Tapas || Fire || To Burn

Personal Definition: Tapas quite literally translates to fire or heat… a burning enthusiasm but with that a wise use of our energy. Discipline, which makes most people cringe, is seriously the name of the game here. With Tapas, you must have enough respect for yourself to make choices that truly nourish your well-being and provide opportunities for expansive growth.

Experience: Observing Tapas was difficult and downright painful. Hasn’t Patanjali ever considered willpower a finite resource? There’s something about my ego that resisted all of this, every last drop. But I aimed to work with the resistance I has balled up and Tapas wound up looking different to me every day.

I started to understand its enormity when I put attention to it. Some days I wake up cartwheeling out of bed ready to attack the day with the kind of enthusiasm it takes to move mountains and then there are these funky days I can’t move an ant hill with my spirit.

When it hurts, there’s a lack of fire to keep much of the good goin’. There’s something in this stuckness that’s powerful. You know Patanjali never pictures us in fairy tales when he wrote these sutras. I consider what a world without Tapas would look like and I’m floored. ‘There must be purpose here because most of us keep waking up.’ *Cue in the Cloud Cult* Don’t you think that’s pretty neat?

So when I meditate on it, I imagine Tapas making the world go round. Imagine we can shift the axis with an awakening in consciousness. I think to myself daily how yoga has this insane ability to change the world.

I can see peace ignited with the purity and physical power that is Tapas.