Am I Getting Better at Yoga? | Mark Whitwell on Sadhana vs Practice

When it comes to our daily Yoga the word practice may not be a good one. Practice usually means you practice hard at and then you get better. That might apply to learning the piano or studying history, but it does not apply to Yoga. Why?

Because there is no linear process of attainment in Yoga. If you are practicing authentic Yoga according the principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth from the wisdom traditions of India and Tibet, then your Yoga is your direct embrace of Reality as it already is. And there is no getting closer to Reality because that is what you are.

The ‘father of modern Yoga’ Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) rescued the tools of the tantra from obscurity. After seven and half years of study with his guru Ramamohan Brahmachari at Mount Kailash, he followed his guru’s request that he return home, start a family, and bring Yoga to the world. It was his brilliant son Desikachar (1938–2016), who was well versed in the culture of west and east, who was able to translate his father’s teachings for modern people.

The five essential principles of Krishnamacharya’s teaching are as follows:

1. The body movement is the breath movement.

1. The inhalation is from above as receptivity. The exhalation is from below as strength.

1. The breath envelops the movement. The breath starts before the movement and ends after the movement.

1. Asana creates bandha, the intelligent cooperation of muscle groups in the polarity of strength that is receiving.

1. Asana, pranayama, meditation, and life is a seamless process, one allowing for the other. Meditation arises as a gift to your asana and pranayama.

By including these principles, then your Yoga becomes powerful, efficient and safe. It becomes the unitary movement of body, breath and mind. The mind comes to feel that is indeed arising from the whole body as a function of life with no dissociated or separate existence of its own. The extreme intelligence of life clarifies the mind and removes the messaging of culture that tells us we are less than life itself, Reality itself.

The idea of spiritual practice usually implies a process of ‘becoming’ in a linear process. Yet trying to get become something amazing implies that we are not already the power of the cosmos; that we are not the beauty, the power and the intelligence of the natural world. And nobody can deny that of us any longer. If there is Yoga it is participation only in the sublime nurturing biologies of Mother Nature.

The traditional word for your daily enjoyment of asana and pranayama was sadhana — which means, “that which you can do.” It is often translated as practice but it means the practical actions that anybody can actually do to embrace Reality, Life, Consciousness, God; to embrace that which you are and that which is your context. You cannot become something that you are not. But you can embrace the unrestricted power of life that is your natural state on a daily basis.

Our teacher U.G. Krishnamurti was fond of letting people know that, “Once there is no longer any movement in you in the direction of becoming something that you are not, then you will not be in conflict with yourself.”

Or, as I like to put it, “Unhappiness is trying to be something that you are not.”

We cannot underestimate how deeply programmed we are in the struggle to become something other than what we are. From a very early age we are encouraged to struggle away in the disciplines given to us by this or that authority figure in order to ascend within arbitrary hierarchies of perfected humanness. And it makes us miserable.

Reclaiming the Tradition of Yoga

The word Yoga has of course been caught up in this mess. The dominant culture has a way of diverting everything into its own value-system. The popularization of Yoga in the west into fitness and gymnastics has obscured the principles that Krishnamacharya actually taught. Actual Yoga is a breath-centred discipline, that was taught on and one-to-one basis, where the asana, pranayama, and meditation was tailored to the unique body type, age, health, cultural background and capacity of the student to practice.

Instead, the force of brand and style has warped Yoga into a one-size-fits-all commodity in which external ideals of alignment (that are appropriate only for teenage boys) are imposed upon each utterly unique human body and their unique life. Yoga is now ubiquitously understood as an imposition on the human life; a form of arduous spiritual/physical gymnastics; a practice of becoming more and more aligned, in the pursuit of external ideals. The idea of having to align ourselves in a linear process of getting somewhere has created doubt in our system.

In reality, the body does not require alignment.The body, which is all curves and spirals (like everything else in Mother Nature) does not want to be forced into straight lines and angles. Life has a natural alignment and the body has alignment in the natural state. Yoga is participation only in the intelligence and harmony of life that is already the case. If there is any sort of alignment it will be there for you through your intimate embrace of life.

In the body there are muscle groups called flexors and extenders and they are engaged in the movement of inhale and exhale. We participate in the natural elasticities of the body and we don’t try and go beyond them.

U.G. Krishnamurti would say, “Leave the body alone. Give it a chance for its natural intelligence to function.”

We relinquish the mind’s dominion over the whole body. We surrender the cultural ideals of becoming. We let the mind relax into the hridaya heart. And we allow the mind to feel that it is arising as a function of life rather than as the controller of life. Then we are at peace.

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.