Niyama #3 Tapas
By Lisa Longton
The third niyama (a.k.a. personal practices/spiritual discipline) is Tapas, which is often misunderstood when translated as austerity. Tapas means to burn or create heat, as anything burned out will be purified.
To put tapasya into practice, you need to know that it is divided into three categories: physical, verbal and mental. The physical category is easier to understand; we understand self discipline, such as the physical tapas of fasting helps us to burn away excess fat along with the toxins our bodies have accumulated. It’s also easy to understand how a hard workout seems to bring pain in the beginning, but we know it is eventually beneficial to the body.
The verbal practice of tapas is austerity of speech. “Speech should bring tranquility and be truthful, pleasant, and beneficial”. With verbal tapas we learn to observe silence, to control our speech.
To put tapas into practice to affect mental austerity we practice having “serenity of mind, goodheartedness, self-control and purity of nature”. Through mental tapas we burn through our old impressions allowing for more present-moment mindedness to prevail.
But how can we use a burning process or heat to purify our mental impurities? To clean a cloth we put it in hot water with soap, beat, tumble and roll it in a washing machine, dry in a hot dryer and even iron it. The cloth undergoes tapasya to become pure. But no, we cannot do this to the mind, but we can use pain as our tool to wash, squeeze, toss, dry and iron. Swami Satchidananda advises, “accept all pain that comes”.
When you receive negative feedback at work, for example, do you take it as an insult and have your feelings hurt? Or is it valuable, giving you insight on how to possibly adjust, adapt, or better accommodate and improve your performance? The mental practice of tapas helps us learn how to keep a serene mind even while facing pain, and make clear and calm decisions of the actions we decide to take.
The practice of tapas allows us to see that by accepting all pain that comes, we can use pain as a tool for its purifying effects. The nature of the mind is to avoid pain, and run after pleasure, but the yogi has elevated his mind. The normal mind has been described as a wild horse pulling a chariot: the body is the chariot, the intelligence is the charioteer, the mind is the reins and the horses are the senses. The passenger inside the chariot is the true you, the Self. If the horses are allowed to run without any control (the senses run amok), the journey will not be safe for the passenger. Therefore the yogi uses the mind to control the senses.
Tapas helps us to see how pain, whether it is physical, mental, or even emotional pain can be used to free our body and consciousness to attain higher levels of awareness.