In Lockdown and Searching for Connection || Mark Whitwell on Yoga and Addiction

I found out my brother was depressed in lockdown and he was self-medicating by getting stoned everyday. I was sitting on the couch with him and my hand found a bag of cannabis. We started talking and it turned out that he was feeling lonely and cut-off from life. He told me that he had been feeling like this for years.

Everyone is struggling to survive and feel good during the ongoing waves of lockdown around the world. Even before the pandemic hit, we were behaving in patterns of habituation. Now we are relying on our addictive habits more than ever.

In Britain, an alcohol support helpline reported a 500% rise in requests since the beginning of lockdown. A recent study in the United States found that use of the illicit opioid fentanyl had increased by 32% between March and May.

And a survey by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has reported an increase in substance use due to anxiety around Covid-19.

I want to offer you a simple moving and breathing practice that that will help you feel better and feel better without needing to turn to toxic substances.

Yoga is Connection

We know that addiction rates go up when people feel disconnected and isolated. Gabor Mate’s recent work has confirmed our understanding that addiction is often born from a lack of intimacy. During these difficult times of lockdown however our ability to spend time with loved ones, friends, colleagues, or fellow members of a church community, has been cut off.

Although we cannot physically be with people during these times, I want to assure you that we are still utterly connected. For connection does not just mean interpersonal relationship, but intimacy with the All—the tacit whole-body knowledge that whether we are with other people or alone, we are seamlessly part of the world, not a lonely bubble within it.

Yoga is your direct participation in Life as it actually is | Mark Whitwell | Photograph by Audrey Billups

The visionary psychologist Carl Jung made the observation that a person’s craving for alcohol was indicative of “spiritual thirst” to feel united with God or the Absolute. And the found of AA, Bill Brown, built the 12^th step program around this principle of surrendering to a higher power (based upon his experience of cosmic unity he had under the influence of peyote).

In our daily Yoga practice, we participate in the intimacies our embodiment through the unitary movement of body, breath, and mind. When we link our body movement to our breath, the mind automatically follows the breath. As a result, the mind gets linked to the whole body and the whole body is the intelligence, harmony, beauty, and peace of Life itself, of Mother Nature. We come to feel that we are not separate at all. The mind is clarified through this connection and redundant beliefs fall away.

“Yoga is relationship.”

Consider now, for example, how your body is already in an intrinsic relationship to its context: to light, air, water, the green realm, animals, all tangible and intangible aspects of the cosmos, and to the the male-female sexual collaboration that forms the substance of all life. We are utterly connected to and made-up of the nurturing substance of reality itself—even during lockdown.

This idea is described in Patanjali Yoga Sutra as Īśvarapranidhāna. It means giving or surrendering your pranas, your life force, to Isvara—which can mean God if that is your culture, as it is for many people. If it’s not however, you can give yourself over to what you consider to be the Absolute: it may be Life or Reality or Mother Nature or the Cosmos.

When we feel existentially separate from life, a great pain is inflicted on our tender, sensitive bodies. It is the primary imagined wound that we are all trying to remedy and fill with substitutes. Life is perfection, but how we live has been a crippling compromise full of ideas of lack and separation.

We have the tools now to make an intervention with our friends and family so that everyone can feel the love that beats their own heart, as life intends. You can take these simple practices and enable each other to find the peace in their connections and directions that work for them—starting with body and breath.

When we feel our connectedness, the samskaras (patterning) of searching for connection through addictions lose their grip over us—the behaviors are made redundant.

Through feeling this intrinsic connection and intimacy with your embodiment, you will find a deepening pleasure in your relational life. Unhooked from the sense of existential separation, things go better with others. When we can feel the innocence our our own authentic life that clarity is equally applied to all others.

Krishnamacharya’s son TKV Desikachar, my teacher | Mark Whitwell

Don’t Get in Conflict with Your Own Can of Beer

My Yoga teacher TKV Desikachar once said a beautiful thing to me relative to addiction. I came to him and said that I was drinking far too much coffee: more than three cups of espresso a day! I had tried to cut back and even quite several times.

Desikachar could see the stress that I was putting myself under. He said to me,

“Don’t get in conflict with your own cup of coffee.”

