Mark Whitwell

Tessa P: Hi Mark, thanks for joining me for this conversation on the topic of men and yoga. My classes are continually almost all women. What can I do to attract more men to yoga? I feel like if they don’t want to come, I can’t help that. Mark Whitwell: That’s a great question. Yes, something very odd is going on in Western Yoga. Where are all the men? I often ask this in my classes, which can sometimes be 80 or 90% women, depending on the country. Tessa: And why do you think that is? Mark Whitwell: It’s a complex issue. Our choices are not being made in a free autonomous vacuum. The problem is, yoga has been popularised as “stretching for girls”, as one student in Germany told me. We live in a world where gender norms are often tightly and unconsciously policed, so once an activity becomes associated with “women” or “men,” it tends to only attract one or the other. But there is more to it, as women’s activities have typically been looked down upon as lesser than men’s activities. ...

The origin of modern Yoga lies in the life of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), a man revered around the world as the ‘teacher of the teachers’ and ‘the father of modern Yoga.’ Krishnamacharya was teacher to many of the main figures of twentieth century Yoga: Pattabhi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi, and T.K.V. Desikachar, who was his son. If you have been to a Yoga class in a studio or have attended a teacher training, Krishnamacharya is likely to be at the source of what you practice or teach. Curiously however, several key principles that Krishnamacharya emphasized have been left out over the course of Yoga’s incredible rise in popularity. Krishnamacharya’s teaching that Yoga must be adapted to the individual and his absolute insistence on breath-participation as very the purpose of asana are difficult to find in the myriad offerings of the yoga world. And so, in any city in the world today, everywhere you look you can find what is called ‘yoga’; but for the most part it is l...

  My teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was a contemporary of Ramana Maharshi and lived a three-hour drive away in Madras. He considered Ramana to be a great Rishi realizer of the tradition of Veda. He would say that Ramana was a “white spot on a white page on the great book of Veda” — meaning that he was pure and could not be faulted. Ramana Maharshi was born on December 30, 1879 near Madurai in South India. He was raised in a middle-class family of Tamil Brahmin caste. An otherwise normal child, his realization came spontaneously in his teenage years. At the age of 16, Ramana fell into a life-long love-peace. He describes one day being struck by an overwhelming feeling that he was about to die. When he lay down in absolute fear it dawned on him that he was not a separate ego-I: he was Reality Itself. Ramana’s realization was permanent. Soon after, he left his family and travelled to Arunachala where he took up residence as a spiritual teacher. Ramana attempted to teach a method of...

“Truth is a pathless land,” Jiddu Krishnamurti famously declared in 1929 , before stepping down as the world leader of Theosophy. “Man cannot approach it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique.” In other words, if you are trying to get to Truth on a path, then that path is leading away from Truth. Truth is the given condition of all Life: your hands holding your phone; your eyes reading these words; the vibration of all life happening is Truth, already . This understanding was Krishnamurti’s profound and beautiful offering to the world. Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in the small town of Madanapalle in South India. When he was fourteen, he was found playing on the private beach of the Theosophical Society near the Adyar river where his family lived. He was discovered by Charles Webster Leadbeater who thought him to be the perfect candidate to become the World Teacher of Theosophy...