Can Yoga Help With Being Too Exhausted for Intimacy? By Mark Whitwell

An extremely common problem faced by so many around the globe is a state of exhaustion that makes intimacy impossible – whether with oneself in your yoga practice, or with another person.

We must say that it is normal to be exhausted as a regular working class person in our modern society of inequality and wealth flowing upwards. Most people must work long hours just to survive. We no longer have ancestral lands to live rent-free upon. Many of us lack social services such as a community would provide for its own. More and more people live a precarious existence, paycheck to paycheck, as COVID has shown.

But part of our exhaustion comes from the weight of social conditioning put inside us, not just the structures on the outside. Modern culture trains us to be numbly productive and productively numb. The ability to feel deeply is no asset to a worker, whose role is to produce and increase value. Numbness is the way we get through the thousand small violences of modern life. Alcohol, entertainment, food, gossip, binge watching, drugs – whatever gets us through the week.

Therefore when we come to yoga, we have to very seriously investigate the habits of struggle, striving and attainment that have been put in us. The urge to prove ourselves, to try and become someone in a culture that told us we were no-one.

If we just transfer the habit of ambition and struggle over into our yoga, we will miss the opportunity for it to really be yoga, intimacy with life, a deepening of peace, power and feeling.

But what happens if we do discover our breath, slow down and begin to feel? For most people, it is a frightening feeling of total exhaustion. “What’s wrong with me,” write so many students to me. “I did my practice and I just feel completely exhausted.”

The answer is that yoga shows us our true state. We were already exhausted, but tensed up, loins girded to continue the struggle. To be numb requires a constant state of tension in the body, as our natural state is one of flowing feeling. And this is extremely exhausting. The tense muscularity it takes to force ourselves into inhuman work schedules and projects deprives us of feeling, so we don’t even notice that we are rigid with tension – until a neck or back goes out under the strain.

We have one human life, Mary Oliver reminded us, and we must take care of our soft animal body. We must do whatever we can to take care of each other and reduce the burden of survival stress and anxiety. We must share better and distribute wealth in such ways that all people can rest and play in this beautiful garden in which we live. You are not designed to be ground down to a worn out skeleton by constant slog. To be tossed on the scrap heap at 65, given a pittance you are too tired to enjoy. You are a flower blooming in this garden, just as valid a piece of life as any other. You are here to enjoy your life, not as a cog in someone else’s profit machine. We must do all we can to free ourselves and others.

And so when our own exhaustion is revealed to us by our yoga, we must respond. We must rest. Rest is not lazy, it is not a failure. It is activism. It is radical. It is thumbing our nose at grind culture, at the programming that told us we were lazy if we were not doing something useful, and that entire moral structure designed to make productive robots out of us. We must shake free of the sense that our lives are something that we owe to everyone else. You cannot serve others when you are depleted, tense and overwrought.

Most people, when their exhaustion is revealed, have instant moral judgements about themselves. “I shouldn’t be so tired, I slept well last night.” There is no point in doing this. Just make a habit of obeying what your body wants, whatever and whenever you can. There will be discomfort as you realize how your social programming is in direct conflict with your body’s needs. Which do you choose to honor and obey?

It won’t be like this forever. When we first start a genuine yoga practice – and I’m not talking just with me, “Mark Whitwell method” or such nonsense, there are many good teachers out there sharing a precise breath technology, an accurate practice that is more than gymnastics – it is like opening dusty old filing cabinets. There is a backlog of feeling to do, and it will feel overwhelming and tiring. Trust in the process. No feeling will last forever. Be infinitely tender with yourself as you step our of machine life and into human life, and catch up on what there is to feel and process.

Part of our exhaustion is because of the tension required in the body to maintain our structures of personality and belief, thinking and ideas. As the breath refreshes the body, reflect on how much of this is inherent to you, and how much is just a social inheritance. What can we let go of? What are we bullying ourselves into that our body really doesn’t want to do? I guarantee you require more rest, and less stimulation. More quiet, and less speculation.

