Polyamory: The New Patriarchy || Mark Whitwell

Teaching yoga in these places around the world where so-called spiritual exploration is happening – Bali, California, Thailand — it is impossible not to notice the harm that is being done to young people (and some older people) by the glamorisation of polyamory as a lifestyle. The elevation of polyamory as a spiritual ideal. And the harm especially to women.

So many women come to our trainings with a story and a burden of deep disappointment, pain and grief accumulated during their polyamorous experimentation. Often, they feel like they have failed spiritually and relationally, thinking that they were “not able to handle it” or emotionally weak. Simply put, in my experience and observation of thousands of people, the polyamorist ideals being sold don’t work and are even abusive, and I propose instead a model for yogic intimacy that won’t create this kind of painful and unnecessary chaos.

As a social model, polyamory has gained some popularity in small pockets. But it is just a substitute for going deeper into adult intimacy. Sexuality is where the dysfunction is for humanity, where the knot is tied tight, and we must resolve this matter. We must become capable of adult intimacy. You cannot bypass this matter of your sexuality. You can’t. The whole weight of spiritual tradition is an attempt to bypass it. Glamourized by womanless men and some woman who play that same game.

Our sexual energy is the energy of life. Call it prana if you like. Or let’s just give it an English translation: ‘life energy’. This life energy comes in all kinds of forms, including and especially as a sexual, procreational force, which UG Krishnamurti called “the most demanding” force of life itself. Mother Nature has one interest, he would say, and that is to duplicate an improved version of each of us before we leave the planet. This doesn’t mean that everybody has to procreate, it’s absolutely not that. It’s just that we cannot bypass this force. Trying to bypass it is like trying to hold your breath — try it for five minutes and see what happens.

What we’ve done with sexuality historically is try to bypass it, and it has therefore come out as an illness in so many societies. You will know that yourself from your own experience. The repression and denial comes out as male aggression and misogyny and control of the feminine rather than participation and collaboration with the feminine. It’s not good enough to tell people to go to the monastery or give up Sex or concentrate on God or Yogic celibacy, which is another whole thing that has been popularized, as we see in how the word brahmacharya has repeatedly been translated as meaning celibacy or refraining from Sex. The opposite is true: brahmacharya is the study of brahman, of God, it indicates right relatedness and to manage your energy correctly. How to relate to your life. What is your dharma? What is your way? What is your position in life? And that includes sexuality, of course. And it may refer to a period in the traditional life of seven years, the brahamacharya stage of life, where you studied right-relatedness and sexuality. When that period ended, at around the age of twenty-eight, then you chose somebody and you entered into intimate union. It is a very common misconception created mostly by Buddhist monasticism that in our traditions, spiritual life meant sexless monastic life.

The demonising of sex and the religious promulgation of celibacy may seem like the opposite issue from the increasing popularity of polyamory, but they are the same. It is the demonisation and the repression of sex that has created the mess we were born into, that caused the blocks to intimacy that prevent us from being able to be utterly fulfilled with one person, and needing to try another, try another. The entire culture of dismissing the sacredness of partnership, of polarity, comes to us from repressive religious culture.

This has been lost in the vulgarisation of sex by the tantric sex-mongerers. Don’t be confused in the oversimplified apparent opposition between sex-denying spirituality and sex-exploiting neo-tantrism. They are flipsides of the same life-denying coin, that treats the person in front of you as a means to an end, anything less than an autonomous life, the goddess herself, whether a male form or a female form. We are talking about something here which is an absolutely pure and vital yoga of sexuality, as a precious treasure, completely unvulgar. Whether in same-sex or opposite sex intimacy, any gender identification or none at all. Not the denial of sex and not the related exploitation and exaggeration of sex. Both casualise something utterly profound.

Some spiritual seekers deliberately avoid going deeper into partnership, using ideas of freedom and non-attachment. Question these concepts carefully. Some will quote patriarchal male traditions from India, where even the most sublime realisers such as Sri Ramakrishna said things such as watch out for women and gold, they will hold you back. This weight of patriarchal culture can be uncritically adopted in a psychology of ambitious non-attachment. People get very attached to their ideas of non-attachment! They serve as a cover for an unwillingness or inability to enter the fire of actual intimacy. (Which is where the siddhis and the vertical expansion lie, anyway.) The result is a culture of casualness and abandonment, emotional ambition and biting off more than we can chew.

