A Break from Self-Improvement | Mark Whitwell on the Yogas of Participation

Actual Yoga is nothing more or less than a person waking up to his or her own power as Life and recognizing that we are all completely supported by Life, the one condition of all life that we call Nurturing Source or God. Yoga is the natural means for every person to participate directly in this nurturing source which is freely and utterly given.

The substance of reality comes bubbling through and the current of life flows through us when we understand that we do not need to look for source or God or truth or enlightenment or anything at all! We find this nurturing force when we relax into our natural state and our relationships and stop trying to get somewhere as if we are not somewhere.

Surrender, known in the traditions as Isvarapranidhana, and faith known as sraddha, are the giving up of spiritual ideas. It is just obvious that the beauty of Life and its source is our natural condition. The whole body is the beyond; the ordinary is the extraordinary; we are here because everything is here.

Our practice of Yoga begins therefore, when we fall out of the prevailing social psychology of trying to get somewhere or ‘become’ someone. Your Yoga becomes your direct cooperation with and enjoyment of the native intelligence and beauty of your body, breath and its relatedness as it is already given.

The result of our ordinary and non-heroic daily practice is that we then feel our tangible condition, “the absolute,” through our practice. The body gets to feel its natural state and connectedness to life. Asana is the enactment of strength-receiving. We have the strength of life in us, which at the same time is soft and completely receptive. This strength is completely responsive to the life around it, always moving, feeling and receiving in natural ways. By participating in life as the whole body, the profundity of life’s intelligence and energy is realized. Our ability to feel our Reality deepens in an immensely pleasurable way.

“If you are moved to practice the means of Yoga, lighten the load, the obligation you place on Yoga to fix an imagined problem. Practice only as a pleasure. Do it in the total context of understanding that there is nothing to attain” — Yoga of Heart

The Denial of Life

Sadly, for thousands of years, man has been more interested in power and the doctrine of alternative realities than he has been in the perfect abundance that is Mother Earth and all her creatures. “Man’s heaven has created a hell out of this abundant paradise.” U.G. A fatal mistake has been made that assumes humanity is separate from its nurturing source, from its experience, and from one another. Dark cultures of fear and separation have spread throughout the world casting a shadow on human life.

Convinced that we are not quite ‘there’ yet, that life is always happening elsewhere, we cannot seem to relax and instead get seriously busy trying to get to get to God or to improve ourselves in all kinds of ways. We feel that our life is a problem to be solved and the demand for a solution fuels all manner of stressful egoic pursuits: art, politics, sport, career, money, sex, self-improvement; when all else fails we turn to spirituality. Yoga has been branded into the public psyche as yet another way of solving your life.

The jivamukti power behind Krishnamachrya’s Yoga, U.G. Krishnamurti, was unrelenting in his criticism of yoga conceived of as a form of self-improvement — as a struggle in body or mind for a future result. U.G. insisted that the whole body was already an extreme intelligence, wonder and beauty.

“All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. We are all the time interfering with its natural operation through the medium of thought.”

Against the sunny optimism of positive-thinking books, U.G. would say,

“The only hope is hopelessness.”

What U.G. meant here is that it is only when all of our strategies of becoming an improve person have failed are free to relax into who we actually are — the sublime intelligence of the whole body, the force of consciousness itself. We stop burdening our lives with the demand to be something other than what we are.

“To be yourself is very easy, you don’t have to do a thing. No effort is necessary. You don’t have to exercise your will, you don’t have to do anything to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you have to do a lot of things” — U.G.

We were sharing this recently in Shanghai and a brilliant young man asked the question,

“But don’t we need struggle in our life, to achieve things and and make progress towards our dreams?”

It is wonderful to want to improve in life’s disciplines. Many of us would love to play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix and that’s going to take a lot of work. But when we take that secular work ethic over to our spiritual life it becomes self-defeating, because we already are the power of the cosmos; we are already are something incredible. It is pointless and inappropriate to struggle away to try and attain a sublime possibility for ourselves when we are the sublime itself.

If we want to improve in our life’s disciplines, then the first step is to unhook these pursuits from any sense of success or failure as a person. We need to begin from the perspective that our life is an unqualified and sublime whole; that our validity and right to be here is not conditional on any achievement or success in the world.

When we don’t have that acknowledgement of our intrinsic wholeness, that feeling of “not quite being there yet,” pushes us into effort in our secular life that we don’t really want to make. Like overwork, not because we love our work, but because we’re trying to become “a success.”

Within this psychology, we struggle through life on a constant forward mission towards a destination that does not exist. We become strong and penetrating only and fail to receive our experience and those around us.

The wonderful paradox of this all is that when we are not fixated on trying to accomplish something impossible, a tremendous amount of attention and energy is freed up to be channeled towards any direction we please. We are able to discover and embrace our unique directions with continuity, lightness, and clarity. As we relax into the given fullness and intelligence and purpose of our life, all of our talents and skills dramatically improve.

About Mark Whitwell:-

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.