How Can Yoga Help Change the World? Mark Whitwell on Yoga and Social Change

 First of all, I want to thank you for your commitment to serving humanity and the more-than-human sphere. The very fact you feel interested to read this article means you are a person who feels deeply and cares. Thank you for being a serious person who perceives clearly the utter chaos of human cruelty and suffering we exist in in these times, and for bringing your love of life to bear on whatever the area of life is that you have felt compelled to attend to. I honour the stand you have taken.

Compared to even a few years ago, our decisions now carry a profound urgency. How we choose to engage in the world, or not, will either pull us as a species back from the cliff edge, or send us over. Everybody has a different part to play in the ecosystem of change, and no one will be exactly like anyone else. So thank you for your unique function. 

The world is lacking clarity as to what yoga has to offer as a means of empowering our life and life’s work. It may seem strange, at this point in history, to suggest taking up a home Yoga practice; a bad joke in the context of the scale of global grief and carnage. Yet beneath the commodification of Yoga and our resulting perceptions of it, lies a radical and ancient science of self-restoration and self-determination, a technology of love. And it is this tradition that we are seeking to recover and share.

We are all painfully aware of the Yoga industrial complex—the money-making, sweaty exercise, Instagram pornography, and lifestyle self-improvement. But we cannot let the usual process of hegemonic co-optation win. We are willing to go in there and wrest the tradition back. We refuse to concede the word “Yoga” to banal and dangerous gymnastic cults. We run into the heated downtown studio, seize the treasure, and sprint out again, before anyone can say “namaste, have you paid.” For culture is always contested space. We are with Belgian radical Raoul Vaneigem, who wrote: “I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout”.

The yoga that we share is a radical matter, a revolution in the deepest sense of turning around the deep logics of culture that have been placed in us. It is the result of friends coming together to share their experiences and discuss the many challenges, as well as the immense pleasures that can come from this kind of creative activity. We have been gifted the great tradition of yoga, so we have a duty to give it relevant context to everyone as modern people. 

Choosing to feel and see clearly is a fiery path. To wake up to the dysfunction pervading every corner of modern society and the violence it enacts is no insignificant matter. To be a yogi or yogini in the world is not another consumer identity, a set of gestures we can take up, or a style we can adopt. It demands every aspect of ourselves. And it makes a huge demand on us emotionally to learn how to feel and love in a world seeming structured on numbness and anti-love. “It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice,” writes Dr Cornel West, “there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others—especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!” Yoga was never intended as an escape from the world, as it has been popularised by misogynistic renunciate cults. It is intended as a redemptive survival toolkit with no need to dissociate from the world, full of equipment that you can put to use immediately and share with your precious collaborators. Yoga is not a new belief system or a religion or cultic sect, but an invitation to add embodied practice to the shared mission to eliminate sectarian belief systems as a basis of culture and life altogether. Yoga exists to be fitted to your life and relationships, to your cultural background and unique directions, not the other way around. It is about unwarping yourself from all social contortions, not adding more.

Firstly, for all change-makers out there who are weary in body and mind, Yoga is a healing balm—a gentle and yet powerful means of being intimate with our bodies, our breath, and our relational lives. Yoga is the first act of ecology, learning how to care for rather than control Mother Nature, starting in our own body. It is our practical method to process and release our grief for the hardness we perceive all around us, and it is our direct participation in the intelligence and nurturing function of nature—the body’s intrinsic movement towards harmony and health, the digestion of experience and emotion, the recovery of self-regulation, the releasing of what is no longer needed, and the receiving of what is. If you feel stressed or burnt out, please make use of these remedial practices to rest and restore. 

I know so many sincere people who care deeply and so who innocently fall into practicing their efforts for change in ways that it turns out, reproduce what has been called ‘grind culture.’ Who went out to work for social change with the same instrumentalization of the body, the same drive towards burnout, that capitalist economics trained us for. As a result, many people find themselves in their adult life feeling that they are not allowed to rest at all, or that to take any amount of time away from work (or activism as work) is a waste of energy, a luxury, something for the lazy or uncommitted. Everywhere, human beings are burning out as these internal psychologies of endless grind destroy the ecosystems of body and mind. We are not robots, and we cannot treat our bodies like machines in this way. 

The beauty of Yoga is that it is a means of self-care and rest, as well as a method of expanding and refining our intrinsic drive towards relational self-determination. We have all been indoctrinated into a society of separation and hierarchy. Passivity, grief, and a sense of creative impotence threaten to blanket our minds at any given point. We must hold firm to the classic definition of Yoga from our teachers, who defined it as to go in our direction of choice with continuity, a positive step towards something, rather than an act of asceticism or restraint. By empowering our intrinsic drive to contribute our life to life, we step out of the social dynamics of disempowerment and hierarchy. 

The first human right is to be intimate with your own life: the power of this universe that is arising as the whole body. We acknowledge every body as a location of radical autonomous intelligence. Yoga is simply to value and engage what is most essential about our embodied lives: from the soft feeling capacity of the frontal line from crown to base, the highly evolved nervous system and spine and its culmination in the sublime mystery of the brain core, to our ability to enjoy creative pleasures of all kinds including self-expression, art, music, logic, feeling, and the refined movement of energy between intimates in Sex. Our Yoga does not put us in touch with anything more extraordinary than what is already embodied as us, sitting here right now. We stop locating the divine outside of ourselves and the people around us. 

