The Secret to Starting a Successful Home Yoga Practice | Mark Whitwell

In the traditional context of Yoga, students would meet with their teacher on a one-to-one basis and then go away and practice for themselves at home. The purpose of the meeting was for the creation of a personal, home Yoga practice that was perfectly suited to the needs of the student.

The teacher gives the student a spiritual sadhana: a daily discipline that they can actually do.

What’s more, the relationship that is formed in these meetings is a Yoga itself. The student is brought into the recognition that they are the power, intelligence, and harmony of Life itself. The teacher gives the appropriate tools so that student can participate in that most essential power. The teacher relates to themselves as that and so relates to the student.

Dear friendship is the model in which such an exchange can take place; it is never a commercial relationship.

Krishnamacharya was very dedicated to his students as you can see in the mood of these photos. He continued to humbly teach privately even in his elderly life. And private teaching remained his first commitment even when he was very busy as a known scholar and Yoga master in India.

When I was studying in Chennai, I was fortunate enough to sit with his son Desikachar as he met with individual students. These meetings were very informative to me; less in the actual content of what Desikachar taught and more in the bhavana (mood/intention) that he created.

I saw how he treated each of his students with absolute respect and affection; what he called mittra or loving care.

“I never call my student, student. I always say he is my friend. That is called mittra. I want to offer loving-care and that makes a huge difference,” he once remarked beautifully.

The teacher is no more than a friend and no less.

Desikachar was meticulous in his ordinariness. He was a humble, modern and natural man with no social strategy. He emphasized that the idea of someone being superior or inferior to anybody else is the problem itself that prevents Yoga transmission. He treated teenagers with the same respect as his adult and elderly students.

Ordinariness is the number one quality to look for in a Yoga teacher. Many teachers grossly or subtly maintain the idea that they are special in some way; more advanced along a socially contrived pathway of spiritual attainment. Hidden hierarchy and the model of the perfect person robs the student of their autonomy and keeps them seeking for a life that is alternative to the beauty that is there present condition.

Unless the social dynamic of disempowerment is deconstructed, this most basic idea of patriarchy — this chain of being — grinds on in the student’s mind producing real pain and an unnecessary sensation of lack.

Yoga is participation in what is Real. In Reality, it is not possible for anybody to be second to anything or superior to anything. We are all here in a vast horizontal relationship with one another.

“I have no one to beat/ I have no one to cheat/ you know I just need some room to unfurl” — Robin Williamson.

The popular forms of Yoga that are on offer around the world today are just another context of hierarchy. Teachers position themselves as ‘knowers’ who know something about Life that you don’t.

Many have recognized now that the methodologies of the founders of the major brands are intrinsically abusive. The practices that have become famous deny the feminine principle and impose gross, male ideals upon innocent bodies.

Even those critical of such patterning however, continue to teach the same fundamental tenets: one-size-fits-all routines, the absence of breath as the central purpose of asana, the use of intrusive adjustments that interfere with a person’s autonomous prana.

Instead of all that, you can have actual Yoga: direct intimacy with Reality. What is Reality? It is the power of this cosmos that moves your breath and sex and that brought you here in the first place and presently sustains you. You can have your very own practice that you can do daily in the sanctuary of your own home — a practice you can slip into like your favourite pair of jeans.

Allow me to ask you to take a pinch of your extraordinary discipline that you already have in so many areas of your life and put that into your daily Yoga practice.

Desikachar was unambiguous in his insistence that his student practice what he taught them on a daily basis. He knew that the healing power of intimate connection afforded by Yoga is felt when it is practiced each day. He wanted that for his students.

Don’t worry if you have fallen off the wagon or have forgotten to practice. Do it again now. Inhale and receive what you need. Exhale and release what you don’t need.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

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.