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Is the Yoga Teacher a Special Person? Mark Whitwell on the Teacher-Student Relationship in Yoga [interview]

In the early 1990s Mark Whitwell was taking a walk on a beach near Madras with his teacher Desikachar and his wife Menaka. He had just finished compiling material for Desikachar’s first book. But they didn’t know what the title should be. Suddenly, Desikachar declared,  

“The Heart of Yoga!”

The heart of yoga, Desikachar explained, is not the poses, the practices, or the philosophy, but the relationship between the teacher and the student. Without a relationship of mutual affection no yoga transmission can occur.

A year later, Mark Whitwell delivered the first copy of the book to his teacher.

The Heart of Yoga: developing a personal practice (1995) is now a set text on yoga teacher trainings around the world.

In this interview, I sat down with Mark Whitwell to explore the teacher-student relationship in yoga; what equality in teaching settings looks like; what the purpose of the relationship is; and how to be a good yoga teacher.

Andrew Raba: You’re fond of saying that the yoga teacher is “no more than a friend, and no less than a friend.” Can you expand on this principle?

Mark Whitwell: The intimacy found among friends – be they formally recognized as teachers or not – is the transformative means of yoga. This equal relationship is the necessary means of yoga transmission and personal empowerment of another. Trust in another enables trust in ourselves and trust in life.

When a student comes to a teacher, trust is already established simply because they have come believing that something is there for them. It is the teacher’s responsibility not to exploit that trust and to teach only what is useful and relevant to each person.

Many people who consider themselves teachers or therapists are wounded personalities who use their teaching as a strategy to maintain control of others. Useful teaching can only happen when there is no psychological strategy or social agenda at all.

When you feel you are in safe hands, something happens.

Andrew Raba: Why is this understanding so rare in today’s world in which there are so many spiritual teachers who claim positions of social power?

Mark Whitwell: The phenomena of spiritual transmission has occurred up until now in the social dynamic of disempowerment. Therefore, it’s not really ‘spiritual.’ It’s a kind of love transmission that actually makes you sick and bound.

Civilization and our present society is built upon this pervasive patterning. The model of the perfect person implies that everyone else is not yet perfect.

My friend U.G. Krishnamurti’s life was a crack in this very fixed presumption of society—a crack in which the light gets in! U.G. embodied an alternative model for all interaction and for spiritual transmission which was utter ordinariness and friendship.  

Andrew Raba: Can you give an example of how Desikachar related to his students in this way?

Mark Whitwell: Often when arriving for a private yoga lesson with Desikachar he would say something like,

“Is there anything? Or shall we go to the beach? Or shall we just gossip?”

Two things are going on here.

Firstly, a teaching transmission depends on a sincere inquiry from the student. If a sincere dialogue arises between friends, that could be considered a teaching. Otherwise, there is no need for a teaching! Because life itself is doing a perfect job of nurturing and sustaining us.

Humanity has been civilized, burdened and controlled by the imposition of teachings on Life that Life does not need. If you suggest to a person that they need a teaching you only confuse the person and put them on a linear struggle toward some future ideal or improvement.

Secondly, asking if we should go for a walk on the beach or gossip is indicative of his profound commitment to egalitarian friendship as the context for teaching transmission.

Andrew Raba: Who can be a Yoga teacher?

Mark Whitwell: There are only three qualifications to teach yoga.

First, you have a good teacher yourself, so you know first-hand what the function is.

Second, you practice yourself, so you are in the direct embrace of life yourself.

Third, you care about others because you are cared for by your own teacher. You know what it is to love.

When you practice yoga daily for yourself, your presence in your community becomes a source of nurturing, healing and empowerment for all because you develop the strength to receive others. To be received is to be loved, and in love life flows.

Relieved of trying to be something you are not, your simple presence frees another to feel that relief, too. Then you fit a practical yoga to their needs.

The best teacher is the Acharya, one who has had victory over their own difficulties. Our difficulties have uniquely qualified us to be helpful to others who must go through the same troubles, especially in the areas we have passed through ourselves.

Andrew Raba: There is a lot of suspicion in the world today around spiritual teachers. Is the yoga teacher or the guru still necessary today?  