If you do this caring for yourself on a daily basis, then it very naturally extends outwards into caring for others in the community. The great writer bell hooks writes of how, 

In progressive political circles, to speak of love is to guarantee that one will be dismissed or considered naive. But outside those circles there are many people who openly acknowledge that they are consumed by feelings of self-hatred, who feel worthless, who want a way out. Often they are too trapped by paralyzing despair to be able to engage effectively in any movement for social change. However, if the leaders of such movements refuse to address the anguish and pain of their lives, they will never be motivated to consider personal and political recovery. Any political movement that can effectively address these needs of the spirit in the context of liberation struggle will succeed. [...] Folks want to learn how to begin the practice of loving.

This is the contribution of Yoga, to enable us to meet the needs of our own breath/spirit, to inhale fully and receive the fullness of feeling that we are capable of as human beings, including love and grief. We keep moving through emotions, not getting stuck in any particular emotion. We are then able to address this need in others, breaking the eternal wall between those who have the capacity to feel and care and those who are too overwhelmed. It was probably a sensitivity to our own suffering and the suffering of so-called ‘others’ that moved us into wanting to change things in the first place, and as we work to dismantle old systems and create new arrangements that do not destroy people and the planet, we must closely guard this capacity to feel, acknowledging it as our gift.

Finally, as our sensitivity to Life in the form of our own embodiment deepens, we feel and enjoy our place within the entire web of Nature. We can see clearly now that humanity is not participating in the ecologies of Mother Nature, and for humanity to survive we must function in our natural relationships. Patriarchal culture has deluded humanity into thinking we are separate and superior to the Earth’s ecosystems that we are made of, creating cultures of numbness, abuse and exploitation. Yoga is to reverse this perspective, to embrace our intrinsic connection, and to let our life’s work be informed by that felt sense of unity. We are empowered to speak with utter certainty of our embodied knowledge that all life is sacred, and that any system which does not recognise this truth must be dismantled. 

The result is inevitable: intimacy with Life in all directions, clarity of mind, and the empowerment of our commitment to healing the planet and her inhabitants in all ways. From the restoration to health of the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms, to the creation of economies that participate in the unity of Life rather than degrade and disrupt, and the creation of social systems that support the fair flourishing of one and all. 

With the understanding that the personal is the political, we explore the impact of capitalist dominator culture on sexuality and relationship. We talk about how relationship has been side-lined and scorned by patriarchal mainstream culture and patriarchal activist cultures alike. We share how yoga can free us from duplicating dominant culture in our so-called ‘private’ lives, and how it can help us make our partnerships into stable batteries of love that power our dedication to show up in the world. 

So whatever your cultural background, whatever has inspired you to dedicate yourself to serving the world, whatever your tactics and strategies, we offer you these simple practices as a means of empowering your chosen directions and nurturing your “soft animal body,” to use Mary Oliver’s phrase. 

Please, if this speaks to you, look into the yogas brought forth by Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his wife Srimati Namagiriamma, their son T.K.V. Desikachar, the yogi U.G. Krishnamurti, and their friends and students around the world. Desikachar’s book ‘The Heart of Yoga,’ is an excellent place to start, and we have made a course of learning in the basic principles of practice that is available by donation on our website. We honour Desikachar’s emphasis on non-hierarchical friendship as the correct approach to teaching, and his clear placing of yoga as a remedial tool that is there to serve our action in the world, not replace it: “The goal of yoga is to reduce the film of avidya [delusion] in order to act correctly” — Desikachar. 

Caption: Mark Whitwell and fellow students with their teacher TKV Desikachar in the 1980s.

Our work is to name what’s gone wrong in modern yoga, and chart a way through the mess toward a liberatory politics and practice of whole-body prayer to life. We must share the learning for each person to practice by themselves at home in a natural, daily, non-obsessive way, as the technology of love. We do not offer some kind of madeup method, ‘The Mark Whitwell Method’ or some such nonsense, but just what our teachers shared with us. 

You are not alone in this. We acknowledge the insights of theologian Howard Thurman, key mentor to Dr Martin Luther King, stating that “Meaningful experiences of integration between people are more compelling than the fears, the inhibitions, the dogmas, or the prejudices that divide. If such unifying experiences can be multiplied over an extended time, they will be able to restructure the fabric of the social context.” We do our yoga so that we can shed the thick layers of social conditioning and participate in our own aliveness, in Thurman’s words, “as a part of continuing, breathing, living existence… alive in a living world.” We step into our full and deeply intuited capacity for love, compassion, courage and service and we do so as a collective. 

Let’s get the job done together and put love into action, within and without, in the vision of a society where life is nurtured not pillaged. Where we are all free to rest and relate in this beautiful garden of a world and enjoy the pleasures of a free-born life. 

From my heart to yours.

Mark Whitwell

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, Mark Whitwell 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 Mark Whitwell 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 Mark Whitwell 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.