He’d been nursing the shoulder injury for two years. It started as minor irritation after an adjustment that went slightly wrong—the kind of thing that happens in long-term practice. He modified. He rested. He did physical therapy. He saw specialists. The tendon would improve, then flare. He couldn’t get back to his full practice.
In Mysore culture, there’s a particular valorization of working through limitations. Tapas—discipline, austerity, the burning off of impurities—gets invoked to justify years of modified practice, of “listening to the body” while the body slowly degrades. The practitioner who pushes through injury is sometimes celebrated; the practitioner who “gives up” is subtly diminished.
A friend mentioned BPC-157. He researched it, found the gray-market sources, started injecting. Within weeks, something shifted. Within months, he was practicing fully again.
When his teacher asked about his recovery, he said “patience and modifications.” He didn’t mention the peptide. It felt like cheating. It felt like he’d somehow failed at tapas by not suffering long enough.
🔥 But What Is Tapas, Actually?
The Yoga Sutras present tapas as one component of Kriya Yoga, alongside svadhyaya (self-study) and ishvara pranidhana (surrender). It’s defined as discipline that burns away impurities—the sustained effort required for transformation. Nowhere does it suggest that suffering itself is the goal, or that refusing available healing is spiritually superior.
The fetishization of struggle as spiritual credential is a modern distortion. It confuses the byproduct of intensive practice (heat, discomfort, challenge) with the purpose of practice. It turns tapas from a description of transformative effort into a justification for self-harm.
“Is it more ‘yogic’ to spend two years in diminished practice, accumulating compensatory patterns? Or to heal efficiently and return to full practice, able to engage with the discipline that actually transforms?”
The body isn’t a temple to be martyred. It’s the vehicle for practice. What supports sustainable practice supports yoga.
💚 The Long-Time Yogi with Autoimmune Disease
Twenty years of dedicated practice. Then, in her mid-forties, rheumatoid arthritis.
It started subtly—morning stiffness, swelling in the small joints. She tried to manage it through practice, through diet, through Ayurveda, through elimination protocols. For two years, she pursued every “natural” intervention the yoga and wellness world suggested. Meanwhile, joint damage accumulated. The disease progressed.
When her rheumatologist showed her the imaging—the erosion already visible—she finally agreed to biologics. Humira. An immunosuppressant she’d inject every two weeks.
She felt like a failure.
Her identity as a “yoga person” seemed incompatible with pharmaceutical intervention. Somewhere along the way, she’d absorbed the idea that if her practice was “working,” she shouldn’t need medicine. The fact that she needed medicine meant, by this logic, that her practice wasn’t working. That she wasn’t working.
🌫️ This Is Avidya in Action
Avidya—ignorance, misperception. Yoga doesn’t prevent autoimmune disease. Nothing prevents autoimmune disease. Research shows connections between chronic stress and autoimmune conditions, and yoga can help manage stress, but the notion that dedicated practice immunizes the body against disease is magical thinking, not philosophy.
The yamas begin with ahimsa—non-harming. In teaching, we often focus this outward: don’t harm others, don’t harm animals, don’t harm the environment. But ahimsa begins with the self. Refusing effective medical treatment because it violates an internalized purity narrative is a form of self-harm—particularly when that refusal allows preventable damage to accumulate.
There’s privilege embedded in “natural” purity narratives, too. The practitioner who can afford to experiment with expensive Ayurvedic protocols, who has time for elaborate dietary interventions, who can access specialized alternative practitioners—she has options that aren’t available to everyone. When yoga communities valorize “natural” approaches while stigmatizing pharmaceutical ones, we’re implicitly praising those with the resources for alternatives and shaming those who can’t afford them.
Our practitioner still takes her Humira. She still practices. But she’s never mentioned her medication in class—even when students with similar conditions have asked for guidance. She withholds information that might help them navigate their own decisions.
The shame she carries doesn’t protect anyone. It just perpetuates the silence.
Tomorrow: What would a yoga culture with less shame and more honesty actually look like?
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