Mark Whitwell: The word guru is deep in the traditions. Guru means heavy. It is a necessary intervention. Necessary because it is required to reduce or remove a person’s negative patterning. It's an important function of Mother Nature like a wave and the ocean. Two people coming together for transmission and transformation.

A mess has been created however, around the guru function. It has been toxified by those claiming to be gurus within the mistaken idea of the patriarchy that it implies status and authority.

It's a heavy thing to be in the fire of relationship with another, and collectively we haven't been given the skilful means to do it, so it's avoided. But an actual relationship between two people is how yoga works. It must be there to restore natural life.

We need our gurus. In every town and village. We need people willing to be the wave or the ocean for others.

End of interview

If you want to learn the principles of home Yoga practice that Mark Whitwell discusses in this interview you can join the 8-week online immersion by donation at www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion.

Wendy Wright

Wendy is a mother-of-two based in Toronto. After initially training in dance, she became a yoga teacher for children and elderly people. She is passionate about learning more about the wisdom of our bodies and baking.

Wendy: Hi Mark, thanks for coming on today.

Mark Whitwell: You're welcome. Good to see you.  

Wendy: I'd like to talk about something I've been struggling with lately. Which is, a sense of conflict with what I see in the yoga world around me. I just see so many strange mash-up of dance and movement and feel good therapies and stretching and then it all gets called yoga, and I've been part of this myself and I don't feel good about it anymore. And more and more there seems to be a lot of stuff out there shaming people for appropriating yoga and such, but meanwhile, people are enjoying these hybrids and get quite defensive. What's your experience here.

Mark Whitwell: Yeah thanks Wendy, I hear you on that. None of its valid. Or at least, it's not yoga it's lots of other things being called yoga and people are getting a little high off that and maybe feel a little bit better. It's the early days of yoga in the West and it's all a big experiment. The young students of Krishnamacharya popularised these very physical harsh male gymnastic practises, and they spread all over the world. And then, on the other hand, you have the practise is spread by Hindu missionaries which demand celibacy and so on. And so either way people haven't really been given a practise that fulfils the promises of yoga. They sense there is something more there waiting for them. And so they start trying to add this and that.

But what is needed to be added is not somatic this and trance dance that, it is the actual principles that the guru of those young men (Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois) Actually taught. I have seen people with decades of experience in those systems add the breath principles that krishnamachari are taught, and they are away. They're playing with a full deck of cards.

Wendy: But people are very attached to doing what they're doing and calling it yoga they don't like to hear that maybe it's not.

Mark Whitwell: Yeah fair enough, and that’s fine. It might have given them a little bit of relief, something positive in their life, some endorphins, like a glass of wine gives relief. We can't begrudge anyone for their sincere explorations. the problem is people start to identify with Wat ever has helped them, and that's when they get stuck because actually, Yoga is about dissolving those identifications so you can stand in your own ground as life itself not as any lesser conceptual categories. What we are talking about here is something more than feel-good gatherings.

Wendy: So what do you do when people righteously insist on their right to define yoga as whatever they feel like it is. For example, they feel good dancing around the room or walking their dog and so they say “that's my yoga.”

Mark Whitwell: Well, what I would say to them is different from what I would say to you. You have to create a relationship with people where they are at and honour their sincere attempts to feel better. That is Life’s intelligence happening. However silly. The goal is not to prove anyone wrong but to make some space for them to actually try what will truly help them. And you can't teach anyone anything until you love them. So what you do is you do your own yoga, your own relationship with life, until you're able to relate with them sympathetically and not react or try to win the argument. Sometimes when people get a little bit of knowledge about Yoga, they can become awful to be around because they start trying to prove to everyone else that what they're doing is superior and it puts everyone else’s back up. So there's no need for that. Everyone is the power of the cosmos and doesn't need to establish imaginary dominance over others in any way. So the main thing is to do your own Yoga. And if that's happening actually, naturally, and non-obsessively, people will notice. You'll find that some people have an organic curiosity about what you're up to. There's no need to get into arguments at dinner parties. I say, “when do you teach? When you are asked to teach.” If someone is not asking you then there's no need to impose on them. There needs to be some receptivity there. But of course, that request might not be a request for yoga it might just be a request for help. And yoga is the help that you have to offer.

