Keeping Safe with Saints and Sages | Mark Whitwell on Responding to Grace

We have all been inspired in our lives. We have all experienced those moments when the social mind falls away and we see what is actually going on: the beauty, power, intelligence, nurturing, and harmony of Reality itself.

Such moments may come in the midst of a beautiful sunset seen from a hilltop; when we lay eyes upon our lover in the early morning light; when we encounter a sublime work of art or listen to visionary music. Some seek out a sense of the sublime through toxifying drugs; others through extreme sports.

For many, Grace comes in the presence of another person. Deep in the indigenous Indian traditions in which Yoga arose was the practice of sitting closely with a friend in local community who was not obstructed in body and mind from the powers of creation.

During these meetings with our gurus, saints, and sages we experience a sudden flash of insight. We recognize that we are indeed in the natural state; that we are not separate from Reality, or what some culture’s call God. We sense the profound insignificance of our usual mind’s preoccupation. And instead recognise the profound beauty of reality as it actually is.

What Next?

In and of themselves, these moments are not necessarily useful. In fact, if you don’t have the practical tools to respond to what has inspired you they can make your life worse.

Without a practical way to respond to Grace, we will return home and then slot these moments into our socialized assumption of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ experiences. And we will go looking for more highs.

Grace will make us even more miserable as we produce a painful split from our apparently ordinary ‘humdrum’ life.

This is why people become like addicts to their spiritual experiences: mountaineers seek out increasingly dangerous climbs; devotees won’t leave the ashram; young men ignore their partners to go get ‘high’ on month-long darkroom retreats in Bali.

Many of us have been deeply affected by the lives of saints (both living and those no longer with us in physical form like Christ) but have had no knowledge of what to do about it except the usual story of meditation and going within. Without knowing how to conduct the energy of life that we receive from our beloved saints in completely life-positive and sex-positive practice then our mental health is put at risk.

Yoga: The Practical Response

If you have been inspired by anything at all, then what you can do in response is a simple home Yoga practice.

In the Vedic tradition in which sages such as Ramana Maharshi appear, when you meet someone unobstructed in body or mind the response is to go home and be intimate with your own life and all conditions of your life.

Intimacy with all ordinary conditions (not the witnessing practices that have become popular) is how we respond to those moments in our life when we feel uncomplicated and free. Whether these moments come in meeting a person like Ramana, as a shamanic experience, a love affair, or a life-changing experience in nature.

Yoga is your direct participation in the natural state, in your heart, the place of the perfect union of giving and receiving. That is, inhalation (receiving), exhalation (giving), strength-receiving, within and without. Your daily embrace of the union of opposites in your own embodiment, reveals the heart that sages such as Ramana or Christ pointed to.

With our steady participation in the heart’s flow established in our own ‘ordinary’ lives, the presumption of difference between the sublime and the everyday falls away. We no longer are dependent on blissful experiences, mountaintop sunsets, or big wave surfing over dangerous reefs in order to feel at One with Reality itself.

Freed from the tyranny of the idea that we need to search for God, we simply relax and participate in God in our own homes. The result is a flowering of your intimate connection to yourself and others. Now that you are abiding in the natural state, you are safe with saints and sages and realizations of all kinds.

Orginially Published on:- https://markwhitwell.medium.com/keeping-safe-with-saints-and-sages-mark-whitwell-on-responding-to-grace-a4d0c360ae4e

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.