301. Burning Down the House! - Tapas

301. Tapas: Burning Down the House!
If a little heat transforms us, isn't more heat better?
In this final episode on tapas, we return to Yoga Sutra 2.43:
kāyendriya-siddhir aśuddhi-kṣayāt tapasaḥ
Through tapas, impurities are diminished or worn away, bringing accomplishment or mastery of the body and senses.
But how much heat is too much?
Fire can cook your dinner.
Fire can also burn your house right down to the ground.
The same can be true of discipline.
After decades of practicing Ashtanga Yoga, I'm grateful for the discipline of showing up, practicing when I didn't feel like practicing, and staying with it year after year.
But as I've gotten older — and hopefully a little wiser — my relationship with discipline has changed.
My body has changed.
My ability to recover has changed.
And my understanding of practice has changed.
Which raises an important question:
Is your discipline serving your life — or have you started serving the discipline?
We need some friction for transformation.
But if our practice is constantly injuring us, making us rigid, becoming obsessive, or feeding our ego, maybe what we're practicing isn't tapas anymore.
Sometimes tapas means showing up and doing the difficult thing.
Sometimes it means accepting what life has given us.
And sometimes tapas is having the patience to allow time to do its healing.
So as we finish this series on tapas, ask yourself:
Is my discipline making me more rigid — or more compassionate?
Is it making me more judgmental — or more capable of accepting life exactly as it is?
And if I'm increasingly grasping and gripping for control:
Is that tapas — or is it ego?
Yoga Sutra 2.43
kāyendriya-siddhir aśuddhi-kṣayāt tapasaḥ
Om, Peace, Out!