Patanjali’s instructions for meditation are almost insultingly simple. First, prepare yourself to sit (yamas and niyamas). Find your seat (asana). Find your breath (pranayama). Begin to turn your attention inward (pratyahara), concentrate (dharana), and let that concentration deepen into meditation (dhyana), which eventually opens into samadhi.
Essentially: Prepare yourself to sit down, breathe and go inward.
Simple, and for most people living modern lives, nearly impossible. Not because we lack willpower or because we are “bad at meditating,” but because of what’s happening in our bodies when we try. Patanjali seemed to have understood this. Look at how he built the path and you will notice he never asks anyone to leap from where they are to where they are going.
Patanjali Didn’t Start With the Cushion
Asana is the third limb. Two limbs come before it, and they have nothing to do with the seat.
The yamas and niyamas are the groundwork: how we treat the world around us (non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, moderation, non-grasping) and how we treat ourselves (cleanliness, contentment, heat, self-study, surrender). We often read them as a moral code. They also work as a clearing. Each one removes something that would otherwise follow you onto the cushion: the guilt, the clutter, the restlessness, the story you keep telling yourself about who you are.
That is the genius of the path laid before us. Every limb prepares the student for the next step. One of my teachers once called it an “involution,” or an evolving inward, and it’s an apt idea. You tidy the outer life so the inner life becomes more clear. You ready the body so the breath can settle. You settle the breath so the attention can turn inward. And by training the attention on one point, over time and with practice, it deepens into meditation. Nobody is asked to go from point A to point Z. Each step evolves into the next.
But by conflating the yamas and niyamas strictly into moral code, we miss the lesson they may also teach us about how to prepare the body to find its seat.
The Seat: The Modern Tale of the Tiger and the Desk Chair
Asana means seat, and most of us already have one. It just isn’t a meditation cushion. It’s an office chair, occupied eight hours or more a day, five days a week. And it’s often from where much of modern chronic stress stems.
From this seat, or even from the modern leash (the cell phone), you receive a stressful email. Or maybe your boss just hovered over your desk, a deadline wasn’t met, or the social media screen forever open on your desktop is declaring the most recent natural (or political) disaster.
Your body responds as if a tiger just stepped into the room. Our nervous systems are primal, shaped over millennia to respond to threats to our survival, and they react to perceived danger whether it’s a predator or a post. So the body mounts a defense: adrenaline and cortisol rise, your heart rate increases, maybe blood sugar is mobilized, and attention narrows. All preparation for that now near-cliché adage: fight or flight. It’s a brilliant stress response built to keep you alive at the first “raaaarrrr” of the tiger.
But you’re still in your desk chair. You don’t run. You don’t fight. Your body has prepared for action, but the action never comes. Then another email arrives, another post expounds the catastrophes of the day, and the must-dos on your never-ending to-do list remain. The general hum of a life with a lot of stimulus continues, and as such many of us live with some level of chronic stress activation.
The proverbial tiger doesn’t leave.
In the evolutionary tale of the tiger, the threat had an arc. Something happened. The body mobilized. You acted. And, assuming you survived, the acute threat eventually ended. But in this modern tale, we generally remain seated in the face of “danger” or, rather, stress. It is a seat of readiness, not rest. Modern stress can keep presenting the nervous system with beginnings without giving us a particularly obvious ending.
Then we are asked to take a second seat, on a cushion or a mat, close our eyes, and be still.
We’ve all experienced this seemingly physiological conflict: you experience something distressing such as traffic, or an upsetting phone call or interaction just before you’re meant to teach, hold space, or even just sit for meditation. As a result of the stressor, your mind is racing and it feels virtually impossible to remain present in the room, let alone sit still.
In those moments, have you ever noticed how compelled you are to move? To run, to dance, to kick, or even punch? That is not necessarily a lack of discipline or a bad attitude. Your body has prepared for action, and some degree of that mobilization may still be present. The stressor may be over, but the physiological response hasn’t necessarily resolved along with it. You’re seeking the other side of the arc: the easing of activation, the shift toward recovery, the quiet that tells the body the proverbial tiger is finally gone. And sometimes, asking a still-mobilized body to simply take a seat isn’t the easiest way to get there.
Which brings us back to the niyamas.
Tapas: Using Heat as a Tool
Tapas is one of the niyamas, which means it sits in the second limb, right before asana. It is usually translated as discipline or austerity, and in Patanjali’s time austerity was probably exactly what it meant. That is not to say discipline isn’t part of tapas now. But the root, tap, means to burn. Tapas is heat.
Picture a potter’s kiln. Raw clay is fragile, and it only becomes something that can hold water after it has been fired. That translation feels extremely apropos to modern life, with its near epidemic of sedentary work and chronically mobilized stress physiology.
Of everything in the groundwork, tapas is the niyama that speaks most directly to the body’s chemistry. Self-study (svadyaya) clears the mind. Cleanliness (saucha) clears the clutter. Tapas brings the heat. And Patanjali puts it before the seat, before the breath, before any inward turn. The person who shows up carrying a full day in their nervous system cannot necessarily simply be told to settle.
We can probably agree that when Patañjali wrote asana, he meant the seat, as in: just sit. But for the modern student, the sequence suggests something wonderful. Move first. Use the heat. Then sit.
So What Is the Heat? And What Is It Generating?
When we move with real effort and challenge ourselves, we create what physiologists sometimes describe as hormetic stress: a physiological challenge that, in an appropriate dose, can stimulate adaptive responses. Exercise is itself a stressor. During vigorous movement, sympathetic activity increases. Heart rate rises. Adrenaline increases and, depending on the intensity and duration of the effort, cortisol may rise too. In other words, exercise initially turns up some of the very same stress machinery we’ve been talking about.
