Mark Whitwell | Yoga is Intimacy

It is promised in the traditions that the gifts and states of health and well-being that are described in sacred text will arise for you naturally as a result of your Yoga practice. This is not a fanciful selling point or a gimmick in an attempt to exploit you. It is an assurance based upon millennia of practice, logic, observation and religious scholarship. Yoga sadhana and the siddhis that arise from it are technical matter. It is not mere hopefulness, spiritual language, poetry or branding.

Sublime intimacy with life (including others) is a human possibility that is scarcely known about in our time. We have inherited a vast mind of doubt that makes us question the solidity and intrinsic truthfulness of our life. Yet, you can be certain that all life is supported by an extreme nurturing force — the force that brought you into existence in the first place and presently sustains you.

You will not know it through diligent self-improvement, heroic spiritual practices and meditations, philosophy or awareness training, but by an easy practice of movement coupled with the breath that is tailored perfectly to your life. Yoga comes to us from the ancient world as a means of direct intimacy with all ordinary conditions and the fundamental energy of life that nurtures you and is you.

By doing Yoga that is right for you — designed correctly for who you are by a teacher that cares for you — you will experience deep and sublime intimacy with all aspects of life. The point of life is intimacy and relationship, not awareness, self-improvement, God-realization, meditation or consciousness. These siddhis arise naturally and unpredictably as a consequence of Yogic intimacy. You cannot “get” them through effort in body or mind.

My teacher U.G. called it “the seduction of enlightenment.” We are easily charmed by teachers and the idealisms of sacred text. We become convinced that our lives are less than ideal and so we start looking for ways to attain the glamour and wonderfulness that we hear about. The search has been imposed on the public for thousands of years by religious power structure and then consciously or unconsciously duplicated by nefarious or well-meaning teachers.

The search obliterates our ability to notice that our own lives are already arising as Truth. Nurturing Source is appearing as all individuals, the exquisite intelligence and nurturing function of the whole body. We are flowers blooming in our own garden. God, Truth, Source, Reality Itself, is One with all arising conditions.

We give up the search and leave the body alone.

“If it had not been for culture the world would have produced more flowers, different kinds and varieties of flowers, not only the one rose that you are so proud of. You want to turn everything into one model. What for? Whereas nature would have thrown up from time to time different flowers unique each in its own way, beautiful each in its own way…One ceases to be somebody else and is simply what one is” — U.G. Krishnamurti, The Natural State

We are not here to get out of here. The Seen is complete and intimacy with the Seen is intimacy with Source. Our Yoga is to merge with our body and breath on a daily basis. Then, we develop the facility to merge with our experience and all our relationships easily.

Our problems and neuroses in life stem from a lack of intimacy. When we feel separate we go crazy. When we feel loved and are able to love then we are at peace. There are many well-meaning spiritual teachers providing the sedating meditations of Buddhism, Christianity, Vedanta and more that allow the person to temporarily step back from the whirling mind. We get a momentary break from our disturbed mind, just like drinking a glass of wine or taking Prozac. This is a cultural error. It does not get at the root of the pain which is our need for intimacy with life in all ways. It is not to denigrate or dismiss the sincerity of people who are drawn to the beauty of witnessing traditions but to identify that the means of actualizing the beautiful ideals of those traditions — love, compassion, grace, forgiveness, connection — Yoga and life of intimate connection to all tangible conditions is necessary.

Compassion is a verb. It is to reach out, embrace and support one another. It is to be attached and to give and receive within the nurturing flow of life. It is not to witness or remain merely aware of those you love, but to participate fully in life.

Patriarchal doctrine and power structures have made our natural desire for intimate connection conflicted, especially within our sexual relationships, which spiritual teachers deny, suppress, or exaggerate in their attempts to get somewhere amazing as if we are not already the wonder of life arising. We must resolve our inheritance now to bring peace and pleasure to our lives. There is no requirement to realize anything. We are here to enjoy our lives and be intimate with life, that’s all.

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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.