Yoga in the Time of Climate Chaos | Mark Whitwell

We may not have asked for this gig, but it is what we have been given: the deepening climate crisis, a global pandemic, and the epidemics of fear, racism, anxiety and mental illness that divide our communities. Everything is tinder-dry: politics, people, and our forest systems all seem set to explode at the slightest spark.

I used to live and teach Yoga in California. Last night, I spoke with friends there who are sheltering from the wildfires presently tearing through the hills. They live in neighborhoods still recovering from the devastating Camp Fire in 2018. They voiced their despair at having to face yet another blaze.

“The air is almost unbreathable here and the fire is getting nearer to our home. If you could see the sky out here, it feels like the end of the world.”

Now, more than ever before, we need our spiritual traditions to help us turn the global machine of abuse and exploitation around. The secular must serve the sacred.

What is the sacred?

The power, unspeakable beauty, intelligence and intrinsic harmony of the natural world; and every person’s non-separateness from that Unity.

Therefore, when I point to the spiritual and the sacred, I do not mean orthodox religion; nor the popular trend of mindfulness meditation; nor the eastern traditions of renunciation and celibacy.

In fact, the patriarchal, religious power structures that built civilization are responsible for destroying indigenous cultures; for exploiting the earth in the senseless aim of accumulating wealth; for sowing division between racial groups and dividing the sexes through the collusion of church and state.

Reports continue to come out of Canada detailing the abusive legacy of the church and their collaboration with colonial powers to assimilate Indian children.

These masters of disaster and their teachings are responsible for the sexual aberration and abuse within all religious institutions — behaviors that have filtered down into the normal life. The model of the perfect person and the dominance of religious leaders, “the knower” over women and men has created the one who “does not know” the one who is imagined to be not perfect.

The womanless men of religious orthodoxy have saturated society with thought-structures that speak of our supposed separation from nature, separation from one another, and separation from Truth/God.

This is the all pervasive assumption and state of the public mind: a cultural pandemic of doubt that leaves us gullible and easily exploited, unsure of our own intrinsic authenticity. Coupled with the glamorization of celibacy as a superior state, the presumption of a religious ‘chain of being’ has proved fatal to humanity — and countless other life forms — on planet Earth.

As highly evolved and exquisitely sensitive social animals, to feel separate from Truth produces a horrible pain in our nervous system.

Humanity once lived in non-hierarchical egalitarian society in which the physical wisdom practices of Yoga were enjoyed by all. It was shared in local community as a practice of intimate connection to the natural world; both to the natural state of the body-mind and its context: the entire elemental world of the cosmos. It was the basis of a spiritual culture of intimate connection to Nature; the antithesis of what we are seeing today.

The whole culture of ancient Veda was built upon humble gatherings of people who were devoted to a life of yogic intimacy. Yoga is relationship. These were groups of people who were in love with each other and living within the collective recognition of the nature of Life as it actually is: the power, beauty and harmony of this cosmos and their non-separateness from that.

Reality-realizers, teachers and gurus functioned in the community as a means by which others could be brought to the same recognition that they too are the power and beauty of the cosmos. It is the anciently given way of the Upanishadic forest dwellers; the very word Upanishad means to sit closely.

The Yogas of participation that evolved in these times allow us to transform human culture one person at a time by dissolving the thought-structures that speak of separation from nature and by allowing any person to live in the natural state.

It must spread rapidly to every person so that humanity as a whole grasps the fact that we are not separate: we are the wild, we are Mother Nature. This change in our thought-structures will give us the courage to do what we must do to clean up the planet.

When we use the word Yoga and suggest its relevance to a problem as serious as climate chaos there is often a jarring effect. Yoga has been popularized so badly as either gymnastic fanaticism or religious fanaticism. Now, ‘What Yoga is’ seems firmly set in the culture’s mind.

Real Yoga however, does exist. The Yogas of Participation that came through Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and which were refined by U.G. Krishnamurti: each person’s direct participation in the natural state. Such a practice shares the same name but produces profoundly different results.

When Iyengar first went to England he said, “I have come to enslave the enslavers.” He carried a lot hidden anger born of English authoritarianism in India which is understandable. My teacher Desikachar would say that the west had colonized India and now India was colonizing the west with its authoritarian spirituality.

Authority comes in charming packages and we do not even know we are being manipulated. Students in the west reported that Mr. Iyengar’s authoritarian methods were compelling because they were aligned to the authoritarian culture that they were already steeped in.

Culture will changes when perception clears; only a mind convinced of separation would destroy its own nest.

May these anciently given wisdom practices spread so that we can all feel our connection to the Whole. The world depends upon it.

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.