Mark Whitwell

  Mothers are the Nurturers “Some people say that yogabhyasa is only for men and not for women,” Tirumalai Krishnamacharya writes, “Some others say that yoga is only for brahmins , Kshatriyas , and vaishyas and not for others. One can immediately say that these people have never read the yoga sastras .” — Yoga Makaranda (1934). In his lifetime, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, ‘the father of modern Yoga’ went to great lengths to ensure that Yoga was made available to women and mothers. He went against the Brahmin orthodoxy of his society to make sure that women were educated in Yoga, including teaching women Vedic chanting and publishing extensively on how to practice Yoga asana during menstruation and pregnancy in the Yoga Makaranda . It was a principle of Krishnamacharya and his son Desikachar’s teaching that mothers are the nurturers of the community and therefore mothers must be nurtured. Women must be given the time and an actual space in the house to practice. In all the busyness t...

When it comes to our daily Yoga the word practice may not be a good one. Practice usually means you practice hard at and then you get better. That might apply to learning the piano or studying history, but it does not apply to Yoga. Why? Because there is no linear process of attainment in Yoga. If you are practicing authentic Yoga according the principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth from the wisdom traditions of India and Tibet, then your Yoga is your direct embrace of Reality as it already is. And there is no getting closer to Reality because that is what you are. The ‘father of modern Yoga’ Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) rescued the tools of the tantra from obscurity. After seven and half years of study with his guru Ramamohan Brahmachari at Mount Kailash, he followed his guru’s request that he return home, start a family, and bring Yoga to the world. It was his brilliant son Desikachar (1938–2016), who was well versed in the culture of west and east, who was able to tr...

In Yoga, all chakras are equally valued. It is the whole body and its natural participation and relational integration with the all aspects of the cosmos (including other human beings) that reveals ‘God,’ Consciousness itself, Reality itself, to the mind. Yoga is intimacy with all ordinary conditions. It is not the progressive attainment toward anything at all. When we abandon the spiritual ideals of culture that seduce us into thinking that there is somewhere to get to then we are free to relax into the sublimity of the Given Reality. This intimacy reveals the source of all conditions. Yet, Yoga is generally taught as a method of ascent through the chakras to the crown, which is thought of as ‘higher,’ and so creates the idea that the body and the base is ‘lower.’ In religious cultures, practitioners are encouraged to sublimate the lower chakras, to deny and go beyond bodily life altogether — especially Sex. The subtle ascending energies of life are so glamourized that the attainment ...

We recommend that you find out what your practice is, traditionally that is with the guidance of a teacher who understands you and cares for you and wants your personal empowerment more than they want you in their Yoga group. The idea is that you carefully follow that practice that you negotiate together. And when you are doing the practice it is a sacrament. In the Māori culture of my home country Aotearoa/New Zealand, they have word which is Taonga — it means sacred object or treasure. Your vinyasa is like that, it is sacred to you. And   your beloved teacher gave it to you. Every day you do your practice within the context of your love-relationship with your friend, who is your teacher. A teacher is not someone you are getting knowledge from but someone whom you love, where there is actual affection between you. And so you do your practice and enjoy it because of that relationship. Years ago in India, my teacher TKV Desikachar would say that you have to be very lucky in order to...

Yogic Relationship Yoga arose from the great Vedic culture of darshanam which is a word that means ‘seeing.’ We see o n e another as we actually are — along with God, the guru, our spouse, our body, and the entire elemental world in which our bodies are arising. Yoga is to be  in relationship  with the all tangible and intangible conditions of our reality. The basis of world religions however has been to observe or to reside as the witness to reality and experience. Yoga is going 180 degrees in the other direction. It is to embrace experience. And then we know the context in which everything is arising. Of course, it must be said, that we are all already in perfect relatedness to our reality. Rather we are born into this reality attached to and formed our of the nurturing flow of life. We are utterly connected to one another and nothing that take that away from us. As we wrote recently in  God and Sex , “In the close observations of science, we see the poles of negative a...