Mark Whitwell

The most influential Vedanta Acharya in Krishnamacharya’s family lineage was Ramanuja of the 10th century: a reality realizer, like Christ or the Buddha, who declared that all seen conditions are a shesha of God (a manifestation of God’s abundance; an overflow into substance) and therefore, devotion to all ordinary conditions — body, breath, and relationship of all kinds — is bhakti : God-realizing activity. Just as the whole-body is the bloom of the hridaya heart, so the material world is the bloom of Source Reality. It is from Ramanuja that we get the great resolving statement of vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dualism): that is, “the Source and the Seen are One.” Ramanuja gifted the world a philosophy of intimate connection. He saw that Yoga was necessary for every person because even though the unity of Source and Seen is established, the human mind has a tendency to assume separation. He emphasized Yoga sadhana as the practical method of devotion to any natural ‘thing’: Yoga is co...

“But it grieves my heart love To see you tryin’ to be a part of A world that just don’t exist It’s all just a dream, babe A vacuum, a scheme, babe That sucks you into feelin’ like this” — Bob Dylan, To Ramona For thousands of years, humanity has suffered the proposal that Truth or God is absent and needs to be found. The population has been brainwashed into the pursuit of a transcendent Truth that supposedly lies ‘beyond the veil’ of ordinary, presently arising conditions. In the belief that there is somewhere amazing to get to, the intrinsic wonder of ordinary conditions — the body, birth, sex, women, and death — is denied. The search for God obliterates our ability to notice the wonder that is already present in us, as us and around us. Whether religious or no, the movement of mind toward an imagined future state is the axiom of all patriarchal cultures. Few are spared. It is the very source of human suffering. Convinced of a future possibility of perfection, union with God, or perma...

  Not so long ago The Atlantic ran a piece declaring that much of the western world was in the grip of a “millenial sex recession.” Apparently, those born between the 1980s and early 2000s are having less sex than previous generations; and less are in engaged in long-term relationships. Data from an American study showed that young people were more than twice as likely to have no sexual partner compared to those born in the 1960s and ‘70s. So why, despite an unprecedented culture of permissiveness around sex, are young people having less and less of it? Anxiety levels, economic pressures, academic stress, the ubiquity of online porn, dating apps, smartphones, a culture of casualness in relationships, environmental pollution, sleep deprivation and diet, have all been pointed to by experts as factors feeding into the decline of sex. And studies show that social media use may have conditioned an entire generation to feel less and less comfortable in their own skin — with both men an...

In my life as a Yoga teacher I have the opportunity to form deep friendships with people from all over the world. Whether during in-person workshops or online it is beautiful to see people of different backgrounds respond to the treasures of Yoga. Regardless if they are Middle-Eastern, American, Norwegian, Mexican, English, Indian, German, Italian, or Ugandan; whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist; Yoga proves to be a powerful tool for supporting any person’s life. Indeed, my teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya believed Yoga to be “India’s greatest gift to the world”; a tradition and set of practices that was applicable to any person: with the caveat that any teaching must be carefully adapted to the student’s age, health, body-type and culture. Krishnamacharya was emphatic that Yoga is not Hinduism; but rather, a wisdom tool for all religions or those without a faith. So what is it exactly that makes Yoga so universal? Yoga is universal because it addresses a universal ne...

  When people first come to spiritual practice they are usually a faced with a choice between two views or dharmic perspectives. The first choice is to abide as witness consciousness to all arising conditions until eventually you reside only as consciousness itself; where there is no subject and no object but only Reality Itself. This is the popular view of modern day Buddhism and Hinduism; and the practices of ‘witnessing your experience’ are foundational to modern meditation and mindfulness traditions. It is where we get the popular spiritual methods of detachment, stepping back from experience and even celibacy. The second choice is to embrace or merge with a chosen direction/ object with continuity until you are completely merged with that object. As a result of that merge, you know the object and simultaneously you know the ‘knower’ of that object: Consciousness Itself, that in which all object/subject relations are arising. This is the view or method of Yoga which can be summ...