Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions by Applying Constant Abhyāsa and Tapas

"The yogi knows the paths to ruin or of salvation lie within himself." - BKS Iyengar Light on Yoga.

As the new year gets underway, our resolutions begin to wane. As stated in the January 28, 2015 article in Women's Health entitled "Beware: The Date Most People Ditch Their New Year's Resolutions to Eat Healthy is almost here," by Ashley Oerman.  Oerman says, according to data collected by GrubHub, February 2nd is the day keeping your healthy eating resolutions begin to get more difficult. 

I'm guessing healthy exercise initiatives get more difficult after the first week in January. We are all gung-ho in the beginning. We inevitably push too hard and end up with aches or pains that give us the perfect excuse to take a day or two to rest. A day or two turns into three or four and before you know it, you are on the couch with a bag of potato chips. 

We are all familiar with Newton's first law of motion:  "A body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by an external force; inertia is the direct result."* Keeping that New Year's Resolution momentum means staying in motion. Perhaps in yoga we'd say the key to that is mastering our ability to deal with our state of consciousness, which is based on a predominance of one of three attributes or guṇās.

In yogic philosophy, the three guṇās or qualities: rajas (firey, mobile, active), tamas (dark, inert, retraining), sattva (illuminating, clear, serene) have a direct effect on the quality of our physical state. For example, if we have a dominance of tamas, we are dominated by a heavy earthiness, laziness, inactivity, delusion, and torpor. In such a case, moving from a resting state is quite a feat. However, remember Newton's law. Once even a tamasic person begins to move, they can keep moving. In yoga, we know to keep our tamasic nature moving we have to apply constant abhyāsa, practice and tapas or discipline.

According to BKS Iyengar in Light on Yoga, the student "...learns which thoughts, words, and actions are prompted by tamas and which by rajas. With unceasing effort [the sadhaka, student] weeds out and eradicates such thoughts as are prompted by tamas and [...] works to achieve a sattvika frame of mind. When the sattva-guṇā alone remains, the human soul has advanced a long way towards the ultimate goal.  Like unto the pull of gravity is the pull of the guṇās. As intensive research and rigorous discipline are needed to experience the wonder of weightlessness in space, so also a searching self-examination and discipline furnished by Yoga is needed by a sadhaka to experience union with the creator of space when he is freed from the pull of the guṇās."

As one of my teachers, Kquvien DeWeese says, "don't give up on yourself." Keep your goals in motion by ridding yourself of inhibiting thoughts, words, actions, and 'external forces'.  

Namaste.

*Source: Boundless. “The First Law: Inertia.” Boundless Physics. Boundless, 14 Nov. 2014. Retrieved 07 Feb. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/physics/textbooks/boundless-physics-textbook/the-laws-of-motion-4/newton-s-laws-46/the-first-law-inertia-236-10947/