practice yoga, meditate and walk every day as I know this helps my overall wellbeing and ability to cope with everything else in my daily life. It hasn’t been easy to get to this point and it is really only in the last year that I have managed to establish this with any consistency.
I still need to work on my ability to say “No”. I have a habit of overfilling my diary with commitments, even when I know I need to rest. There will always be opportunities for practising will-power in life.