And then he said,

“Just do your Yoga and see what happens.”

When trying to manage or overcome addictive patterning, the main thing is to provide an intervention of a positive pattern. There has to be something pleasurable and satisfying that we can actually do that takes us in a different direction without getting locked into battle with our habits.

What is Yoga? Yoga is intimacy with body, breath, and life. As we move and breath in these smooth rhythmic patterns the mind gets linked to the whole body and calms down. As the mind relaxes into its source, which is the heart, the pranas or the energies of life flow and move in their natural directions.

My teacher would say to enjoy a little practice on a daily basis—just ten minutes a day—and then see what happens to your cup of coffee, or your can of beer, or joint, or your gambling addiction; or see what happens to your habituated worrying; or your online shopping compulsion.

If we get in conflict with our habits then that state actually holds the pattern in place by putting the mind into a battle with the substance.

The advice from the traditions is not to give up your pleasure but to refine them. You will find that the pleasure of moving and breathing, of softening into your life, and being intimate with the intrinsic intelligence and beauty of your embodiment and its relatedness to others becomes more pleasurable than any substance. Over time, you may spontaneously find that you don’t want a beer because it interrupts the refinement of pleasure that you are enjoying.

Find your sit spot whether inside or outside where you can be nature hanging out in nature | Mark Whitwell | Photograph by Audrey Billups

Pain is Not the Enemy

We do not get to choose our emotions. They are part of nature’s intelligence and are valid responses to the events of our lives, including to a global pandemic!

In modern life however, we are taught to try and avoid pain and that a life free from pain and difficult emotions is the goal. We often turn to substances like alcohol and cannabis or opioids to repress difficult emotions from our present or past.

Addiction expert Gabor Mate writes that,

“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience.”

As anyone addicted to a substance knows however, the search for a painless life only inflicts more pain on the body. The struggle to avoid pain actually obstructs its nurturing, self-healing, intrinsic intelligence.

“Get to grief as quickly as possible. In grief, the siddhis (gifts) of compassion for yourself and others arise naturally.”

So far, spirituality and popular brands of yoga have not served our needs. New-age ideas, like the cult of positive thinking, suggest that you have caused your own suffering through negative thoughts or bad karmas and are wrong to have honest emotions like fear, anger, pain, and grief. As if we should be smiling like the Buddha all day despite how we are really feeling amidst the pandemic and the reality of loved ones dying.

I promise you that what I am sharing with you is not a Mark Whitwell TM Yoga brand invented in Los Angeles in the 1990s, but the actual technology of asana as it was shown to me by ‘the father of modern Yoga’ Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989). These practices arose within indigenous wisdom culture and were refined over thousands of years as the very means of being intimate with your experience. Krishnamacharya was a sincere Yogi and scholar of his tradition. He was not a businessman selling false hope.

We may have to adapt to meeting online and communicating heart to heart via glass tubes. Will we ever go back to the way it was? | Mark Whitwell | Photograph by Audrey Billups

Yoga therefore is not any kind of attempt to bypass your real emotions. In Yoga there is a statement, “everything is Sat” which means that everything is truth, everything is real, including our numbness, fear, anger, pain, and grief.

We can move through this sequence of emotions knowing that each subsequent emotion is predicted by the former. In my life, it was a significant to recognize that I was angry because I was in pain.

My teacher said that none of these emotions can be bypassed but by knowing what is coming next in the sequence we can avoid getting stuck in any particular feeling. So get to grief as soon as possible. For in grief, the siddhis (gifts) of compassion for yourself and others arise naturally.

We cannot move through difficult emotions by will of mind. Rather, our daily sadhana (practice) allows us to gently and at a natural pace feel what we need to feel.

The inhale scours up old emotions, softening the frontal line of the body, and opening up the chest which may have become hardened and shut down in our response to difficult or overwhelming experience. The exhale releases what we no longer need from our system.

The practice may raise difficult emotions in us that we have been holding in, unable to digest up until this point. Yet this intimate connection is the great healing. The result is regeneration and health, the nature of nature.

If you are interested in learning a simple home practice of authentic Yoga from Mark Whitwell then you can join the 8-week online immersion by donation at www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion.

About Mark Whitwell:-

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.