New Year, Niyama: Cultivating Tapas On and Off the Mat
I’ve made New Year’s resolutions every year since I was ten years old. When I was younger, I would make comprehensive list of over a dozen goals, encompassing far more promises to myself than I could ever hope to keep. And while I know the conventional wisdom regarding resolutions (studies show that eighty percent of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by mid-February), I still sit down with my pad and paper on December 31st, more for the tradition of it than anything else: a way to check in with myself and see how my ambitions have shifted in the past year or two or 10. About a decade ago, I started limiting myself to five resolutions, and while some are always situationally specific (finish a project, complete a certification, etc.) a few themes tend to repeat from year to year. Regardless of what I accomplish or how I change, there are three areas in which, in my own annual estimation, I can always improve: food, money, and family. And despite the genuine resolve I feel every year as the countdown to midnight adds a sort of symbolic punctuation to my intentions, by mid-March I tend to be back where I started: eating a bowl of cereal at midnight next to an untouched copy of Investing For Dummies while letting a call from my sister go to voicemail for the third time that week.
For years I thought my inability to stick to my resolutions was a problem of will power, namely that I simply didn’t have any, or not nearly enough. My mother has the self-discipline of an elite athlete or an oblate of a particularly abstemious convent, and although she is unfailingly kind, she has always been somewhat bemused to realize that complete self-control is a struggle for other people. My sister inherited her temperament, including her iron will, which didn’t help assuage my belief that my character was simply inherently weaker. I am far more like my late father, who was creative and innovative and tremendously sensitive, but also self-indulgent, impulsive, and easily bored. So it was a true epiphany for me, in my early study of yoga, to learn about the concept of tapas.
Sometimes translated as “burning discipline,” tapas is one of the five niyamas—the second of the eight limbs of yogic philosophy as described by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. Observation of the five yamas (the first limb, translated as restrictions or restraints) and the five niymamas (personal observances) are considered moral imperatives in yoga: they are the roadmap for righteous living. It’s not uncommon for a new yogi to be daunted upon learning about the yamas and niyamas— including expectations of purity, truthfulness, an even temper, and self-mastery, they can seem like a lot to live up to. It might seem counterintuitive that I was so thrilled to learn about tapas, given my track-record with will power. But yoga philosophy teaches that mastery of the eight limbs of yoga is not only possible, it’s the point of existence. For me, learning about tapas opened the door to self-discipline as a possibility: rather than a God-given talent that just wasn’t in my make-up, the Yoga Sutras teach that tapas is a virtue elemental to human nature—all human nature— it just needs to be cultivated. And here’s the really beautiful part: the practice of yoga itself inherently strengthens tapas.
So if you, like me, are feeling pretty good about ahimsa (non-violence) or saucha (cleanliness), but could use a bit of work keeping your nose to the grindstone, here are four tips for cultivating tapas on and off the mat.
1. Pin Down the Why
If you’ve ever had a conversation with a three-year-old, you already know how to go about this step. Once a child grasps the concept of “why?”, she will ask ask it over and over and over again until she reaches something fundamental (or gets distracted by goldfish crackers). Take this approach when setting a goal for yourself. Keep asking yourself why the goal is important until you find the emotional core. For example, say my goal is to increase my lower back flexibility. Why? Because I want to be able to do a “full” urdhva dhanurasana. Why? Because everyone else in my Saturday class can do one. Why does that matter? Because many of them aren’t even yoga teachers, and I am. And why does that matter? Because it makes me feel like a fraud! Ah, now we’ve hit bedrock—I don’t want to achieve a full urdhva danurasana per se, I want to feel more confident in my role as a yoga teacher. I’ll be far more likely to achieve my goal if I grasp the fundamental why. Now is the time to ask myself, “Will accomplishing this pose truly make me more confident as a teacher?” If the answer is yes, it’s far more likely that working towards my goal will fuel tapas. If the answer is no, it’s likely that frustration will deplete tapas before I’ve succeeded. At this point, I should ask myself, “When do I feel truly confident as a teacher?” If the answer is, “When I look around the room and see relaxed faces in savasana at the end of a class,” then perhaps I should adjust my goal to finding my particular niche as a teacher, creating a workshop, or increasing my teaching hours over the next year. When our goals align with our values—what we actually value—tapas will naturally ignite.
2. Keep It Simple
Studies demonstrate that people who make concrete, visual plans to implement their goals succeed at 2-3x the rate of those who don’t, but only if they pursue one goal at a time. And further studies demonstrate that people who achieve what they set out to do succeed not because they have superior discipline, but because they cultivate tapas through effective use of habits. You can set goals in different areas of your life, but if you want to maintain the discipline you need to succeed, you should plan on letting one habit fully take root before your start working on a second. It takes approximately 66 days for a newly seeded habit to fully blossom into automatic behavior, meaning that you if you’ve set just three New Year’s resolutions, under the most ideal circumstances, it will take a minimum of half a year to establish the habits necessary to keep them. You’re most likely to keep your tapas burning if you approach your goals in a way that makes sense progressively.
