Tapas. Austerity, heat of yoga practice (Niyama)

Patanjali Yoga Sutras says, “Practice of austerity (asceticism) removes impurities; body and sense organs become perfect.”

By practicing austerity, discipline, and yoga, we extract energy that we call tapas.

In older times, tapas was standing on one leg in water for many days or keeping a hand above the head for many days. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna did great penance for Lord Shiva to please him and gain a very powerful weapon. So he went to the Himalayas and started doing his tapas.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati explains that, etymologically, the word tapas means process of purification, through which a person becomes mature.

Tapas – it’s like universal energy that helps you to realize all kinds of ideas: for spiritual development, for realizing projects, ideas, even for pleasures.

When you have tapas, everything is going very well in life, with success. When you have no tapas, it’s very hard to do something in life, we fail in everything.

When we do good things for other people, we get energy of gratitude. When we do yoga practice, we transform this energy of gratitude and extract tapas. For example, you give somebody an apple, and you get his energy of gratitude. After that you do yoga practice, austerity, and penance, and you get tapas. This tapas you can use for your spiritual development.

It’s possible to do good things for other people.
It’s possible to do the will of gods (as in the example from Mahabharata, Arjuna).

Benefits of Tapas

1) You purify yourself from inside.
2) You get energy tapas that help you to grow spiritually.
3) Your willpower becomes much stronger.
4) You control your mind and senses.
5) You come back to your real nature.

How to practice Tapas

1) Do regular yoga practice: asanas, pranayama, meditation, bandhas.
2) Do more positive things for other people.
3) Self-discipline.
4) Follow as many Yama and Niyama principles as possible (moral principles).

Yoga is always about askesis and tapas, challenging your possibilities and heating your inner fire.

Usual people mostly try to work with the material world: how to take care materially of his family, buy a house, grow in career, and create relationships with relatives, friends, and colleagues. For most of the people, their highest award is to earn a lot of money and become a successful, powerful person. But for a usual person, it’s very hard to be a real yogi. He will not be able to know his Self, until he gains the strongest willpower and tames the ego. Spiritual practice requires much more. Tapas and self-discipline every day.

In order to reach this state, you need to always train yourself, fight for this, challenge yourself, and always win. Why for people it’s very hard? Because they have a lot of worldly desires, their energy channels is narrow and blocked, a lot of limitations, ignorance, and old information, very weak will.

So always train your will, you will control yourself, your body, and your senses.