Mark Whitwell

  My decision to train with Mark Whitwell came quite out of the blue when a close friend from university rang to tell me about a real-deal teacher she had met in Fiji who was offering something almost unrecognizable to the usual bullshit of the yoga world.  “Trust me,” she said, “This is different. If you can get leave from work, you could come up for the training. I’d love for you to meet Mark Whitwell .”  I could tell by the excitement in her voice that she had found something worthwhile. I booked my flights the next day… I had no prior interest in Yoga, but I was desperately unhappy. I couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that life was happening somewhere else, and that I was separate from it all, and that I needed to somehow get closer to it.  I had spent my twenties hysterically trying to resolve this sense of separation—through art, drugs, meditation, and higher education. And each time I failed to arrive at a sense of wholeness through one pursuit, I would hav...

Mark   Whitwell   was born in 1949 in Auckland, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. In 1973, he traveled to India and began a life-long study of yoga with Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his son, T.K.V. Desikachar (1938–2016).  Mark   Whitwell ’s simple mission is to give people the principles of practice that came through Tirumalai Krishnamacharya to make their Yoga authentic, powerful, and effective.  Mark   Whitwell  is the founder of the Heart of Yoga foundation and the Heart of Yoga Peace Project, an organization dedicated to developing yoga communities in conflict zones around the world.  Mark   Whitwell  lives between New Zealand and Fiji.   It may seem strange, at this point in history, to suggest taking up a home Yoga practice; a bad joke in the context of the scale of global violence and grief. Yet beneath the commodification of Yoga and our resulting perceptions of it, lies a radical and ancient science of self-restoration a...