Because there is such power and pleasure in sexuality, there can be a fear of becoming addicted to or dependent on that pleasure (in an otherwise pleasureless existence). There is a fear of dependence. Theories of non-attachment can be a way to control the natural movement of two beings towards one another, to try to avoid being controlled by it. Certainly, when we are out of touch with the intrinsic pleasure of being, the pleasure of a breath, then relationship will be strained under too much pressure, which comes out as casualness and abandonment of each other. But it’s not pleasure that’s addictive, it’s misery that’s addictive. The vast weight of spiritual advice is to be internal to experience of every kind. A war is set up in the person between the inner awareness and the presumed separate object or problem. The advice is to give up on experience, or play with it in a casual and detached way. Neither work. Spiritual life is to bring your full awareness, consciousness, to pleasure, to experience. Then the war is over. No addiction can arise.

Of course there are chemicals that are released in our bodies during sex that help us bond with the other person. This is why we practice brahamacharya, right relatedness, to make sure we are choosing an appropriate person to become intimate with. It’s not fair on our chemistries to blame them for the attachment issues that people have. We can’t even talk about attachment issues until we address this glamourisation of celibacy as a higher spiritual state.

We are just completely burdened with all these deeply engrained mythological stories out there from cultural heroes like Ramakrishna. Not denying that he’s a hero, but he has a cultural imposition on him. It is a deep dark cultural story. Like we could mention the Dalai Lama, such a beautiful model of human being, okay, but there are these unread volumes about celibacy and a single man being the world leader, and we don’t look into that, we just assume that it’s somehow some superior state that he’s in. I once heard a Catholic priest say, “We have gone the extra mile, we have given up sex.” You arrogant prick! And they’re convinced of that, that they are in some superior state because they’ve given up sex. That it’s something superior or even worthwhile for a human being to do. We are convinced of that. We don’t even know that we are convinced. That we have this sex negative story in us, which says that if you are still in the village having sex then you are less than the hero who has gone beyond it. These models are absolutely all around us.

Generally people go backwards and forwards between celibacy and aberrated, exaggerated sexuality. Both create and compound pain, and so we oscillate. Sex and relationships are perhaps the greatest source of emotional pain in people’s lives. Often even physical pain as well. Sex without love is emotionally and literally painful. It is the knot we have not undone. And avoiding it does not solve anything. We must see that liability and do something about it. We must come into free choice and free expression of actual sexual intimacy. This is what enables us to go deep with another person.

Joni Mitchell expressed it so beautifully years ago, saying that “this culture doesn't place much value on depth – we don't have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn't encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff… this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity – the uncertainty of whether or not you're truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I've seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line."

Yet she says that she “always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing,” and quotes an article from Esquire magazine entitled ‘The End of Sex’: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.”

“What happens when you date is that you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories – and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can't do that with a long-time mate because [s/he] knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die, then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love.”

“It's hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You're with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them, or they look like an asshole to you – it's unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer, and you learn a way of loving that's different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It's warmer and has more padding to it.”

Perfectly expressed in the pop-cultural language of her time, Joni Mitchell points to the running away and avoidance of ourselves and others that underpins polyamory. Polyamory is framed as a way to continual freshness, continual stimulation, but really it’s just continual repetition.

People find all kinds of ways to justify that avoidance. Quoting neuroscience, finding some scientific study that shows that males want to move on to another partner to spread their seed more “efficiently”. You have to be extremely careful reading all of that, that it is not duplicating our current misogynistic gender biases. Do we have a functional sexually positive society of besotted couples in sublime intimate union of mutuality, each in devoted service to the other? No. So what are we studying is dysfunction. Usually the person quoting such a study is not planning on staying with you for the next seven years. It’s a way to naturalise their very understandable problems with intimacy.