Wendy: Do you think that tendency to want to own and define yoga is a western thing?

Mark Whitwell: Absolutely. The western mind wants to define everything, put it in the box, own it. My teacher Desikachar said that “In the West, whilst they don't accept authority, they would like to be the authority.” So yes, we can say that there is a colonial impulse there that takes yoga, changes it out of all recognition, and then angrily fights for its right to do so. That is attracted towards very materialistic, aggressive physical practice, such as what Iyengar taught, and then gets injured, blames “the Indian tradition” rather than its own ambition and habit of struggle, and then says we need physios and anatomy to make it ‘safe.’ The Western saviour complex that thinks it can come along and improve this poor inadequate indigenous thing called yoga, that can’t be very good because brown people made it up. As if they were not thousands upon thousands of years of sublime history there. Think about the sages wandering that great land while Europe went through two world wars… Anandamayi Ma, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi, Bhagavan Nityananda, Shirdi Sai Baba, Ramana Maharishi… completely extraordinary. But we won’t gain anything from trying to point this out to anyone who is doing it. Because why are they doing that? They’re just trying to feel better in the cultural patterned way they know-how, which is over-stimulation and entertainment, possession and ownership. So what is the underlying need there? Intimacy. Feeling connected. Wanting to feel better. So what we can do is share the tools of the tradition that have been left behind that do actually make people feel better. The tendency to just get into fights about what yoga is, is part of the same cultural mess, the same illusion of separate mind vs separate mind. You are not a separate individual, you are Reality. And your Yoga is your daily participation in this fact. Whether they are informed about Yoga and yoga traditions, or uninformed, people are still troubled by the same thing which is our reaction to experience. And so reacting to the reactions doesn’t help. It just makes more of a mess. You have to step-free and live your life, share the actual tools, create something. Don’t worry about whether you succeed or fail, just keep going. Don’t worry if you’re misunderstood.

Wendy: I feel so pained teaching yoga and being associated with it all, I have thought many times about quitting teaching because it’s all become such a circus.

Mark Whitwell: That's a beautiful honest confession. Thank you for your sincerity and vulnerability. Please don't stop teaching, because these qualities are needed in the world. We need people who aren’t just selling shoddy goods to the public, selling patterns to people who genuinely need help and are coming to you for help. We need people who are willing to share their knowledge of the precise technology of Yoga that Krishnamacharya brought through from the ancient traditions. There are only three qualifications to teach: that you have a good teacher, you practice yourself, and you care about others. And you, Wendy, have all those three. And so you must teach. You know it. You have a treasure and I guarantee that you can’t help yourself but share it. It’s like having some food and there are hungry people around you, you want to share it. And when you see the circus going on, don’t be in reaction to it. It doesn’t define you. What you are doing has nothing to do with all that. Don’t waste your energy on it. Let it motivate you to be even more determined to share things that actually help at a deeper level, not just make people feel good for five minutes and then grind along as usual. Everyone has a heart. At some deep level, everyone wants to step out of the cycles of numbness and stimulation, distraction and repression, excitement and despair. Even if it seems to you like everyone just wants gymnastics and a talk circle, don’t despair. Share what you know to be true and a few good souls will find you. Do not worry about who comes and goes and whatever their karmas are. Don’t take it personally.

Wendy: It seems to me that part of the problem is that people don’t admit just how much they are really suffering. It’s like it’s shameful or something, and there’s just this surface level of smiles and laughter, with all this anger and pain underneath.

Mark Whitwell: Absolutely. That's part of the teacher’s role in the traditions, to see that people think they're at a feast, and really they’re in a kind of desperate hell realm. The glamour has to wear off the illusions. As people relax and start feeling into the real state of the body, as they start regaining their natural sensitivity, they become sober and realise that what looks like an exciting party from the outside is actually a desperate scene of suffering and seeking. No one has to take my word for it, they notice it for themselves. They stop being enamoured of the drunken party. A person starts a yoga practise and starts to feel for themselves how they have been imposed upon by culture. It's a shock. But it becomes further motivation for their practise. To participate in something different then the identity of the limited individual that they have been sold.

