Establishing a Home Yoga Practice | Mark Whitwell

The biggest challenge we face when starting our life of Yoga is to establish a home practice that feels natural and pleasurable to do every day. Our daily practice should feel as simple as brushing our teeth in the morning, as easy as slipping into our favorite pair of jeans and as necessary as taking a shower (perhaps more necessary!). Yet, as we all know, when we wake up we can easily let the demands of the day take over and forget to practice.

Some rare people can start to practice without any difficulties at all. For most of us however, the journey is uneven and this is all good. We all have our unique karmas, addictions, circumstances, emotional complexes and frustrations to cut through.

We may practice for a few weeks or months and then stop. We practice some days and then do not practice on other days. When we stop we may feel guilty. We then resent Yoga for making us feel guilty. The next week we feel a burst of enthusiasm and recommit which is followed by a loss of faith and so on.

Does gender play a role? Men may find it easy to practice because they have long been encouraged by the culture to prioritise their spiritual fulfillment. Although, typically the means of fulfillment is located in career, artistic pursuits, a sense of mission in the world, and action. The stillness, restfulness and receptive quality inherent in a Yoga practice may deter many men who only know and want to penetrate life.

On the other hand, women have been so trained to be tuned in to the needs of the others that the actual discipline of taking half an hour to an hour a day to do sadhana for themselves may result in a direct confrontation with deeply ingrained social patterning. Female friends describe how even when they do have the time to practice, their own tendency to put themselves second to others needs (real or imagined) means they won’t do it.

Where there is an obstacle to practice it must be inspected. And when there is a couple who both want to practice, it is the responsibility of each person to ensure the other has the time and the literal space to do so.

Perhaps the most significant barrier to practice however, is the idea that Yoga is something that you do on yourself in order to get to a future improved place.

We have been raised to believe that we are separate body living in a separate world. Spiritual disciplines are provided to us by well-meaning (or exploitative) people as the means to return to a state of unity with life and others. The starting point is problem and Yoga is presented as the solution. Such a prospect either turns us off practice altogether or makes us obsessively practice for several hours a day trying to fix ourselves. The very presumption that we are separate and need to re-connect causes stress on the organism and turns us off practice.

Another approach is possible.

Yoga is Not a Struggle for a Future Result

Yoga arose in the great Upanishadic culture in a time before the concept of the holy personality or exclusive God had developed in history. It was a wisdom culture that simply acknowledged that everything is Brahman or God: Sun, moon, male, female, breath, senses, food, and all tangible and intangible aspects of the cosmos. There was no concept of a special person as God, implying that everyone else was not.

This dichotomy was made worse when the idea of the divine person was packaged, distributed and forced into the social mind and behavior as doctrine. This is the cause of human misery, trying to be something we are not, rather than enjoying the wonder and power of Life that is already abundantly given.

The message from the wisdom traditions of humanity, prior to the imposition of male power structures, is that there is no ultimate reality or God to be attained because God or Reality is already our innate condition and appears as every thing. There is no world separate from Source.

Call it God or spirit if you will, but there is no necessity for religious language or belief. It is simply to understand that life and all there is to know is never further away than your own breath and all ordinary conditions. The secrets of the universe are fully in you, as you. There are no steps to be taken. None. Your body is not different from its source. Your whole body is not different from God.

This is not something we can turn into a process of seeking. Just as the fact that the sun is the source of our solar system does not provoke us to seek for the sun. The sun is a tacit presence in our lives that we enjoy. Attempting to get closer to Reality or God is like trying to find the sun as if it is not pouring down on us every moment of the day. It only keeps the mind busy and stressed and we soon injure ourselves in our struggle.

No Problem Yoga

Once you realize that there is nowhere to get to, then your journey to daily practice is clear. Actual yoga arises naturally as the movement of Life in body, breath and relationship, rather than the manipulation of the body and mind.

If you find yourself still caught up within the seeking logics of the mind then don’t worry. For as long as your practice is organised around the specific principles that Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) brought forth then your Yoga will be the unitary movement of body, breath and mind. Your Yoga is direct participation in Reality itself: no matter what the mind is up to.

These principles are:

1. The body movement is the breath movement.

2. The breath envelops the movement.

3. The inhale is from above as receptivity; the exhale is from below as strength.

4. Asana creates bandha; and bandha is not to be practiced outside of asana.

5. Asana, Pranayama, meditation and life are a seamless process.

These principles functionally override the mind’s seeking impulse by gently but deliberately subordinating the mind to the flow of the breath. The breath leads the movement not the brain. As a result, the mind automatically becomes immersed in the whole body and the whole body is always in the present moment. You find that you do not have to be here now, you are here now!

The faith or certainty in the body’s intelligence and presence gradually enters the mind and the only motivation that remains for your daily practice is pleasure. The body loves its breath; the exhale loves the inhale. We feel the whole body, mind included, fold up from its fearful struggle. We gently relax into the nurturing field of Reality itself. Our system relaxes and energy flows. Then we are away.

There is still of course a degree of discipline, but it is now conceived of as a discipline of pure pleasure. Just like making love regularly with our special partner is a discipline, because if we do not make it a priority then we tend to let work and other matters take over. The gamble is that pleasure (rather than fear, guilt, or hopefulness) becomes the guarantor of your daily sadhana.

So get your practice into your day whatever it takes. Do not be casual about it and do not make it random. Have a time in your day that fits into your daily routine. Like eating breakfast or having a shower your practice will soon become a seamless part of your day.

Learn more about Mark :-

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.