enLIGHTened by Jessica Berger Gross

Author:Jessica Berger Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

Cultivating Tapas: No Laziness Allowed

Success in yoga comes quickly to those

who are intensely energetic. Success

varies according to the means adopted to

obtain it—mild, medium, or intense.

—Sri Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood

Without realizing it at the time, what I was doing in Nepal was cultivating tapas. Swami Prabhavananda and his coauthor, artist and writer Christopher Isherwood, write in their 1953 translation of (and commentary on) the Yoga Sutras, “Buddha pointed out that, if there is any sin, it is laziness.” Willpower, discipline—tapas, as it’s called in Sanskrit—isn’t a temporary way of being—it’s an ongoing process, a daily choice we need to make again and again about how to live.

When it comes to eating and exercise, there’s no getting around what we all know: To lose weight, you’re going to have to eat much less and exercise much more. Once you’re maintaining a healthy weight, eating wholesome, energy-giving foods in moderation, and integrating physical activity into your daily routine, it will all become much easier. But in the beginning, it’s going to be a battle. You will be hungry; you will feel like you’re spending all of your free time exercising. Everyday you’ll think about giving up. That’s where tapas comes in. Instead of feeling deprived and dejected, embrace and savor the challenge of cultivating a strong, determined, lasting inner fire.

Although yoga has always felt natural to me, I wasn’t born with any particular talent for the poses and postures. My body’s not especially flexible and wasn’t always agile—I couldn’t do a single cartwheel as a child, much less stand on my hands or head—so I had to work hard to build my yoga practice, being enthusiastic (on my best days, at least) and acquiring discipline.

Take, for example, sirsasana, or headstand pose. For me, no pose exhibits the beauty and grace of yoga asana more than headstand. Once I began practicing at the yoga center in New York, I made the pose my unspoken goal—even though it seemed so far away. When it came time for headstand I’d slink into a corner or take a bathroom break. One day, though, I gathered my nerve, raised a hand, and asked for my teacher’s help. If I positioned myself against the wall, and my teacher lifted my legs up into the pose, I was surprised to see that I could stay up—at least for a moment.

To take the next step and make the headstand my own, however, I’d need to lift myself up into the air. I tried and tried in class. I even went to a special headstand workshop and spent $40 being lifted again and again. I still couldn’t do it by myself.

Eventually, once I began studying Iyengar yoga—a precise method and style of yoga developed by yoga luminary B. K. S. Iyengar at his center in India—I learned that the key to successfully doing this intermediate posture was to work diligently on my beginning standing poses, so that I could build the strength and flexibility and sense of steadiness needed to balance in handstand.

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