So as a teacher you absolutely don't have to try and convince anybody that they are suffering. First of all, you just acknowledge your own suffering. You really honour everything you have been through and every persona that you have been that got you to where you are today, the modern survivor. You thank them all. And you forgive them all for whatever they had to do to survive. And then you just share the breath with people and you share your recognition of them as a valid person, as life, as something that isn't the limited identity they might have bought into of winner or loser or whatever. You make it clear that you are interested in them as a person no matter what they are feeling. Your own practise gives you a capacity of feeling, that you can receive them, no matter what their feeling. You can only receive anyone as deeply as you receive yourself. If they're down you don't try and cheer them up just because you can't handle it. You help them make space for reality. And that helps them make space for Reality capital R, the fact that we are always looked after, nurtured and supported in this life. That life is nurturing. You can tell people this, sure, but the most important thing instead you feel the truth of it and you share the practical means for them to feel the truth of it.

Wendy: Thank you, Mark. I feel like there is potential here to step out of a kind of purity spiral, where I never feel like I’m good enough as a Yoga teacher, never feel like I know enough like I should have more qualifications, read more ancient texts.

Mark Whitwell: Again, thank you for this beautiful vulnerability. There are so many feeling the same thing whom you speak for. It’s just our old patterning from school and culture of not good enough, old identify of being lacking, just a hangover of these old patterns. Some of them might hang around for a while, but you know that you ARE in fact the power of the cosmos, you acknowledge this daily. You make some new grooves in your mind. You don’t get stuck in reaction even to your own patterning. You have those three qualifications that I spoke about earlier and look, I can tell that you really do care about people. You have all kinds of people coming to you, and you really do care about each one. Thank you so much for caring about each person. I know you do. Don’t let these old hangovers hold you back from doing what you can do. Don’t let yourself be intimated by all those climbing up imaginary ladders in imaginary power structures. They get to the top, apparently, and they still feel bad about themselves, they still find themselves looking for power over others. It’s all made up. The teacher is no more than a friend, no less than a friend. Not an authority. Not a knower. Not someone hoarding information and doling it out with the stink of enlightenment, the promise of future realisation. There is no such thing as future realisation.

Wendy: Thank you so much, Mark. I hope other teachers reading this or listening in will feel some relief and inspiration.

Mark Whitwell: Thank you, Wendy. I appreciate your love of the people and desire to get it right for them so much. Thank you.

About:

Mark Whitwell shares his thoughts on dealing with such tough times.

For many friends around the world, ongoing lockdowns are causing chronic stress. In the U.K., psychologists are now reporting what they call ‘Lockdown Burnout,’ with more and more people suffering from overload and uncertainty. In the context of real suffering, it is heartening to see teachers reaching out to communicate the healing power of Yoga in their communities.

I was talking recently with a friend in the U.K. and she described how teaching Yoga was no longer a hobby or a job for her, but a matter of survival for her students. “Everybody is under so much pressure,” she said. “People are desperate for the connection, nourishment and the fortitude that Yoga gives. We meet on Zoom twice a week, practice together and then share in each other’s company. I have no choice but to be there for my students.”

Our conversation got me thinking about care and the function of the Yoga Teacher within the broader ecology of nurturing that holds society together. In the Vedic lineage of my teachers, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) and his son TKV Desikachar (1938–2016), the Yoga teacher was considered essential to the health and wellbeing of the community.

Principally, the yoga acharya was there to help any person (no matter who they are) to merge with their body and their breath. Out of this daily merge, facilitated through a tailored asana and pranayama practice, come many gifts that are physically, emotionally and spiritually healing. Practice of intimate connection to body and breath is the Yogic means to enjoying intimacy with world beyond ourselves: our experience, our relationships and Life as a whole. There is no substitute for the regenerative power of breath.

“My father taught us more ways to approach a person in yoga than I have found anywhere else,” Desikachar writes. “Who should teach whom? When? And what? These are the important questions to be asked in beginning a practice. But underlying all these is the most important question of all: How can the power of the breath be utilized? That is something quite exceptional; nowhere else is the breath given so much importance, and our work has proven that the breath is a wonder drug, if I may use this term.”

