Tāpas - Heat

TAPAS

The Heat

The third niyama of yogic philosophy is tāpas, or self-discipline. I don't think it really means self-discipline as we know it. It means something more like friction, aggravation, unease, and the heat of discomfort. It is what we feel when Life rubs up against us in ways that are unwanted. The concept asks us, "Can I persist through the pain of this terrible thing that is happening?"

Or perhaps more accurately, it is the practice of preparing for those times.

Of all the yamas and niyamas in yoga's ethical code, tapas is probably the one that I intuitively understand best. It is also the one I like least. They say that the pose you like the least is the one you need the most (Dolphin - barf). It is the one that creates the most friction and chafing in your mind and will and discomfort in your body and breath. Your very desire to avoid this pose is the reason you should do it: it is necessary and important work to willingly do hard things so that when Life forces you to do hard things un-willingly, you are ready.

I do not like hard things at all. I will never be a person who runs a marathon, or climbs Mount Everest, or competes in a Tough Mudder. These all sound like truly terrible experiences to me. Not only do you have to go through the pain of actually doing them, you also have to go through all the pain of practicing doing them in the weeks and months leading up to the event. This sounds like a terrible idea.

But that's what tāpas is.

Maybe if I had been training for marathons all this time, the pain of securing and then losing a job recently would have felt more bearable. Maybe I would have felt better able to cope. I don't know. 

In the book The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice, Deborah Adele references the story of Jacob wrestling with God at Peniel. Actually, the text (Genesis 32:22-) says Jacob wrestled with "a man" -- it was Jacob himself who inferred from the circumstances that it was God who wrestled him.

In any case, the wrestling happened. Jacob encountered this other-worldly being whom he wrestled with all night long. As day began to break, the being crippled Jacob, but Jacob still held on. He wouldn't let go until this entity gave him a blessing.

Adele asks us, "Can we hold on to what has us in its grip, gripping it back, and not letting go until we are somehow blessed by it? Can we grow our ability to stay in the fire and let ourselves be burned until we are blessed by the very thing that is causing us pain...?"

Another translation of tāpas is catharsis and the author goes on to write, "Catharsis does not leave us untouched or unscarred. We will be bearers of the wound as well as the blessing."

In other words, tāpas is the catalyst igniting pain that will ultimately transform us.

I have been wrestling for a long, dark night. It is inconceivable to me that I am returning to the same teaching assignment again next year, with as hard as I've wrestled to get to a different one. I cannot imagine any scenario in which it is cathartic for me to remain where I am, even if there is "just one more student who needs you!"

However, this is where I am. There is a quote attributed to both Buddhist tradition and also, oddly, to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "When it rains, I let it rain." And so here I sit, existing, persisting, wrestling in the tāpas of this stalled place, acknowledging the rain.