Say your resolutions are to meditate daily, commit to three hours per week of cardiovascular exercise, and lose fifteen pounds. It make sense to pursue them in the following order: first, establish the exercise habit with the intention of completing your activity daily at a time that will eventually be free for meditation—ideally towards the end of the day. Once the exercise habit is established, begin developing the meditation habit, as seated meditation especially is much easier if the body is already physically spent, plus, if you spend 66 days developing a cardio habit that incorporates strengthening the lower back, seated meditation will that much easier to achieve. Finally, after four months of regular cardiovascular exercise, you may find that your goal of losing fifteen pounds can be substantially readjusted, or has become completely moot. Tapas feeds on itself—successfully establishing one habit creates a behavioral framework to establish the next.
3. Set Micro-Goals
I once had a creative writing teacher who did not believe in writer’s block. His position was that writers avoid writing for two reasons: 1) they dread sitting down to write and finding that nothing comes out, and 2) they set early goals—“I will get up every morning before work and write from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m.”—that are far too ambitious. His solution to the problem—which changed my writing life—was twofold: 1) Give yourself permission to write badly. The important thing is to write. If you sit at your computer and write “I have no ideas” for ten minutes a day for a week, this is substantially better than not doing so, because you are establishing a habit of writing. The same is true of your yoga practice. If you hate inversions but want to master them, don’t set an early goal of practicing inversions every day. Make a sequence of simple poses you enjoy that strengthen the muscles and develop the balance you’ll need to eventually master one inversion (a process called vinyasa krama), and resolve to complete the sequence daily, or three times a week—whatever feels 100% doable and triggers no stress. Eventually you will notice that you are stronger and your balance has improved, and you will feel much more confident trying out that shoulder stand.
2) This one is incredibly important: set yourself goals that trigger absolutely zero mental resistance—ZERO—and begin there. If your goal is to sit in meditation daily for an hour before bed, but you find yourself continually putting it off and finding excuses, sit down and ask yourself how long you can commit, right now, to meditating each night and feel absolutely no resistance. If you feel resistance at ten minutes, lower it to five. If you feel resistance to five, lower it further. If you get down to 60 seconds of meditation before you feel absolutely zero resistance committing to a nightly practice, then that’s where you begin, with absolutely no self-judgment. It is extremely likely that over time you will find yourself naturally extending you practice to three, ten, twenty and eventually even that 60 minutes you originally intended. But if you’re like me, you will put off beginning until you have a micro-goal that triggers zero mental resistance.
This practice not only works like magic, it also dovetails neatly with a maxim I learned from my master teacher in my yoga therapy program which has impacted my practice more than any other yoga advice I’ve ever received, to wit: “The best yoga practice is the one you do.” Sixty-six days of a consistent five-minute meditation practice is far more beneficial than ten or twenty thirty-minute meditations done sporadically over the same period of time. And the chances are excellent that the length of your practice will grow and grow, because every time you sit down to meditate for another consecutive day, your tapas builds. Self-discipline is all about consistency. When you’ve established the habit, progression and challenge will follow, because you’ll get bored: you’ll want new challenges, deeper experiences, and more difficult skills. But you’ll never set that foundation if you don’t start with zero resistance.
4. Reward Yourself For Milestones (Even The Small Ones!)
When I started my 200-hour training, I learned about meditating with a mala, and I noticed that many experienced yogis in my training wore full malas as well as mala bracelets. I wanted a mala bracelet for myself, but I decided to wait until I completed my training to buy one. I spent some downtime shopping online and researching different stones until I had my ideal mala picked out. Envisioning the day that I would put it on, and what wearing it would mean to me, helped me stay focused on my goal. Similarly, I decided on a small meaningful purchase I wanted to reward myself with when I completed my 500-hour designation, and each time I finished a training that brought me closer to that goal, I rewarded myself with some time spent seeking the perfect item and narrowing down my choice. On a smaller scale, I inform my husband when I’m working towards a pose and periodically ask him to check my progress. After I’ve spent weeks or months building strength or flexibility and finally achieve a pose, we mark it in some way. It’s not as if we went to the Russian Tea Room the first time I was able to hold chaturanga, but we certainly toasted in front of the TV that night, and he was proud of me. Having a friend or family member invested in your progress, and respecting your own hard work enough to celebrate it, are like gusts of oxygen that help your tapas to flare.
Speaking of my husband (an iron-will type like my mother—let’s not examine that too closely), he often jokes that he may be a perfectionist, but I am a “good enough-ist.” But perfectionists often need help cultivating tapas, as well: the pressure of needing to be perceived as perfect can lead to maladaptive behaviors such as procrastination, as well as mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Whether you identity as a perfectionist, a good enough-ist, or something in between, if you apply the suggestions above, you will be well on your way to cultivating the tapas that will aid you tremendously in reaching your personal goals in your yogic life and beyond.
Looking to study yoga therapy and how to modify your teaching to make the most of tapas? Check out our Trainings Page for upcoming yoga therapy modules.
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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.
