Bouncing Back

When crises arise, some people flourish while others flounder. Here's how your practice can help you build resilience.

By Sally Kempton

According to Patanjali, we suffer not because bad things happen to us but because we are in thrall to obscuring forces called kleshas. The kleshas—ignorance of who we are, egotism, attachment, aversion, and fear of dying—act as psychospiritual cataracts, cognitive veils that skew our vision. They make us imagine that we're separate from others and the universe. They delude us into identifying ourselves with our bodies and personalities, trying to pleasure a made-up self and to avoid anything that gives it pain. They keep us in perpetual fear of annihilation.

The best reason to do yogic practice is to overcome the kleshas, since without them, we naturally experience the expanded heart and joyful freedom of our original consciousness. And the basic methods for cutting through the kleshas are tapas, self-study, and surrender. They are also the secret of true resilience.

Tapas literally means "heat"—the inner heat created as we undergo discipline or hardship for the sake of change. When we understand tapas, any hardship can be seen as a purifying fire, removing veils from our awareness. Laura's intense, painstaking effort to rehabilitate her brain was a tapas that actually purified her mind. In fact, for a yogi, any effort can be reframed as tapas. My friend Scott kept it together through years of working with a difficult boss by telling himself that he was doing tapas. He figured that each moment of forbearance was helping purify and dissolve his tendencies toward impatience and anger. Understanding the concept of tapas as purification has taken many a worldly yogi through challenging situations—situations that can be as mundane as surviving a 14-hour plane ride or as primal as a serious illness or the death of a parent.

Asana practice offers basic training in tapas: You are emotionally strengthened each time you make the physical effort to stay in a pose while your legs burn. Meditation and mindfulness practice teach us to sit through boredom, mental restlessness, and emotional upheavals. Another form of tapas is the effort we make to practice kindness and nonviolence and to tell the truth. But during hard times, tapas often means pure endurance—hanging tight when fear, sadness, and frustration threaten to send us into a tailspin. Doing this kind of tapas, we actually become heirs to the great spiritual practitioners who experienced long periods of difficulty, doubt, and darkness, figures like St. John of the Cross, Ramakrishna, and Bodhidharma—especially if, like them, we also remember to practice self-study and surrender.

Svadhyaya, or "self-study," is sometimes defined as studying wisdom teachings and chanting mantras. In fact, it's a much broader practice. Svadhyaya is our direct line to the egoless awareness beyond thoughts and emotions. Self-study might take the form of the classic yogic inquiry "Who am I?" or of witness practice, in which we step back from our thoughts and emotions and identify ourselves with the inner witness rather than with the thinker. Svadhyaya is a way of moving beyond limiting beliefs to identify our basic goodness, the unbreakable beauty of our inner heart.

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