How much of the world had I missed while living in my head? If each cell in our bodies is an outpost of our brains, what might I have learned? I'll never know who that adventurous little girl might have become. But at least I know that she's still there - waiting to enter the present. Gloria Steinem from her book Moving Beyond Words
Yesterday, I had a profound experience with psychosynthesis. As I continue to learn more about self, my meditation reading today connect this experience with Karma Yoga. Allow me to share some words from Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates & Katrina Kenison. The essence of tapas is the yearning desire to know more, the desire to integrate lost selves, the passion to live fully. All of us are set on a trajectory by the circumstances of our birth gender, class, family, and life experiences. The sum total of all these forces in our lives, and the choices we make concerning those forces is our karma. Karma is the momentum of all the external forces in our lives, including the consequences of choices we have made in the past. Tapas (one of the Niyamas which is a branch of the eight limb path of yoga) is the generation of internal momentum to counteract the momentum of karma. As written, the earlier stages of such a journey, during which we acknowledge and reclaim our lost selves, are quite painful. Grieving the harm we have done to ourselves is part of the process. Later, we must hold to the vision of a new life in the face of adversity. In both legs of the journey, tapas is the energy that sees us through. Tapas is the will both to look at what we have lost and to see what we can reclaim. An analogy might be like we woke up one day and we found ourselves mindlessly floating down a river. We must first acknowledge we are in a river. Next is to understand we have a choice about it, either swim upstream or lastly realize we can get out of the river. If karma is the river, then tapas is the will to get out of the river.
Playing with my tapas .....