At the level of physical health, the practice of deep, whole-body breathing coupled with body movement, cleanses and strengthens the respiratory system. It also improves all other vital functions of the body: the immune system, the health of the mind and digestion. On every exhalation, the lungs are emptied completely. On every inhalation we receive the refreshment of the breath into an expanded lung cavity. We empty what is full and fill what is empty. Or, we release what is old to receive what is new. There seems to be no part of the system that the breath does not influence.

The great gift of Yoga however it not just health for its own sake, but how it positively affects our relationships. In particular, the breath powerfully supports our ability to respond to difficulty and stress in our relationships in a caring way. Our daily delight of merging with our body and breath masterfully facilitates our ability to be intimate with our loved ones: to really listen, support and receive them no matter what is going down.

Deep in the traditions, it is understood that it is not what we experience but how we react to it that determines its effects. If we react to our experience and contract, then blockages or rubbish forms in the nadis and the muladara chakra. The prana can no longer flow unhindered through the system as it wants to. If, on the other hand, we merge with our experience, even it is disturbing or difficult, then prana continues to flow.

We all have difficulties in life and we all react from time to time. There is no idealism here, especially during a pandemic. When we notice reaction we can apply intelligent means to release the blockages that may have formed. In fact, “Yoga is 99% waste removal” Desikachar once said, and by removing everything that is not necessary, the natural energy of life, pranashakti, soon flows again. Ultimately, the goal of Yoga is to not react in the first place.

If you are put off by Sanskrit terms, the simple language of biology is suffice to communicate what our ancestors were talking about. The psychologist Maurice Hamington, for example, describes how our natural physiology is “built for care” — the soft feeling frontal line from crown, face, chest, belly and genitals, to our wonderful sense organs and our ability to focus our attention — are there to support us to receive. On the other hand, the strong base of the body — legs, pelvis, back and spine — support our capacity to give and take action in our relationships.

Yoga is nothing more or less than our participation in the relational intelligence of the whole body. We move and breathe in the polarity of strength (linked to the exhale and described in the traditions as the masculine principle of life) and receptivity (linked to the inhale and the feminine principle). All bodies, no matter what gender or sex, contain the union of strength and receptivity. To live out that union is enough to base life upon.

The beautiful insight of Hamington is that caring for one another implies the whole body. This becomes obvious when we think of what happens physically when we close ourselves off from other people and from life: our shoulders hunch, our chest muscles harden, there is tension in the face; we generally fold in as a body. Conversely, when we feel free and easy in our relationships our bodies reflect this with a physical openness and softness: our spine straightens, our chest opens and softens, our gaze relaxes, we are both more upright (strong) and softer (receptive) as we give and receive in the natural polarity of life.

Although many try, this is why we cannot force ourselves to be more caring or sensitive to another with mental ideals alone. More often than not, cultural ideals of love and kindness without the practical means to let these innate qualities flourish in the body-mind causes stress and disappointment. There is a gap between how we are and how we want to be. What we can do is our Yoga practice. In the traditions, it is known as sadhana: that which you can do. My teacher would say, just do your asana and just see what happens.

We are not getting out of life or away from others here. “Yoga is relationship,” Krishnamacharya would say, a statement that holds weight given his profound understanding of the religious cultures of India. It was the profound view of my teachers that relationship itself was the principle healing for the human life and the heart of a spiritual life. When I was speaking with my friend about her classes, she confirmed Krishnamacharya’s view and expressed how simply being with each other, within the bhavana (mood) of friendship and respect, generated its own nurturing influence.

“People often arrived with a feeling of heaviness or depression,” she told me. “But as we sit together and as they feel seen, listened to and loved, then something happens: a lightness enters where perhaps previously there was darkness or restriction.”

In my early life, I was able to observe Desikachar embodying this principle during private lessons. He would do many things: take the pulse of his student, enquire about the family, check on the diet, teach various asana, all manner of intelligent means. Yet, what made these tools truly relevant and alive for the student, was the context of friendship and care that they were communicated within. Students reported that it was the relationship itself that they drew the most sustenance and motivation from.

“This personal connection cannot be replaced by books or videos,” Desikachar said. “There must be a relationship, a real relationship, one that is based on trust (sraddha).”

