Mark Whitwell

  Teaching in Bali 2019 | Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga Whole Body Mantra The mind is a function of the whole body and is itself indistinguishable from the whole body. The mind culminates in the crown but the crown requires a whole spine. The mind is in the spine and then in all the nerves that travel through the whole body. The mind is in the whole body’s relatedness to its own experience and context.  In the traditions, they say that the mind is literally arising from the the heart. The mind is not the controlling dictator of the whole body.  In this practice of asana , pranayama , and then mantra/sound, the whole body is participating in its own context. We become free in mind because we no longer imagine that mind has a dissociated life of its own: as if the mind is separate from the whole body, from experience, others and from Life Itself.  Life is a Unity. Every body is contributing; every part of your body is contributing, and every part of your life is contr...

  Above the sacred waters of Lake Manasarovar, Tibet | Mark Whitwell | Photograph by Audrey Billups In 2019, sales of self-help books reached 18.9 million copies, an increase of 11 percent since 2013 . In the same period, the number of books published in the genre has more than doubled from 30,987 to 85,253 . By 2022, it is predicted that the self-improvement market in the U.S. will be worth 13.2 billion dollars : including infomercials, motivational speakers, personal coaches, holistic institutes, yoga, meditation, books, audio and weight loss programs. The tradition of yoga has long been funneled into this lucrative industry. Through diligent effort in yoga we are promised transformation. We can become “the best version of ourselves” and “self-optimize” our way towards physical, spiritual, financial and relational perfection. Yet, does Yoga really belong within the psychology of personal attainment and progress that characterizes self-improvement? Or, is it an altogether differe...

  On the balcony of the Palace of the Maharaj in Mysore near where Krishnamacharya taught his famous classes after returning from the Himalayas | Mark Whitwell | Photography by Audrey Billups You know, I just need some room to uncurl, I don't have no aim in view, just some dreams to pursue, As I wallow around in the world—Incredible String Band  * To continue the conversation in live classes with Mark and friends join the new heart of yoga online studio as a free member or by donation. About the Author:- I don't have no one to cheat, don't have no one to beat, The goal of the Yoga Teacher is to give the student access to the innate intelligence of their whole body through the breath. Yoga is not about attaining an external intelligence from the teacher or accumulating information within a male knowledge hierarchy. It is each person’s direct participation in the unspeakable beauty and intelligence that is the whole body. The body is the Cosmos: eternity blooming in limitle...

Let’s face the facts. Sitting there, you, reading this, are part of the natural world. The power, beauty, intelligence and harmony of nature is sitting there as your body. You are not separate from life. It’s a primitive fiction, like “the world is flat.” After Copernicus proposed that the earth was not the center of the solar system, and rather that we revolved around the sun, it still took hundreds of years until this became accepted. Galileo waited until the end of his life to publish his observations confirming the thesis, because he knew he would be risking his life to contradict the church position. We are fortunate if we live in a time and place where contradicting such orthodoxy does not get us imprisoned or killed. Many people around the world still do live in such situations.  But it must be said: the belief that we are separate beings in a separate universe is no different from the religious presumption that we are the center of the universe. It is provably untrue, but i...

       BKS Iyengar, Yehudi Menuhin and J. Krishnamurti  Truth is a Pathless Land It was Krishnamurti who said to my teacher Desikachar, “Don’t become one more monkey.” Don’t become a guru; don’t exploit the gullibility of the public in this idea of being a ‘knower.’  We must profoundly see the non-necessity and the obstruction produced by these corrupt social orders that created civilization in Europe and in Asia. No one can be second to anything or anybody and no one can be superior to anything or anybody. My teacher U.G. Krishnamurti (no relation to J Krishnamurti) had a lovely statement “No one should be a slave to anybody.” In his lifetime J. Krishnamurti displayed a paradoxical and hidden relationship to Yoga where he would say one thing and do another. In his private life he was a devoted practitioner and lifelong student of Desikachar and Krishnamacharya. In his public teachings however he was dismissive of Yoga as either spiritual seeking ...