How to Quiet the Doubting Mind | Mark Whitwell

In life, if you are ever in doubt of your connection to Source, go back to these two questions. Please answer each one sincerely, yes or no.

Question 1: Are you the extreme intelligence of Life, this heartbeat, this breath, this skin, this spine, this DNA, this YOU?

Question 2: If there is an unseen Source to this extreme intelligence, CAN it be absent from its expression through YOU and me and everything else in our universe?

If you answered that yes, you are the extreme intelligence of life and no, your Source CANNOT be absent, now you understand the non-dual philosophy of yoga.

Your Source is never absent, even in the ordinary experiences of your day-today lives. And yoga shows you this. Yoga is the embrace of the natural, including all ordinary experience. By doing yoga, you can understand that it’s surrendering to all experience that reveals the infinite. Why? Because they are One and the same.

This also means that you can start doing yoga right here, right now to directly participate in this nurturing Source. Please understand that yoga is never about “looking” for God or Source. In fact, it is the searching for God or Source that creates the idea of absence. It is the quest for God, Source or holiness promoted by various religious teachings that create a spiritual problem that in fact does not exist.

As you practice the yoga that is right for you, you will come to feel how all life is utterly strong and synchronistic, utterly soft and receptive. In your heart, flesh and blood, you will experience the power of gentleness. Real power lives and breathes within your gentleness because it brings forth the life force of the feminine.

An inhalation through a strong body that is soft enough to receive strengthens you in a profoundly durable way. Whenever you do this, you are being nurtured by Life and feeling, supported by the Source. You can receive nurturing from another as well as nurture this person and others. Even if personal and public stress persist. Connecting to the source of Life through the yoga will help free you regardless of obstacles.

You may already fully understand how to plug into the nurturing field that surrounds Mother Earth. You may be of the self evident generation, young people everywhere who simply already understand. Whether this is a new or old idea for you, I am saying that each One of you embodies the hope for humanity and our planet.

I invite you to feel how you are loved and nurtured by Life by practicing yoga for yourself and everyone on earth. You are absolutely loved and YOU love and care. Share your yoga with everyone, including your family and friends. Share it with strangers, co-workers, lovers, employers… and especially those whom you find most irritating! Let others feel the nurturing force that lives within us and around our planet home, our Mother Earth.

Participate in Source by breathing. When you consciously participate in your own breath, you connect directly to That which is breathing you–and beating your heart and all the rest. You connect to your own Source, the first and deepest of all intimacies.

Meditation is your mind struggling with your mind. So don’t meditate. The attempt to still the mind only creates more mind which obstructs clarity. The mind struggling with the mind does not work. The idea that truth is somewhere else to be attained through “higher” practices is simply wrong. Meditation starts with moving and breathing practice. When your mind links to your whole body it becomes clear. Your understanding and experience of union with all things will arise naturally and spontaneously on its own accord. It is a seamless process.

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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.