I want to thank everybody out there who is teaching their hearts out on Zoom and in-person around the world, making sure that the mother’s milk of Yoga gets to all people no matter their race, religion or financial means. We pick up where Desikachar and his father left off and continue their mission of giving the whole world a Yoga education.

It is everybody’s birthright to breathe well and to be intimate with their Life. Sahana Vavatu. May we get the job done together.

If you feel curious or moved to learn more about home practice you can join me and my friends at the heart of yoga online studio for live classes and conversations from the heart.

Why is intimacy and relationship so neglected in the spiritual traditions of the world? Last year we put out God and Sex: Now We Get Both (2019) to examine this question.

Originally published here.

About:

Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga

The one thing that qualifies you to teach is that you practice yourself. If you practice, then you can teach others from the authority of your own experience of what Yoga is: your direct participation in Reality Itself.

It can be a difficult job being a Yoga teacher because your students will have had teachers and authorities telling them the right way to practice. People will say, “This is not yoga” and “Why is there so much focus on the breath?”

With the strength and the certainty of your own experience you meet the student with their mixture of ideas. And with the authority of the fact that you are intimate with Life as it actually is, then you teach them.

A Yoga teacher is not an authority in the usual sense of hierarchy and power. But an authority that is born out of a sense of love for all other people. You love everybody in a fundamental way as Life Itself. And you know that this technology of asana and pranayama enacted according to the principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth actually helps people feel their prior connection to Life.

The key is to translate your own experience of Yoga according to the needs of the student. We adapt the Yoga to individual needs according to body type, age, health and culture. Many students will be religious people and many will be people who have thrown out religion. We teach by making Yoga relevant to each person’s background and with respect to who they are.

Within the ongoing waves of lockdown, the need for people to have access to a Yoga practice in their homes is huge. We need Yoga teachers who are practicing and who able to share.

Yet, even if the usual pre-pandemic world stumbles back there will still be massive problems.

The mind of civilization has dissociated us from our own Reality via the transmission of Doubt. What has been transmitted to us from babies is that we are a separate body in a separate world and therefore we feel lonely and problematic.

This presumption that we are separate from Reality has caused real pain in the body mind. In this pain we become exploitable by all sorts of cults, authority figures, knowers and spiritual salesmen. Otherwise we numb the pain and the doubt through drugs and alcohol to try and feel better.

Within this craziness we need the wisdom tradition of Yoga like a baby needs mother’s milk. We need to feel our connection to Nurturing Source. We need to feel connection to what Life is.

Separate Body/ Separate World? Or, Life is a Unity

The world of separation that is created by the thought-structures of society does not actually exist. It is a vast illusion. What does exist is the cosmos in all its harmony, beauty and intelligence and power and you are that. How could you not be that? What could create your body? What has created your body? A vast intelligence that is the body. What lives the body. What brings it through to existence and what is breathing it?

You have to agree that life is a Unity. There is no mind without life without the body. So the mind too is the Unity. This Unity cannot be lost. My teacher U.G. Krishnamurti would say, “Nobody need give this you because you already have it. Nobody can take it away, because you are it.”

Therefore, even thought we may have wild dreams of pain and separation, we can say that our pain is not the whole story. The thought-structures of separation and doubt create momentum in the psychophysical forms that we are in. But we know that we are the peace, power, harmony, intelligence and beauty of Reality Itself.

If the pain of presumed separation gets intensified enough, it may lead us to the understanding that we are not separate, so long as somebody speaks it to us. We need to speak it to each other because of the necessity to address it. Otherwise our only option is to numb ourselves. But if the pain takes us to Reality Itself, we can let that which is Prior wash over us. Then we will all get home.

Join me and my friends in the heart of yoga studio to continue the conversation, take live classes, and collaborate with one another to learn how to teach this much-needed technology of Reality Embrace.

About:

Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga

In Patanjali Yoga Sutra the quality of asana is described in the beautiful phrase Sthira Sukham Asanam (YS II.46). Sthira means strength, alertness, energy and intensity and sukha means softness, comfort, openness and serenity. Right asana practice should have the dual qualities of sthira and sukha present in equal measure as a balance of opposing forces.

