Week Three: Tapas

 तपस्

 Dear Sadhakas, 
This week we will focus on tapas as a foundation of our sadhana.
Sadhana or practice is defined as:

Kriya yoga—the activity and practice of yoga and this is broken into in three distinct practices that overlap and support each other. :

1. tapas (discipline, stoking the internal fire producing the will to transform, clarifying body and mind)

2. svadyaya (unflinching self-reflection and sincere study)

3. Isvara pranidhana (awareness and focus on something greater than yourself, laying the fruit of your actions at the foot of something larger than your own desires.)

Our practice in the asana (postures) and praynayama (mindful breathing practice) serves as a foundation for all three parts of kriya yoga. Asana directly impacts the anamaya kosha (the physical diminsion) and praynayama impacts the pranamaya kosha (the vital energies). However all the elements of self are being challanged, changed and supported by these practices, particularly when they are undertaken on a daily basis and with sincere effort towards learning and growing. In other words as the sadhana is established, the tapas is stimulated. This stimulates greater self-reflection that reveals the awareness of an newly awakened features of our consciousness. 

Readings for Week 3

Tapas: From Yoga Sutras 
 Emmet Fox's 7 Day Mental Diet 

Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.

—Karlheinz Stockhausen

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

—Lao Tzu

 

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
—Simone de Beauvoir
 

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
—Pierre Teillard de Chardin

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
—Frederick Douglass

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet