Becoming Sane as a Yoga teacher: Q&A with Mark Whitwell

Q: Looking at the new-age, consumerist, pants-selling, over-stimulated hot mess of the yoga industrial complex, I feel embarrassed to call myself a yoga teacher. I watch a shutdown and dismissal happen in intelligent people’s eyes when I say I teach yoga, and on the other hand, hysterical reality-avoidant fitness junkies come to me looking for something I can’t give them. What is the solution here?

Mark Whitwell: Wow, what a mess. I just think it’s early experiments in yoga in the west. Unfortunately those early experiments have already poured back into India and china, how yoga is branded as a lifestyle activity of the leisure class. We’ve had 30 years of that kind of activity, and it has really branded yoga to be something that it is not, it is now truly dislodged from its own wisdom tradition. So how do we cope with embarrassment of being associated with that circus and frustration at not giving people what they might think they’re going to get? I think the answer is that you simply don’t have to cope with it. You just do what is true for you. Each person who has had a sincere scholarship in this yoga education that has come through Krishnamacharya, however that lineage has been contacted, knows what is true for them. They know the power of their own breath. Desikachar would always say that every person who is a sincere student of my father, who is doing their best, is in the guru paramapara, in that surge of nurturing from the ancient world. And if each of us is sincere about doing that, and sincere about caring for our students and giving them the tools of their empowerment in life, then we don’t have to worry about the rest and what is happening in the branding of yoga. We don’t have to worry. People can get tortured by a sense of reaction to the mess – just teach sincerely what you know, and adapt your own yoga to be in the authority of your own experience and then translate that into the needs of the person that you’re teaching, and be sincere about that. Teach yoga as you have experienced it, not based on knowledge or learning or anyone else’s patterns. And by patterns I don’t mean sequences, I mean unconscious duplication of things that are not really true for you. For example, talking about all the benefits of a pranayama when you might not have done it or felt them.

Q: Do you think there’s some kind of purification that has to happen for teachers, where the more you have been a people pleaser and tried to keep others happy, the more you’re going to feel conflicted by not being able to do that with a yoga class that just wants a gymnastic workout?

Mark Whitwell: Yep. It could be in any area, couldn’t it. Trying to keep people happy by aligning with their preconceived ideas.

Q: I know the power of the breath in yoga in my own experience, but if I take the time to teach it at the studio where I teach, I’m afraid people will get bored and i might lose my job. People want a more stimulating experience, they don’t want intimacy. Shouldn’t i just try to give them what they want? And hope they will ask me about the breath after class sometime?

Mark Whitwell: Oh no, horrors, please. As I said, we’re in the early stage of yoga in the west, its an early experiment and it is kind of a world gone wrong. You know, the founders of these brands and styles, they left Krishnamacharya very early on, and they didn’t have the advantage of a yoga education themselves, so they didn‘t get these principles of self-empowerment of every person. So it kind of got lost in the weeds.

Q: As a teacher, is it a valid fear to say that people don’t want intimacy? Just stimulation?

Mark Whitwell: It’s not valid. Everyone wants intimacy. They might not be able to put it words, or they might not even be able to put it in their own mind, but that’s what is needed in the human life. Connection. Connection to reality itself, the power of this cosmos that brought us here in the first place. The pure intelligence and unspeakable beauty that is life itself. That’s what’s needed. But what you fear can turn out to happen, because you create the circumstance for it to happen.

So to the question of being in the yoga scene and the popular styles and having something that you actually want to teach, which is the essence of your own practice and the translation of your own yogic experience to another person, taking into account the needs of that person, and we must be sincere, and teach what we know. And don’t try to teach what you don’t know. And certainly don’t teach the mere patterning of standardized styles and brands, the duplication of other people’s patterning, which is the usual downtown studio yoga business, the duplication and continuity of patterning. We don’t do that.

Q: I want to be vulnerable with my students, but it always seems to take the form of saying things that are wrong with me, or bringing myself down. An urge to tell my students about my problems and flaws so they stop thinking I’m better than them. Is that really what vulnerability is?