How do we do achieve this?

We want to practice with open hands and to keep a gentleness in the fingers. Let all the joints be at ease. In standing asana, keep the front of the feet active and the musculature of the legs engaged (no dead weight through the heels). Move from the strong centre of the body and avoid placing tension on the outer limbs.

Now, simply participate in the natural receiving and releasing process of the breath. Asana facilitates the union of the inhale with the exhale, that’s all. So start where you are with simple asana and be with your breath. There can be a challenge as you explore the range of your breath capability but never so much that you are straining for breath. Your practice should be pleasurable and energizing rather than stressful and depleting.

Remember, Yoga is not physical or spiritual gymnastics and there is no goal. Don’t worry about trying to do impressive asana or to practice like anybody else. We are deeply programmed to take up disciplines like Yoga in order to try and change ourselves into an ideal person. Practice without this burden as a pure pleasure, as your intimate connection to Life. Nobody has to be like anybody else. You are flower blooming in your own garden.

The openness and ease of sukha enters our practice when we accept who and what we are. If we have shoulder problems or are restricted in the breath, we start from there and move intelligently. These qualities flourish in us less when we impose them on ourselves and more when we let the natural, intrinsic intelligence of the body function.

What should our mind do during asana?

The balance between sthira and sukha also applies to the mind. Ideally, the mind is relaxed and comfortable whilst also being focused and attentive. My teacher Desikachar says, “It is attention without tension; loosening up without slackness.” If the mind is distracted during our asana practice then it is not really asana.

As we practice we discover for ourselves how to apply the right amount of effort (sthira) so that the mind’s tendency to wander is gradually replaced by its wonderful capacity to focus. It is not a matter of mind control. The mind ceases to wander when it become absorbed in a single direction, rather than when it is forcibly restrained or controlled.

The necessity for a personalized practice is clear. What effort without struggle means for one person will be different from what it means for another. We all have different constitutions, energy levels, health conditions, family circumstances, goals, and work lives that need to be taken into consideration.

As Desikachar writes,

“We cannot escape the need for adaptation. Adaptation is the application of certain principles, to achieve certain results. It implies: Knowing where the person is now and knowing where we want them to go. Adaptation is the means used to bridge this gap.”

For example, finding sthira-sukha for one student may require a morning practice of several rounds of Surya Namaskar followed by a long pranayama; for another, a lying down evening practice with long exhales may be appropriate; for a religious student, mantra, puja and guru devotion may be essential to the cultivation of this quality of mind; for a non-religious student, practice may need to be placed in the context of the student’s relationship with the natural world: to visualize the strength of the sun and the softness of the moon during asana. The student’s whole being must be considered — their body type, age, health, and cultural background. In order to become absorbed in our practice, we must be interested in our practice; it must be made relevant to our life.

In this way, the entire tradition of Yoga can be thought of as a vast treasury. The full portfolio of asana, pranayama, meditation, mantra, yantra, and visualization are available to be individually applied.

This is why group classes where everybody’s doing the same thing are a problem or a compromise.

“We are not magicians,” Tirumalai Krishnamacharya would say, “You cannot teach Yoga in classes, it must be adapted to each individual.”

Yoga is Relationship

The relationship between your asana practice and all aspects of your life is silken smooth. If you practice your asana in the way that is right for you, then the twin qualities of sthira and sukha will permeate your life. To be in life with these aspects in balance is the same quality of energy it takes to succeed in the world without creating stress.

There are so many opportunities to be very effortful with people and to make things happen in the world: publish books, build websites, build apps, run around the world meeting people, see this person, organize this event and so on. In that struggle, we eventually fall over depleted.

Whereas if we go about our life’s work with the balance of intensity and calmness, in which we keep the prana in the spine, then we are far more effective. You can be very effortful in your work whilst ensuring the quality of sukha — serenity, calmness, relaxation — is there.

So find a good teacher who really cares about you and who is educated in the tradition of Yoga. From there, invite the beautiful qualities of sthira and sukha into your practice and into your life.

