Mark Whitwell

In every body and every cell, the intelligence of the male-female mutuality is present. What is the simplest way to experience it? With our breath. Breathing, pranayama, is how we release ingrained patterns and clear the mind. Asana practice is just moving breathing. Too many popular yoga “brands,” however, have traveled very far indeed from this simple mutuality. So, rather than talk too much about specific postures here, I’m going to give you the foundation of all asana. Ready? Your breath will be the guru that guides you through your yoga practice. The body movement is the breath movement, so always begin the breath before you move. In yoga we use the ujjayi breath, which is the same full-body breath we use in sleep. We inhale and exhale through the nose, but the breath is controlled at the throat, producing a sound with a low and uniform pitch. Most people have a strong exhale, but it’s important to practice inhaling with the same quality. In order to learn how to receive, you need...

Though union is our natural, divine state, we don’t feel it all the time. There is a practice, arising from the ancient wisdom of tantra, through which you can develop the ability to receive, the ability to be intimate and to bring out the strength in another who will bring out the strength in you. It is called hatha yoga . Ha-tha (sun-moon) is the union of opposites; it is relationship, just as life is relationship. It is the mutuality of everything above with everything below. Yoga relieves and heals the system, and, since the union of opposites has already occurred in all of us, it is available to everyone. It is participation in what is already given: left and right, above and below, front and back, inhalation and exhalation, inner and outer, spirit and form, Source and seen, male and female, strength and receiving. It is the integration of the whole body with everything existing, intimacy with body, breath, and all experience. In our systems are the basic qualities and structures ...

  If you aren’t comfortable with non-dual yoga philosophy, yoga practice will still deepen your experience and connect you to your faith. Krishnamacharya used to say that there is no realization of the Vedanta without yoga, no realization of Jesus Christ without yoga. Whether or not you have faith in a religious ideal, full participation in the wonder of our given life will intensify your felt connection to your nurturing Source. For example, I taught a Christian man in New York, a very sincere, devout man and his wife. And in the first lesson a serious argument erupted. It came out that the man felt a call to go abroad as a missionary for their church, and his wife felt he was neglecting the family. It was a difficult situation whose resolution would take time. As we moved through the session, I gave them a yoga practice in which they used the Christian cross as their yantra, the horizontal and vertical forces coming together at the heart. After three months, the man called me to ...

Though meditation is often prescribed as part of a spiritual practice, in a very real sense, you, or I, or anyone, cannot meditate. My teacher Krishnamacharya pointed out that meditation is not a struggle within the mind but arises by grace, as a gift or result of asana. Think of sleep, which cannot be compelled but arises naturally and spontaneously. While you can make the conditions right for sleep, you cannot force it to happen . The same is true of meditation. You may be familiar with a practice commonly known as raja yoga, prescribing a mental focus on and above the crown of the head as the place of “higher” realization. By fixing the attention there, one may indeed perceive unusual energies and lights. Yet this fixation is not meditation. In their commitment to an “ascended” life, these yogis — haloed like the images of Christian saints — attempt to go beyond the body but ignore what is most precious. The very means of opening the crown to ascending and descending forces is the...

In these writings I am offering you the means to free yourselves and future generations from the pain we feel and cause in dualism’s grip — when we believe we can attain holiness by denying our natural state. If what I am about to tell you is “secret” knowledge, it is also incredibly simple, and instantly recognizable as true. We are guided to this knowledge by an ancient and nondenominational philosophy known as tantra. Tantra goes back thousands of years to the Indus Valley and Egypt. Though the practice of tantric Buddhism was famously forced underground in the thirteenth century by a hostile political environment, adepts have kept it alive through the centuries, and tantric principles have informed Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish, and Christian mystical traditions. According to this non-dual tantra, the Source of life cannot be separate from the ordinary seen conditions of life. Our Source is not far away but is in fact the first and deepest of all intimacies. If you have difficu...

  The goal of Yoga is vairagya , peace, or freedom in the midst of experience. This comes not through detachment or the avoidance of experience, but from natural participation in all arising conditions of life. Yoga is relationship and relationship is peace. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), the great scholar and ‘father of modern Yoga,’ translated vairagya in a beautiful way. He defined it as freedom relative to all experience. He clarified that vairagya did not mean to remove yourself from experience, or to try and not attach to something — for example, me effortfully trying to not attach to you; rather, the opposite is true. Krishnamacharya said freedom from all arising conditions arises when we merge with and digest our experience. And this applies to both pleasurable and painful moments. For example, as we see our friends and family suffering in the pandemic and even dying we are not indifferent to that suffering. We have a loving and caring relationship to all circumsta...

I recently put out a book called God and Sex: Now We Get Both . The motivation behind the book is simple: to heal the dualistic divide that sees matter and spirit as separate and to resolve for humanity the complications and trauma that have stemmed from this imagined split. I am happy with the response to the book so far. It is good to see it travel around the world and resonate with people of many cultures and religious traditions. I wanted to write this book because there is a deep-seated assumption in our world that you can have God in your life, or you can have sex, but you can’t have both. Consciously or not, if you aim to be a spiritual person, if you seek closeness to God, you probably think of sex as something that only puts more distance between you and the divine. Our guilt and shame surrounding sex are so deeply ingrained that we may not even acknowledge them. After all, western culture has been through a series of “sexual revolutions” in the last century. By now, some may ...