Mark Whitwell: Well it sounds a bit like having a sob story strategically (not necessarily consciously) to let them know that you’re a real person too. Isn’t it better to emphasise the positive? You don’t have to come to jesus or go to the pope with your medieval sob story about what a bad person you are. It’s a religious hangover converted into the new age of being honest about your dark side. Becoming fascinated about your “dark side”. Needing to somehow regurgitate it and vomit it up. You can create equality in your class by rasiign everyone up, rather than by lowering yourself down. You raise people up by helping them cut through the whole paradigm of there’s someone better than you and someone worse than you. I like to point this out a lot, that no one is second to anything else or anyone else, and no one is superior to anything else or anyone else. There’s only one thing happening, which is reality itself. So we understand that fact and that the above and below social ladder is imagined, its not really there. Then you step out of that paradigm yourself, and then you can be helpful to others, to know that they can step out of it too. And you will find some unique language for that in your own unique voice.

Q: I’m so busy teaching that I don’t really have time to do my own practice, so I just do it in class, isn’t this enough?

Mark Whitwell: Sorry, no, it’s not. There’s no substitute. Krishnamacharya would say, who can teach yoga. One, you have a good teacher yourself. Two, you practice yourself. Three, you care about others. There must be that practice. Even if it’s ten minutes of moving and breathing in the way that’s right for you. You can do a lot in ten minutes. If you’re doing ten minutes every day, some days it will be ten, or fifteen, or twenty. Suddenly, you’re not a fan of yoga any more, duplicating other people’s patterns. You’re a yogi, practicing. And then you can teach, and convert what your experience is to the experience of somebody else, but designing the asana and pranayama around their particular needs, their body type and age and culture.

Q: I like showing my students advanced asana so they know what is possible with practice, so they have something to aim for, why do you say that teachers should not demonstrate?

Mark Whitwell: Because then you set up that old paradigm, where the students want to struggle in body and mind to attain what is suggested as advanced. It may not be advanced at all! It may cripple the person and put them in hospital if they do that with too much severity. And they do! Because that’s the social dynamic we are working in, where everyone feels less and everyone wants to be more, through whatever the promise is or the arbitrary method offered. This was why Ram Dass wrote off yoga, I remember we were doing some breathing with the arms after his stroke and he was weeping, and he apologised for not representing yoga when he was supposed to be a leader of spirituality in the US. And he said he didn’t understand what yoga was, he hadn’t understood its vital connection to spiritual realisation. And I asked him why, and he said his teachers were show-offs, and they would do things he couldn’t do, so he gave up. So there is a right yoga for every person, and the teacher’s job is to give them that yoga. I have this statement, advanced yoga for perfect beginners. Give them all the advanced yoga.

Q: How would you define ‘advanced’ in yoga?

Mark Whitwell: It’s the union of the inhale from above as receptivity, with the exhale from below as strength. The movement of breath served by the asana. An elderly person stuck in bed can be an advanced yogi.

Q: As a teacher, I don’t know all the names of the asana, I don’t have any degrees in yoga history or anything, I can’t read any Sanskrit... I feel like to be a good teacher I need to have far more knowledge and that once I’m really, really knowledgeable I’ll be a better teacher. There’s a seduction in the fantasy of being an expert. I suspect this is imposter syndrome, or even a lust for power over others through knowledge. Maybe both.

Mark Whitwell. Yes. These systems are usually taught by people who have a lust for power over others and have elaborate knowledge systems, where you have to struggle away for ages and ages and pay a lot of money, and its completely arbitrary. Over and over again, just teaching these basic principles passed on from Krishnamacharya, that the body movement is the breath movement, that the inhale is from above and the exhale from below, that the breath envelops the movement, the ujjayi breath… asana creats bandha in the breath rations.. measuring the asana by the number of breaths and the breath ratio you can do without struggle… asana, pranayama, meditation and life as a seamless process, where mediation arises as a siddhi or gift of your sadhana, that which you can do. And people say, oh, I wish my teacher had told me these things, before I spent thousands and thousands on 200, 300, 500 hour courses of arbitrary, packaged, boxes of information. That make someone feel inadequate, because they’ll get enough knowledge to become a yoga teacher. Look, if you practice these principles yourself, these principles I just mentioned, and then do your best to share those, and you’re doing that because you really actually care about the person you’re sharing with, and you’re not trying to make money out of them or get anything from them at all, nothing! – then you’re a yoga teacher.

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