Mark Whitwell

Before beginning your asana practice it is good to rest for a short while, putting aside the demands of regular activity and turning your attention over to the intimacies of body and breath. You may like to chant, listen to music, or place some relaxed attention on significant objects. This will establish the mood or bhavana of the practice. Yoga begins from savasana, corpse pose, or any passive posture, and moves as the natural movement of life energy or prana of the whole body, usually with easy, simple movements at first. The body moves easily in the energy of the system throughout the practice. Nothing is imposed. Force disrupts rather than enhances movement of prana. It may be counterintuitive to consider savasana as the starting point for practice. The point here is that Yoga is the renewal of the body’s natural state of aliveness and feeling-connection. “Yogis now prescribe savasana, the corpse posture, after the performance of any moving postures. This is backwards. You start ...

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 eve...

Mahamudra is known in the Yoga traditions as ‘the great sacred gesture.’ It is a highly revered asana that is placed at the conclusion of one’s vinyasa . Unlike a seated forward bend, the spine remains straight. The posture earns the title ‘great sacred gesture’ because it is the literal enactment of the head/mind given over to its source: the Hridaya Heart; the first cell of life that appeared when you appeared; the portal through which Nurturing Source Reality flows and manifests as the whole body. Mahamudra practiced correctly involves the activation of all three bandhas . Among asana , only two others share this feature: the others are Adho Mukha Svanasana (down dog) and Sarvangasana (shoulderstand). The strength of the body base and the lower bandha — mulabandha and uddiyanabandha — rises to the Hridaya Heart as the ascending, male energy of strength. The head lowers to form jalandhara bandha thus giving over the descending energy of receptivity to the Heart. The Heart resides ...

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...