Mark Whitwell

  The Heart of Yoga Teacher Untraining in Fiji with Mark Whitwell Rosalind Atkinson Originally published in The Yoga Lunchbox “If you want to teach people, you have to love them,” said the tall figure seated near me on the floor. Shit, I thought. What am I doing here, then? I don’t love people… I hate them! I feel them frozen in fear and radiating phoney bullshit, and I can’t bear it! I looked around the room at the other bodies. No-one else seemed to be freaking out. The apparently casual comment began the Heart of Yoga teacher training in the Chief’s Meeting Hall on the island of Taveuni, Fiji, and the down-to-earth speaker was New Zealand-born yoga master Mark Whitwell . How had I ended up here? Despite practicing many styles of yoga in classes and at home over the years, I’d stubbornly resisted what I felt was the bourgeois stereotype of going somewhere exotic to do teacher training. I’d developed a reactive cynicism towards “yoga,” seeing it as a self-absorbed a...

  No More Meditating! Mark Whitwell on the Distortion of Modern Meditation [Interview] Mark Whitwell ’s latest book God and Sex: Now We Get Both (2019) can be read as the culmination of his teaching life and is a rich repository of wisdom gained from his personal experience as a Yoga practitioner.  The book makes the case for an embodied spirituality and strongly opposes patriarchal fixations on ascent, celibacy, and renunciation. Mark seeks to repair the damage that has been done to human life through the separation of the so-called ‘higher’ goals of spiritual practice and our ‘mundane’ everyday relational lives.  In December last year, I sat down to have a conversation with Mark Whitwell during a three-day heart of yoga workshop in London.  In the following interview, Mark explains what real Yoga is; how the popular brands of meditation and mindfulness have got it wrong; why we can forget about trying to become enlightened; and what it means to live a life of Yog...

Is the Yoga Teacher a Special Person? Mark Whitwell on the Teacher-Student Relationship in Yoga [interview] In the early 1990s Mark Whitwell was taking a walk on a beach near Madras with his teacher Desikachar and his wife Menaka. He had just finished compiling material for Desikachar’s first book. But they didn’t know what the title should be. Suddenly, Desikachar declared,   “The Heart of Yoga!”  The heart of yoga, Desikachar explained, is not the poses, the practices, or the philosophy, but the relationship between the teacher and the student. Without a relationship of mutual affection no yoga transmission can occur.  A year later, Mark delivered the first copy of the book to his teacher. The Heart of Yoga: developing a personal practice (1995) is now a set text on yoga teacher trainings around the world. In this interview, I sat down with Mark to explore the teacher-student relationship in yoga; what equality in teaching settings looks like; what the purpose of ...

  An Interview with Yoga teacher Mark Whitwell Mark Whitwell is one of the most celebrated Yoga Teachers of the modern era with a unique ability to make the sublime tradition of Yoga available to people as a normal part of everyday life. He is the author of four books including the beloved Yoga of Heart (2004) and most recently God and Sex: now we get both (2019). Mark was also the editor and contributor to his teacher T.K.V. Desikachar’s classic Yoga text, The Heart of Yoga (1995). Born into a family of teachers, (his mother and father were both schoolteachers, and his grandfather worked in providing education programs in state prisons), Mark Whitwell has dedicated his life to passing on useful teachings from the wisdom tradition of Yoga. Mark’s simple mission is to bring the principles of practice that came through the ‘teacher of the teacher’s’ Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) into the mainstream of public life. As a teacher, Mark Whitwell is unusual because he refuses ...