The most powerful rest of all is that found in shavasana, or corpse pose, the horizontal repose at the end of your practice. Be aware that shavasana must be earned by your prior vinyasa krama of asana, pranayama, and whatever other devotions you may include! You cannot just lie down and call it shavasana I’m afraid. In your shavasana, scan every part of the body and let each part rest in the unity of the whole body. Let the breath move through every part, dissolving all the little tensions, everything you are holding on to. If you feel tears come, let them flow. It is natural and all is well. It is a holy release. Do not doubt your body’s wisdom. Life is a nurturing flow and you are held in the arms of Mother nature.

As you begin your daily yoga practice, the first few breaths may reveal your real exhausted state to you, which you had been ploughing on through or ignoring. Adapt your practice to suit. There may be a sudden strong aversion to standing. Be attuned for exhaustion and don’t mistake it for aversion to practice in general. Simply continue a gentle short moving and breathing practice on the floor, and make a note that changes are required to your routine.

As you come into more attunement with your embodied needs and begin to shake free of some of the impositions of culture, such as feeling lazy for resting, your practice will naturally become stronger at times. The breath is at all times a source of great regenerative power, and your receptive ujjayi inhale* will nourish and restore the whole body. Empty what is full, and fill what is empty.

You will find in yourself a new enthusiasm and energy. Many people find themselves returning to old pursuits they loved. Many shed exhausting activities that seemed necessary but are not. We prioritize carving out a space for ourselves as much as possible within the continual violence and struggle that is the common economic situation.

So we rediscover some energy for our daily intimacy with ourselves, the first act of loving and caring. But what about our intimacy with another? Of all the threats to intimacy within relationship, exhaustion is the most ubiquitous. Young couples are so busy surviving that there is no vitality left for making love. Around the world, statistics reflect this sad situation.

It is only natural that when we are running on empty, there is nothing left for intimacy. The current of polarity moving between two bodies is the same energy moving through you in your own yoga practice, and in the same way it can show you your true feeling state. A kiss might soften your body, only for it to reveal to you that you’re completely exhausted.

It is a bit of a catch-22 situation, for our yogic intimacy is in fact the battery we need to give us energy in life, whether this is our intimacy with our breath or with another. To break the pattern requires conscious action.

Yet it is a complex situation. Feeling too exhausted for intimacy with another may mask other concerns. There may be lack of interest in the usual depleting “down and out” sexuality. We may not be with the right person, having got together in a state of dissociation from our own lust or feelings (or for some women, driven by artificial hormones – see for example the research of Dr Lara Briden on the subject).

Please know that conventional sex is exhausting, the attempt to create some feeling in basically numb bodies. But when sexuality is restored as pure and sacred full-body loving, it becomes extremely subtle and energizes our system rather than depleting it. Your own yoga is the first step in this direction of healing.

It is important that we relax from any guilt about what you “should” be doing. Do not shame yourself or your partner. Do not take their natural exhaustion as a reflection on you or your attractiveness. That is not up for debate. Engage in a little moving and breathing and your holy practice of rest and restoration at its conclusion. Begin to make space for release and feeling. Prioritise receptivity of whatever arises without judgement of the feeling. In intimacy with the breath, we process our own experience and rediscover the regenerating power that is the ever-available nurturing flow of life.

We can then rearrange our lives in ways that prioritize intimacy. Discuss it together. Make time. Do not leave it to chance at the end of a long day. Treat it like the sacred temple at the heart of your relationship. Like a precious garden needing watering and tending. When the time is right, tune in to the natural movement in the body toward sexual intimacy and engage the ‘discipline of pleasure’ with your chosen other.

*for more information on the ujjayi inhale, please see the Heart of Yoga Online Immersion, available by donation at www.heartofyoga.org

About the author:

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. 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.