*For an introduction to personal home Yoga practice you can join the by-donation online immersion course at www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion

About:

Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga

Interviewer: Rosalind Atkinson

About Mark Whitwell: Teaching since the 1970s, Mark Whitwell is known worldwide for his unique blend of caring about individuals, humor, wisdom, and truth-speaking. After discovering from his teachers, T. Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar, that yoga was the missing link in spiritual practice, Mark Whitwell dedicated his life to sharing the principles of tantric Hatha yoga that he had received. Traveling to the United States in the 1990s to find a publisher for his teacher’s book, which he had put together, he was completely shocked to discover what was being practiced there, and how little resemblance it had to what he had been studying. Since then he has traveled the world sharing the principles that he learned with students around the world who have become fed up or injured within the yoga industrial complex. Mark Whitwell is unapologetic about sharing yoga as a spiritual practice that is nonetheless available for people of all religions or none. His training introduces people to yoga that is neither gymnastics nor knowledge-acquisition, but participation in reality. He lives with his partner Rosalind in Fiji, where this interview took place.

Rosalind Atkinson: If you do your yoga with the mindset of trying to get somewhere, will it still be yoga?

Mark Whitwell: No. Yoga is your direct participation in the beauty, intelligence and harmony that is already established as life itself. There is no getting to that. You can’t practice separation and then suddenly get rewarded with unity after decades of slog. There is no process. Either you participate, or you deny. We are trained to see practice as something unpleasant that you do for a future reward, rather than the thing itself. Sorry to bear the bad news, but no reward is coming.

RA: So the view that we hold does matter? The feeling of practice matters?

Mark Whitwell: If you give the principles to your student accurately and spend some careful time and attention to see that they are practiced accurate, then the results will be this unitary movement of body mind and breath in reality, which is a nurturing force. Not trying to realise anything. And the result will come without any necessary thoughts or philosophical accompaniment to one’s practice.

RA: So would you ever teach a class without taking the time at the start to recognise everyone, to affirm to everyone that they are actually already the power of the cosmos. To establish a context of not trying to improve or struggle.

Mark Whitwell: I like to have a little conversation and get to know people. You’ve got to know them a little bit to make good decisions about what to give them as a suitable practice. But I do think that the principles alone without any words or philosophy will maintain the right view. Because you can say to someone, you are the power of the cosmos, it is a pure intelligence how your body is functioning, and everything in the natural world is utterly beautiful and you are that beauty, you are of the natural world, your body is already in a perfect harmony with air, with light, with water, with the green realm. You can say all that and someone can say, “I see what you mean, ok”. But that might last for one minute, and the patterning of their samskaras, their problematic presumptions are so powerful that they overwhelm the clarity of their insight. So they do go together. There’s jñana, the yoga of understanding, and then there’s the haṭhayoga, direct intimacy with reality as it is, and then there’s the bhakti, devotion to reality.

RA: Do you think that for us teachers out there, there’s a need to communicate to the people we’re sharing with that we see them, that we see them as part of life, to say that in our own language, from our own feeling?

Mark Whitwell: Yes. Us teachers, we need to talk in language that is our own, that is also relevant to the student. To have a conversation about “you are the wonder of existence, you are existingness, it’s amazing that you’re here” — whatever we want to say. It’s completely relevant to be said and an unusual conversation in our society, because it’s not the kind of thing that is usually being said. And to say them not as spiritual affirmations, not as poetry, not as quotes in a weirdly soft calm voice, not as inspirational ideas that are supposed to cajole your student into trying to realise it, it is just a conversation you have in a normal voice, because it’s so damn obvious. It’s a matter of fact! But do have that dialogue, and then the practice. But I am saying that the practice accurately done gives the siddhis, where what you might have affirmed becomes tangibly real in their own experience.

RA: But couldn’t you just do all the principles with a raging project of trying to self-improve?

Mark Whitwell: If the principles are taught accurately and implemented accurately as the unitary movement of body, mind, and breath, that itself does the work, because the mind follows the breath automatically. And the mind becomes linked to the whole body, and the whole body is the miracle of the universe, and the intelligence of the universe, the beauty of the universe. And that informs the mind. And the mind can feel itself arising as a function of life.

RA: Great. Thank you. We’ll call it “Mark Whitwell Yoga”