Welcome to the True For You podcast. I'm your host, Renee Cupples, and we are on day 12 of 40 of a 40-day series on Sadhana. I'm coming on for five minutes a day for 40 days to give some little tidbits that I've learned through practicing sadhana. In yoga, sadhana is a 40-day practice, and it usually involves some movement, meditation, and processing. And it is unique to every individual practicing it. The idea is that you lean into the discipline to show up every day. 

And today's focus is we're gonna dive a little bit deeper. On day 10 of 40, we were going over the idea of feelings and emotions and things that might rise up. And I wanted to bring attention to what is referred to in yoga as tapas. It is one of the niyamas. In the eight-limb path of yoga, niyama is limb number two which is about our relationship to ourselves. And tapas is a way to help you process your emotions. So the meaning of tapas is austerity. It also is a burning up. So when you feel an emotion rise up in the body, you can lean on your witness consciousness to witness the emotion. So instead of following the story that the emotion is giving you, you can let it burn up and through. T

his is a practice that I did not know about until I was training to become a yoga teacher, and just this one piece alone, I could have walked away with just learning tapas and never taught a yoga class in my life. I was like, "This is a game changer," because I'm a deeply feeling and emotional person, and I was like, "I thought I knew how to process my emotions," and then I learned tapas. It is, um... There's kind of like a running joke with some other yoga teachers that I know that, like, we don't wanna be doing tapas, right? We don't want to let the emotion burn up because it's actually super difficult to, like, sit and feel and to just let an emotion be. But it's almost like you're not giving your power to it, you're not getting attached, and the release that you get when you let it rise up and burn, it can be uncomfortable sitting with it, but the self-awareness and the victory that you feel like, I just burned something up that I usually would attach to, is... It's like a really beautiful self-empowerment practice. Our tendency is to wanna run away or distract, right? Which, of course, feeling can be hard, right? But tapas is an incredible, beautiful practice that you can lean into. 

And I wanna shout out to my teacher, Christina Alexa. I've learned so many amazing things from Christina, and, I love that she's always nodding to tapas. And there's this exercise that you can do where you can trace an emotion to maybe the first time you remember ever feeling that emotion. It can be a little bit of a tricky exercise to do because sometimes you trace it and you're like, "I don't know if that was the first time I felt it," but just trust that that's coming through for a reason, right? That specific memory. And you can really feel into the memory because a lot of our feelings, the reason why we sometimes have resistance to them is it's like it's stored in the body somewhere. And when you bring up a memory where you felt that and you love on whatever age you were at that time, right? And it's almost like you can relive the memory. What would you have wanted to happen instead, right? You know, maybe you're holding some shame or, some trauma there. So really tracing it back can help and feed that kind of burning up and, and allowing it to move out and through. 

So super deep practice tapas, right? We're leaning into some more deeper ideas in week two, how to go a little bit deeper with your practice because you're gonna meet up against resistance, you're gonna meet up against emotion, and what different tools and things we can tap into. Tapas. It's not little, tiny Spanish appetizers. It's an incredible, austere, self-love, self-empowerment practice. That's how I see it at least. So let me know if this is your first time hearing about tapas or if you're well-versed in the practice or somewhere in between. Would love to get your feedback, and I'll be back tomorrow with day thirteen. Take care.