But there is an important difference. A bout of exercise has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And what happens at that end is where things get interesting.
Once the effort stops, the body begins shifting toward recovery. Sympathetic activation decreases while parasympathetic influence progressively returns. In plain English: the accelerator begins to ease off and the body’s braking and recovery systems increasingly regain influence.
The chemistry changes too. During exercise, the body releases beta-endorphin, one of its endogenous opioids (“endogenous” simply means made inside the body; the word endorphin itself comes from “endogenous morphine”). These compounds interact with opioid receptors involved in things like pain modulation.
But endorphins aren’t the whole story. Exercise also increases endocannabinoids, molecules produced by our own bodies that interact with the same broad signaling system that gives cannabis its name. These molecules are involved in processes including pain, mood, reward, and anxiety. And one of them has a particularly fitting name for a yoga teacher: anandamide. The name comes from the Sanskrit ananda, or bliss.
Anandamide rises with acute exercise, and research increasingly points toward the endocannabinoid system as an important contributor to the reduced anxiety, altered pain perception, sense of well-being, and sometimes even euphoria that can follow sustained exercise. In fact, newer research has complicated the old story that the famous “runner’s high” is simply an endorphin high. When researchers have blocked opioid receptors—essentially preventing endorphins from producing their usual effects—many of those positive post-exercise effects just listed have still occurred. That suggests endocannabinoids may be an important part of the chemistry behind why we can feel so different on the other side of exertion.
And people don’t just have different chemistry after exercise. They often report feeling different. Across studies, a single bout of exercise tends to improve mood, and research also supports modest reductions in state anxiety (which is, essentially, situational anxiety). There is even evidence that exercise can alter how strongly we respond to the next stressor, with research finding lower cortisol and blood-pressure responses to subsequent psychological stress under some conditions.
So exercise isn’t simply “burning off” cortisol or using up adrenaline. Something far more interesting—and I think awe-inspiring—may be happening. Modern stress tends to keep presenting the nervous system with beginnings without a clear ending: another email, another deadline, another notification, another perceived tiger. Exercise deliberately gives the body an ending.
We enter a bounded period of physiological activation. We move. We exert ourselves. We generate heat. Then we stop. And the stopping matters. The accelerator eases. Recovery physiology increasingly takes over. Neurochemical systems involved in pain, mood, anxiety, and reward shift. The body that emerges on the other side of that intentionally created stressor—on the other side of tapas—is not physiologically identical to the body that began it.
And perhaps that helps explain something nearly every yoga practitioner has experienced. You work. You build heat. You breathe hard. Your heart pounds. Your muscles work. Maybe sweat rolls onto the mat. And then you stop. You lie down, and suddenly stillness doesn’t require nearly as much effort.
This is the part I find so fascinating: the heat didn’t simply exhaust you into stillness. It may have helped create the physiological conditions that make stillness more available.
That said, dose matters, which is where the idea of hormesis earns its keep. More challenge is not necessarily better. Too little challenge may produce little effect. Too much, too often, and we may simply add more stress to an already loaded system. The appropriate dose will differ by person, by day, and by the physiological state someone brings into practice in the first place. Tapas isn’t heat for heat’s sake. The heat prepares us for what comes next.
The Body Kiln: There Is No Prescribed Firing Time
Understanding this relationship between exertion and recovery may help us have more compassion for students who struggle with Restorative and Yin practices, or who frustratingly resign themselves to the claim, “I just can’t meditate.” Maybe stillness isn’t available to them yet. Maybe they just need a bit more heat first.
Some students cultivate tapas in vinyasa or power classes for months, or even years, before they feel called toward yin, restorative practices, or meditation. They aren’t necessarily avoiding stillness. They might be finding their way toward it through movement.
That was my journey and that of many I know who have had stress disorders. With the exception of states of profound exhaustion or collapse, what I have often observed is a powerful desire to move when activation is high. And perhaps what matters isn’t simply the movement itself, but the state that becomes available on the other side of it. The stillness after exertion is not necessarily the same physiological state as the stillness we try to impose by simply sitting down. Through exertion, through heat, we have changed the physiological conditions within the vessel before asking it to become still.
This is where the kiln metaphor becomes useful again. We aren’t all starting with the same clay, and there is no prescribed firing time. One person may need twenty minutes of movement before their body feels ready to settle. Another may gravitate toward vigorous practice for years before slower practices begin to feel inviting. Someone else may arrive already depleted and need very little heat at all. One student may need five extra push-ups and another may need to skip the vinyasa and take child’s pose. The point isn’t that more tapas is better. It’s that the amount of heat that helps prepare us for stillness is individual, and it can change from one day to the next.
Perhaps that is part of what we’re learning when we practice: not simply how to tolerate stillness, but how to recognize what helps us arrive there.
Heat Prepares the Seat, and the Path Opens
This brings us back to the yamas and niyamas and the possibility that they offer us more than a moral code. When tapas is understood only as austerity or discipline, we may miss another tool embedded in this ancient teaching: heat. Because look at what the physiology we’ve just explored can leave in its wake: less anxiety, improved mood, a quieter body, even feelings of well-being and bliss. These are remarkably similar to the conditions we are trying to cultivate as the practice begins its involution and turns inward toward samadhi.
There really is more physiological wisdom in the order of the eightfold path than it might seem. We know that, when studied, exertion has the capacity to shift our physiology in ways that may be more conducive to stillness, sustained attention, and seated meditation than the physiology of chronic stress. From there, Patanjali’s path continues inward toward concentration, meditation, and ultimately samadhi. In a way, it’s centuries-old biohacking.
Like clay fired in a kiln, we use heat to transform the vessel before asking it to hold something. A fired vessel can hold something. A fired body can hold stillness.
