Can we have Faith in Yoga? | Mark Whitwell

If you aren’t comfortable with non-dual yoga philosophy, yoga practice will still deepen your experience and connect you to your faith. Krishnamacharya used to say that there is no realization of the Vedanta without yoga, no realization of Jesus Christ without yoga. Whether or not you have faith in a religious ideal, full participation in the wonder of our given life will intensify your felt connection to your nurturing Source.

For example, I taught a Christian man in New York, a very sincere, devout man and his wife. And in the first lesson a serious argument erupted. It came out that the man felt a call to go abroad as a missionary for their church, and his wife felt he was neglecting the family. It was a difficult situation whose resolution would take time. As we moved through the session, I gave them a yoga practice in which they used the Christian cross as their yantra, the horizontal and vertical forces coming together at the heart.

After three months, the man called me to say he’d realized that he should stay with his family. He had prayed for an answer to his inner conflict, saying, “Lord, give me a sign. Give me a word.” Taking out his Bible, he had opened it at random and placed his finger blindly on a page. When he looked down, he read, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25). He said it staggered him; it touched me, too, to see this expression of yoga tantra in the Bible. The man realized God, his Source condition, not in a mission to sell doctrine to the people, but by loving his wife. In surrendering to his wife he found his heart and felt his God realization there.

The yoga practice of strength receiving prepared the man for this realization when he surrendered in his own body. The practice was the catalyst that enabled him to receive his wife and the wisdom and power of the feminine. Feeling the union of strength and receptivity in their loving, both partners became empowered. In his wife’s happiness the man realized his happiness; in her well-being he received his own well-being. And his receptivity was met with receptivity: now the couple talks of going to India as missionaries together, as a family. Finding their strength not in the rules of orthodoxy but in their reception of one another, they are living the truth that as you gather the love given by your partner, you have more to give back!

If you believe in a loving Source that gave you life, yoga will support that belief by letting you feel the vibration of the complete love that surrounds you, the power and the peace that lives in every cell of your body. When you practice asana and pranayama daily, you will live in the understanding that there is no absence of God. Your intimacy with body and breath translates into intimacy with all things and you know that there is no separation.

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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.