What to Do If You’re Bored With Yoga by Mark Whitwell

 What to Do If You’re Bored With Yoga by Mark Whitwell

Author: Rosalind Atkinson

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, he successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet he is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where he can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and your favourite yoga class is happening at 5pm… but you just can’t quite get the energy up to head to the studio.

It’s a lovely slow Sunday morning, and you know you’ll feel good if you roll out your mat… but somehow it just doesn’t happen.

Your friend invites you to join them for some flowing yoga in the park… but it just seems a little tired and boring. You’ve been to all the classes, taken all the workshops… and yet here you are, still tired, still grumpy, still stuck in a job you don’t really like, still single, or still sniping at your significant other. 

What do you do to rediscover your love of yoga when it all just seems so… boring?

Well, first of all, we have to validate our feelings. 

When I first met my teacher Mark Whitwell, I explained how I’d developed an allergic reaction to yoga.

“I used to love it,” I explained. “I loved the novelty of different classes, new yoga books, trying out new things… but none of it ever seemed to work out. Am I just jaded, or aging, or disillusioned or something?”

“No, your feelings are very astute,” he replied. “There IS something missing. Yoga has been popularized without the breath, and so once the novelty of the shapes of asana wears off, it does get boring. The living quality, the transformational power is missing. You’re a sensitive person, and so you’ve noticed that something is missing. Your boredom is the intelligence of your system telling you to keep looking. Not in the same old places, but in the traditions, to find what has been lost.”

I was a little suspicious. 

“So you think my boredom will just magically vanish if I do “Mark Whitwell Style” yoga?” I retorted.

“The whole division of yoga into styles and brands is the problem itself,” he replied. “You shouldn’t be doing someone else’s style. You should be doing YOUR yoga, the yoga that is right for you. Tailored to your needs by your own breath.”

I was willing to give it a go.

Over the course of a few weeks, I learned what Mark Whitwell was talking about. 

First up was the ujjayi breath. This is sometimes translated as “victory” breath, and means slightly constricting the throat so there is a soft sound at the throat, kind of like when you breath haaaaa to steam up glasses, yet with the mouth closed. For most of us, this was much easier on the exhale than the inhale. I asked why this was.

“The inhale is the feminine, the descent,” Mark Whitwell replied. “We live in a hyper-masculine of struggle and strife, where the emphasis is all on strength and hardly at all on receptivity. The inhale is about learning how to receive.”

It felt really awkward at first. On every inhale, my jaw felt pained and tense. 

“This breath isn’t really working for me,” I complained. “Is there something different I could do?”

“Maybe you don’t need any yoga?” Mark Whitwell suggested. “You’re probably in a completely free state and don’t need it.”

Some part of me really wanted to agree with this, but I was forced to reflect on my actual habits of mind and deny the charge. 

“I’ll give it another go,” I said.

Over the course of the days, I realized the breath wasn’t making me tense. It was bringing feeling and attention to the immense tension I was already carrying around in my jaw. Slowly the soft ujjayi inhale began to loosen up the habitual tension I hadn’t even realized was there.

We moved on to the next principle: Inhale from above as receptivity, exhale from below as strength. This, too, felt weird. What had been doing at all those yoga classes? I had never paid this much attention to how I was breathing in my life. We filled the chest first on inhale, allowing the diaphragm to move down and a soft belly to expand of its own accord. Then on exhale we contracted the abdominals and allowed the chest to settle naturally. After a few days of this, I felt a new expanded sense of breath capacity, like my lungs were expanding in all directions. A sense of power and focus came into my chest, and a sense that it was “the source of me,” whatever that meant. 

But the precision of breathing wasn’t over. Next we made sure that the breath started and enveloped every movement. The inhale started in the chest… then my body moved… and then the breath finished. The exhale started in the abdominals… then my body moved… and then the exhale finished. I could feel how the breath wrapped around the movement, keeping it safe and setting the pace at the exact right speed for me.

Something was happening. At first, it was absolutely difficult to pay attention to all these principles at the same time, but with every day it became more natural. I noticed that the more difficult the pose, the more I was likely to drop my new focus on the breath and revert to my “old way” of focusing on the shape of my body. And funnily enough, as soon as I did that, my mind would start to wander and I would feel that old familiar feeling of boredom. 

“Maybe I’m not bored,” I thought. “Maybe I’m dissociated.”

I realized that the breath took me into a depth of presence and feeling that I was usually spending my time avoiding – through busy-ness, through work, through talking, through thinking – and yes, even through asana. This avoidance gave everything a deadened quality.

But with the immediacy the breath principles gave me, I could stay present and alive in my movement. My mind wasn’t wandering, comparing myself to the person next to me, thinking about how I shouldn’t be thinking.

Image: Mark Whitwell teaching a class how to remove the struggle from practice and rediscover the joy of yoga through the breath. 

The body movement IS the breath movement, I wrote in my journal. It was so simple. I was breathing. I was alive. How could that get boring?

It reminded me of leaning in to kiss a new lover, the feeling of excitement and aliveness that crackles in the air. Except this time, the love was myself. No thought of technique filled my mind, only the pleasure of intimacy. I realized I had been taking myself for granted, like a stale marriage where only practical functioning is holding two people together.

“Just answer the question, yes or no,” said my teacher, in his most idiosyncratic Mark Whitwell style of teaching. “Are you, or are you not, the power of the cosmos?”

I was forced to admit that I was. Why was that so hard to admit?

“And is that power arising as a pure intelligence and an utter beauty? Will you admit that everything in the natural world is completely beautiful?”

I had to admit that yes, everything in nature had a purity of aliveness that was so stunning. This is why I’d been preferring nature walks to going to yoga.

“And you are that, you are of the natural world,” he continued.

I had to admit that it was true. 

“But I don’t feel that all the time,” I objected.

“You don’t need to feel it for it to be true,” he replied. “Just acknowledge here and now whether or not it is true. If it is true, it doesn’t come and go with your feeling. Your yoga is just your participation in this fact. Not a struggle to realise it.”

I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders.

I realized that all my yoga efforts had been an attempt to get into a different mood, a different state – anything but here. When I failed to change into a better mood, a better me, I felt like a failure. Yoga was boring because my whole system was rebelling against being constantly rejected. In trying to improve myself – become more fit, more flexible, more calm, more peaceful – I was doing a violence against everything that I already was. 

Yoga regained life for me.

So if you are reading this, I sincerely encourage you to check out those basic breath prinicples. Follow your intuition that something is missing from your yoga and discover what that is. Don’t stop until you find your way into pure intimacy with your breath, with your life, with the feeling of beign alive. Mark Whitwell is not the only teacher out there sharing these principles – I know there are others, and I encourage everyone to track them down. Yoga has an ancient promise of peace and power that is so much more than the gymnastic hobby it has been reduced to. It is meant to flow into our lives, transforming our relationships and psyches. But those changes are a story for another day.

About the author:

Rosalind Atkinson is a yoga teacher and student of Mark Whitwell in the tradition of T. Krishnamacharya, a writer, an academic researcher on the subject of mystic poetry, and the founder of Silver Snake Press, an independent publishing imprint based in her home country of New Zealand. You can find more of her writing at www.thedirt.media