Mark Whitwell on The Natural State

I want to tell you that you are the Power of the Cosmos. You are alive as Life itself. And Life is extreme intelligence, beauty, and harmony. It is easy for us to notice this in the natural world. We look out the window and can say without a doubt that everything in the natural world is utterly beautiful: the trees, the flowers, the sunlight on the water, the moon at night. Well, you too are of the natural world. And so, when you are looking at a flower or a sunset, it is beauty looking at beauty.

Your body is the sublime intelligence of life. It is an utter unfathomable mystery that science can only begin to understand. Like the soft green foliage of a tree, your body is perfectly receptive to its context and to actual human others. You also have the eternal strength of life in the base of your body and spine, just as the tree has the strength of life in the trunk. Your body is strength-receiving. The natural state.

This is not a spiritual statement or a nice poem, it is a simple, sober, scientific fact. The nurturing force of Life that nourishes and sustains all life is what we are. We are not some separate, flawed being who is wandering a dreary planet of mere resource trying to feel connected. You belong on this planet, you are authentic. It is given.

You are off the hook of all self-improvement strategies and struggles to try and become connected. Like a fan turned off at the wall, your mind may still assume separation but soon these thoughts will stop. The reality stays reality no matter what the mind is up to. And in Reality, your body-mind and this world dance in the same direction.

In the traditions, authentic Yoga is your daily means of direct participation in that Unity. Yoga is the unitary movement of body, breath, and mind. When we link the body movement to the breath the mind automatically follows the breath. The mind gets linked to the whole body and the whole body is the extreme intelligence, beauty, and harmony of life itself. Enveloped by the breath, the mind surrenders to life and surrenders its thought structures of lack and being less. The mind becomes informed of what is really going on, relaxes its busy search for a future self-improved persona, and relaxes into your life as it actually is.

We teach this simple form of yoga around the world and online and have seen immediate relief response from people when we move and breathe in these specific and accurate ways that our teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught. It is not what has been popularized in the gymnastic brands and styles which perpetuate struggle in body and mind. Actual Yoga is a practice of pure pleasure. A means of relaxing into the connectedness that is already the case and then abiding as that in our daily life. It is easy and anybody can do it.

As we move and breathe and relate to each other in the One Reality we find our peace, as Nature does her powerful work. If yoga is our means, we can negotiate our peace with its tools. Yoga must be adapted to our needs, and no standardized approach will work. Our careful adaptation of movement guided by the breath develops clarity of mind and intimacy with our own body and life. Intimacy in our life soon develops into intimacy with others. Here there is peace.

Read more about Yoga or visit here to learn more

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.