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When crises arise, some people flourish while others flounder. Here’s how your practice can help you build resilience. An article by Sally Kempton on yogajournal.com.

Yoga practice is meant to teach us how to untangle inner knots. Often, you don’t realize how much difference your practice has made until the day that you find yourself dealing with a crisis without going into an absolute meltdown.

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 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.

From Adbusters #77, The Global Moment, an article titled Your Moment of Truth by Laurel Saville. It’s about an art piece by Tino Sehgal called “This Situation.”

As with his other pieces, he is looking for a deeper level of engagement between art and audience. In “This Is New,” museum attendancts read newspaper headlines and visitor responses determine the continuation of the work. In “This Success/This Failure,” young children pull passersby into an empty room to play. In “The Situation,” Seghal is asking the audience to consider larger issues along with the players, while expressing his discomfort with our culture’s love affair with consumption and his impatience with the conventional search for political solutions.

“The big new task of my generation is, how can we morally defend our lifestyle, which will not be possible for future generations,” he says. “A political solution won’t do it.”

By Eckhart Tolle

Continuing to read this book for the second time and still finding yummy tidbits. These are from the final chapter of the book.

Without the impairment of (egoic) dysfunction, our intelligence comes into full alignment with the outgoing cycle of universal intelligence and its impulse to create. We become conscious participants in the creation of form. We don’t identify with what we create and so don’t lose ourselves in what we do. We are learning that the act of creation may involve energy of the highest intensity, but that is not “hard work” or stressful. We need to understand the difference between stress and intensity, as we shall see. Struggle or stress is a sign of the ego, as are negative reactions when we experience obstacles.
The force behind the ego’s wanting creates “enemies,” that is to say, reaction in the form of an opposing force equal in intensity. The stronger the ego, the stronger the sense of separateness between people. The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all. They are inclusive not exclusive.

The three modalities of awakened doing…
There are three ways in which consciousness can flow into what you do and thus through you into this world, three modalities in which you can align your life with the creative power of the universe. Modality means the underlying energy-frequency that flows into what you do and connects your actions with the awakened consciousness that is emerging into this world. What you do will be dysfunctional and of the ego unless it arises out of one of these modalities.
The modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.
Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do – stop. Otherwise, you ar enot taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness or mind.
Enjoyment
The peace that comes from surrendered action turns into a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing. On the new earth, enjoyment will actually replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions. You don’t have to wait for something “meaningful” to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The “waiting to start living” syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state. When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerous, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be derived from something else, such as an activity or thing.
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and that state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end.
Enthusiasm
Then there is another way of creative manifestation that may come to those who remain true to their inner purpose of awakening. Suddenly one day they know what their outer purpose is. They have a great vision, a goal, and from then on they work toward implementing that goal. Their goal or vision is usually connected in some way to something that on a smaller scale they are doing and enjoying already. Enthusiasm means there is a deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward.