Here’s the Problem… | Mark Whitwell on Doctrine, Yoga and Inspiration

Here is the problem: when mankind invented the written word, he simultaneously invented doctrine. Suddenly, yogic experiences of freedom were turned into ideas and abstractions written in text. The idea of enlightenment, for example; or the idea of God-realization.

Presented with the sublime poetry of religious text the public was seduced into the pursuit of exalted, abstract states of being. For thousands of years, the ‘ordinary’ life has been denied in the name of a future possibility.

Our lives today remain haunted by spiritual abstractions. We all are trying to become like the Buddha; or we are trying to approximate God-realization as expressed in text; or we read about meditation and inner peace and so we try and meditate and attain what has been described.

We are miserable within the idea that we are not measuring up to an imagined standard. Humanity is caught in a desperate struggle within their belief systems.

In Yoga, the understanding is that these sublime human possibilities arise naturally, spontaneously and unpredictably within the context of a life of intimacy.

You cannot make them happen. You cannot take heaven by storm, so to speak. Things happen when the conditions are right, like falling asleep.

My teacher Krishnamacharya described the so-called higher-limbs of yoga as siddhis. A siddhi is a gift that comes as a result of your searchless Yoga practice; that comes by grace.

The point is: just intimacy.

The Yogic method is intimacy with all ordinary conditions: body, breath, and relationship in that order. Our most direct intimacy is with our own embodiment.

As we move and breathe, the mind becomes linked to the intelligence of the whole body. You can feel the connection to the nurturing source that is beating your heart and moving your breath and sex.

From our intimacy with body and breath, the siddhis of meditation/ of clarity of mind/ of God-realization arise naturally. This embrace is the ancient means of spiritual wisdom culture.

Not through meditation; not through residing as witness-consciousness; not through reducing or denying all experience; but to embrace your experience. By the embrace of all conditions, you know the source of all conditions.

If we have been inspired by sacred text (or by anything at all), we have to understand that these ideas are not the be-all and end-all of our life.

Yoga is required as the practical means to actualize those ideals; the tantra is the means to reveal nurturing Source.

For example, Jesus was a Jewish Yogi who said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Great! So first, we become sensitive to our own embodiment. Yoga is this technology of bodily self-love.

We can take up a short daily practice of moving and breathing and learn to receive our breath and our experience. Very quickly, we discover a newfound receive and love another. Intimacy within allows for intimacy without — to love thy neighbor as thyself.

People all over the world want to feel something. They want to feel alive, to feel their connection to that which is Great, and to feel their relatedness to others.

When we feel restricted in our life it does not help to be given ideals of how we should be feeling. What is required is an actual practice that anybody can do.

The Nurturing force of reality has arrived as you: as this very heartbeat, breath and sex. You are a flower blooming in your own garden.

Yoga begins as your direct participation in the given wonder that you are. You are an utterly unique individual who is connected to the Whole. If you do this you will realize the wonderful things that have been expressed in text.

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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.