Tapas at Work | What 15 Years of Office Yoga Taught Me About the Heat of Showing Up

The discipline that doesn’t look like discipline, and the boring miracle of doing the same thing for a long time.

There’s a Wednesday in late March of 2013 that lives rent-free in my mind.

It was windy and wet in San Francisco. I had five Office Yoga classes scheduled. One downtown at 7 a.m. for a law firm and one in SoMa at noon for a tech company. The two back-to-back afternoon sessions were in Oyster Point, the birthplace of biotech, where traffic was a pain, but parking was abundant. The last session was at 5:30 p.m. in the Outer Mission for a design company. I had spent the morning lugging yoga mats through wet underground parking garages. At the noon class, four people showed up. Two of them were eating sandwiches. One left early. The fourth was a woman named Jane who actually showed up early, moved with me, and at the end said, “Thanks,” before walking back to her desk. 

Then I got back in my car, drove for 45 minutes to get 8 blocks, and taught 5 engineers in a fluorescent-lit conference room. Two of them never looked up from their phones. I made $370 that day. I took a 10-minute nap in my car before driving to assist my teacher, Stephanie Snyder, at UrbanFlow yoga studio (RIP) until 8:45 p.m. 

That day was Tapas. But I didn’t see it that way at the time. 

What Tapas Actually Is

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Tapas is the third of the niyamas, the five inner observances Patanjali lays out in the Yoga Sutras alongside the outer five (the yamas). The word comes from the Sanskrit root tap, which means “to burn” or “to generate heat.” Most modern translations land on “discipline,” “austerity,” or “self-discipline,” but I think those translations are too clean. They miss the burning.

Tapas is the friction of doing the work when nothing about the work is rewarding you yet. It’s the heat that comes from continued effort against resistance. Mostly your own resistance and sometimes the world itself. It’s the voice in your head that says you should be doing something easier.

In studio classes and teacher trainings, Tapas is often pitched as the practice of difficult poses, fasting, or anything that involves obvious discomfort. That misses what’s actually difficult. The hard part isn’t the difficulty. The hard part is the repetition. Showing up again, and again, and again, when it feels like everything is working against you, or maybe you’re just not meant to do this. 

What I Got Wrong About It

For a long time, I thought Tapas was about clenching my jaw and doing that extra chaturanga. The yogic equivalent of “no pain, no gain.” I would push myself into longer holds and longer workdays and convince myself the discomfort was the point. That isn’t Tapas. That’s self-punishment dressed in yoga pants.

What I now understand, 15 years and 475 companies later, is that Tapas isn’t about pain. It’s about consistency in the face of nothing happening. It’s showing up to the same conference room every Wednesday at 7 a.m., teaching the same six people the same set of stretches, for four years, while nothing visibly changes. And then noticing, one day five years later, that Jordan moves differently than he used to. His shoulders sit lower. His phone stays in the office instead of his back pocket. He’s stopped saying “I’m so stressed” when I ask how he’s doing. The Tapas was showing up for four years when nothing seemed to be happening. The change was in the fifth year.

We are very, very bad at this. We’ve built a culture around the before-and-after, the launch post, the milestone moments. Tapas is the opposite of that. Tapas is the years in which nothing changes, and you keep showing up anyway, because you have decided that showing up is the practice. 

The Tapas of Building a Business

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Running Office Yoga for fifteen years has been, by far, the most accurate Tapas practice of my life. More than my asana practice. More than my meditation. The business itself has been the discipline.

The Tapas of a business is not the shiny new workshop launch or the post that’s getting attention. It’s the Wednesday in late March when you drive 45 minutes to get eight blocks and teach five engineers who are on their phones. It’s the quarter when you pitch 19 companies and land two. Some years, it’s the client who closes eight offices at the start of a pandemic, cancels your contract, and rehires you six months later. You bite your tongue rather than say “I told you so.” And then there are the mornings. Your instructor calls in sick because she didn’t sleep well under the full moon. Your sub won’t sign the contract because Mercury is in retrograde. Your largest client just got a new CEO and wants to renegotiate. You have a class to teach in an hour.

You teach the class. You teach it well. That’s Tapas. The discipline isn’t dramatic. It’s the part where you don’t let the drama interfere with the work in front of you.

What I See in My Teachers

When I started training other teachers, I assumed the people who would thrive in corporate yoga would be the strongest, most charismatic, most “I’m-going-to-change-the-world” teachers with lots of Instagram followers.

I was wrong about that. The teachers who actually build careers in this work are not the ones who show up with the brightest fire. They are the ones who keep showing up after the fire stops being interesting to anyone but them. 

Courtney, a 2021 graduate, built her student lists one person at a time. She’s been teaching the same twenty-minute sequence to the same accounting team for three years. She gets rebooked, not because she’s flashy, but because she shows up, week after week, in the same conference room, with the same calm, giving the same cues.

The thing my best teachers all have in common is not exceptional asana. It’s Tapas. They are willing to keep showing up after the novelty wears off. If you’re a yoga teacher and you can feel the difference between flash and Tapas in your own practice, that’s the kind of student we look for. The Office Yoga Training is built for teachers who are in this for the long game.

How to Practice Tapas Outside a Studio

Here’s the most useful thing I can give you, whether you teach yoga, run a business, or sit at a desk reading this between meetings:

Tapas is not a gym workout. Tapas is the Thursday after the gym workout when you don’t want to go but go anyway. It’s the interview you prepared meticulously for that gets canceled, and you save the prep for next time without getting bitter or discouraged. Tapas is the email you send for the fourth time, politely, because the answer matters more than your discomfort about asking again. None of these feel like discipline at the time, but all of them are.

The thing about Tapas is that it doesn’t generate heat in the moment. It generates heat over time. You don’t feel the burn on day one. You feel it in year three, when you look back and notice that the small daily choices you barely registered have, in aggregate, built a body, a business, a practice, a life that someone else’s bigger, more dramatic 9-second reel never built for them.

What This Looks Like for Jane

I should tell you what happened with Jane.

Jane came to that noon class in 2013 because her company brought me in. She didn’t sign up. She didn’t pay. Her boss gave her permission to go. She moved with me that day, then came back the next week, and the week after that. She missed maybe four sessions in the first two years.

Three years in, she changed jobs. The new company didn’t have corporate yoga. She emailed me and asked if I could come to her new office. I came. I taught a one-off sample session. She convinced her new HR team to bring us on. I still teach that client.

In 2021, Jane left corporate work entirely and went through our Office Yoga Training. She now teaches private yoga clients and a few corporate classes. She emailed me last fall. Her sessions had gotten so packed that the client asked her to add a second day a week. That second day made her, officially, a full-time yoga teacher. I thought about that Wednesday in March of 2013. Jane started practicing yoga next to people eating sandwiches, and now she’s leading sessions for hundreds of people. 

The Tapas wasn’t the day I slept in the car. The Tapas was next Wednesday, when I got back in the car and drove back to teach that same noon class. And the Wednesday after that. And the one after that. You don’t see the practice while you’re in it; you see it when you look back.

Every Wednesday, I send one practical sequence, one essay here. The same way I’ve shown up for fifteen years.