Practicing Tapas can include the development of many disciplined habits, such as making time each morning for yoga, journaling, or cooking yourself a simple breakfast. Even making the bed each morning can be a discipline you practice. In this sense, Tapas can also be described as consistency in habit. Tapas, or fire, means that you will cleanse and purify yourself of habits that are not benefiting you and replace those habits with disciplined practices that self-improve.
Applying Tapas to your asana practice is done by striving to improve your skill, to hold poses longer or to achieve more advanced poses. Tapas is not gained by forcing a pose that you are not ready for just for the sake of pushing through the pain and nailing the pose. Pain and difficulty do not guarantee that you are growing, advancing, or practicing Tapas.
It means pushing outside of your comfort zone for the betterment of yourself and your relationships. By lighting a fire within yourself, which purifies and cleanses your spirit, you invite self-improvement and peace. Tapas will burn you at first while you get used to breaking old habits to forge new ones.
While first embracing Tapas can be uncomfortable and difficult, the fire within your spirit will begin to purify your intention and desire so that your practice becomes energizing. Practicing yoga in this way, working toward Tapas, means letting go of safety nets that are holding us back from being truly self-aware and becoming our authentic self. Patterns have been etched into us for years that aren’t doing anything to improve our lives or bring us closer to anything worth achieving - patterns like checking our email, Facebook or Twitter on a constant basis, not being fully present in conversation with each other, multi-tasking, or turning on the television when we get home from work. The list is endless. As a society, we have become far removed from ourselves and our relationships. Tapas allows us to extricate ourselves from the minutiae and mundane habits that consume our days. While uncomfortable (or even downright terrifying) at first, the fire within you will alight and help you shed destructive patterns in favor of healthy disciplines.
In a sense, the fire within us while practicing Tapas is a fire we use to burn the obstacles and worldly desires that stand in the way of our journey to peace and the Divine. This is not to say that we cannot enjoy worldly possessions and joys while practicing yoga; however, we may find that some luxuries or habits are truly in the way of our path to peace and enlightenment. In these cases, we must weigh the desire for the object or practice against the benefits of lighting the purifying fire of Tapas within ourselves. To do without secular luxuries can be a blessing in disguise as we learn to let go and better ourselves in body, mind, and spirit.
How do you practice Tapas?
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