What does discipline look like?
By Megan
When the new year rolled around in January 2025, I proudly announced this was the year of discipline in maintaining a better work-life balance. Five weeks later, I broke my leg. Not an ideal injury for someone who moves their body for a living. In true Megan form, I've never been great at balance.
As the year marched on Alana and I learned to sit compassionately with versions of ourselves and each other that we hadn't planned for and frankly didn't want to be. We drew on our yoga practices for radical self acceptance.
We adapted as we grew out of versions of ourselves, with Alana ending her long running online classes to prioritize new opportunities, and myself navigating ever changing stages of injury and healing.
All of this was a practice of yoga, not on the mat but in our lives. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras there are three crucial elements of practice include:
Tapas: disciplined fire
Svadhyaya: self study
Ishvaraprandhana: surrender to the divine
The practice of tapas is an ongoing practice of connection to self and the use of self study to recognize and acknowledge which patterns and practices serve us and which are karmically habitual. In this way, we can move with alignment and intention instead of expectation.
Finding tapas - the fire of discipline
I had this idea in my head that discipline was a destination. That it looked like the result of achieving your practice. I came into 2025 thinking I needed to learn discipline. As if somehow my year of finding joy was not a passionate application of self study, reflection, and surrender. Breaking my leg initially felt like failing at my goals of discipline before I could really practice. It turns out, I didn't actually know what discipline was.
I felt unable to show up personally or professionally as I'd planned. Through that entire healing process, I was filled with conviction and connection to the goal of getting back to my regular life. A goal that required me to continually adjust, based on an ever-changing sense of capacity that I had minimal control over. I came to understand that this was the fiery discipline of tapas. It is not a destination, but a transformative practice.
From @aolanow on Instagram
From the outside, I doubt much has changed.
From the inside, I have a deeper connection to my breath and the inner experience of my body. I am able to stand, walk, jump, and balance again.
I did not achieve the goals I thought the pursuit of discipline would bring me (running a 10k, getting into headstand, learning pushup form), but instead I found purpose in the intentional practice of coming back to the present version of myself. I wasn't able to do as much as I'd hoped, but what I did came with a passionate sense of intentional connection, joy and capacity.
And together Alana and I practiced tapas and adapted our workload to let us show up where we felt most passionate and capable. For us that meant we chose to prioritize practicing what we preached by making time to show up in our yogic practices. As always we found that while some yoga happened on the mat, and a whole lot more happened in the quiet moments of self study and surrender in our daily lives.