There is no shame in being unable to go deep with someone, look at the culture we are coming out of. Look, such studies might be true. The kinds of studies quoted in that well-known book, Sex at Dawn, for example. Making a case for polyamory in modern times based on the behaviour of bonobo monkeys and speculations on ancient humans. It’s good what that book does, busting myths about the past necessarily being “nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s good how it pops that illusion of progress being linear through time and our time somehow happening to be the ultimate zenith of everything. But I don’t want to figure out what our Neolithic ancestors might have been doing as a template for behaviour now. And we should probably read this other book, Sex at Dusk, which makes some counter-arguments, points to research flaws in the first one, before we leap to any conclusions. I’m making a case for lifelong yogic intimacy, different from any of the biological patterning that might be in us, or the behaviour of primates to spread their DNA as fast as possible. There is a human sublimity available to us in this life, a yogic sublimity, intimacy beyond any of those ideas. Not as an imposition on biology, but deeper even than biology. This is what I am promoting, a model that is humanly possible for any person to enter into a lifelong intimacy that is not assumed to have a seven-year cycle or a biologically engrained promiscuity. And build a life on the basis of that intimacy. Where you can live somewhere nice on planet Earth in a quiet place in the natural state and have old people and children running around and live your life. It is a human possibility, and if there is any imperative of biology or the primitive behaviours of ancient people in the urgency to spread DNA, we can go beyond all of that. In a life of Yoga, in a life of intimacy with this universe.

Not as a social construct. Not as the addition of some lifestyle or philosophy or practice. Intimacy is the removal of masks, of performances. From the power of intimacy comes the social order. At the moment we have it the wrong way around, with relationship and even our selves being constructed around the social order. That’s all back to front.

There are teachers out there who have really naturalised and made a joke of the terrible state of relationship out there, where people do just get bored with each other, scornful and unappreciative. The thrill of getting someone to like you when you don’t like yourself wears off and you’re left co-habiting with someone who snores and smells and is just as self-involved as you are. It devolves into an arm wrestle, “you should be different to suit me better,” “No, you should be different to suit ME better.” Throw two kids in a cardboard box to have sex and next thing they’re trying to raise kids together. What a disaster. Best-case scenario, a coolly functional team. This is the situation, and yet there are still these ideals of true love and marriage and romance being constantly shoved down our throats by media of all kinds. The fairy tale. So everyone feels like a failure when the relationship inevitably devolves into boredom and scorn, manipulation and little cruel digs, teamwork and resentment. Most people are ashamed of having “failed” at relationship. Look, you haven’t failed. You did your best coming out of the completely toxic culture you were born into. If you saw that the relationship was doomed to a conventional model of ownership and manipulation and walked away, good for you. It doesn’t have to be like that, two people just sucking the life out of each other. But transcendentalist teachers just mock the situation, tell us to go within and walk away from it all. It won’t work. We are wounded in relationship and we must heal in relationship. Don’t take relationship advice from monks!

So it is common to feel bored by your partner, but it is not normal. Yogic intimacy is possible, where the magnetic flow between two people is like a constant pure refreshing river, your energy doesn’t leak out anywhere else. People are doing some work to release the shame they might feel around all of this, but they’re not really resolving it, because the yoga that would actually help isn’t there. Which would you rather — stuck in the suburbs, getting silently bored of your partner, feeling guilty and ashamed? Or move to Thailand, normalise getting bored, and have seven partners so you can just move on to another one if one gets boring. That’s not a choice we have to make. They’re both still the same problem.

We have to take responsibility for the all-encompassing role played by our own perception. No human on this planet is boring. No living being on this earth is boring. Each person is enough to bring us to our knees, each person is the utter beauty of mother nature, a miracle on legs, and even the legs are a miracle too. We take responsibility for how our own samskaras and conditioning thwart intimacy. This is how break-ups can be a huge wakeup call, a motivation to look into some things. Many people cannot bear to lift the lid on what is really going on here. But it’s not your fault. It’s all been put in you by culture. Don’t be afraid to look at it. And when you do, don’t get obsessed. Analysis won’t help. A gentle daily practice of intimacy with your own body and breath is what will get the job done. I’m saying to you, very specifically, this can be done. You can enter into lifelong yogic intimacy with yourself and then with another, in this order. You’re allowed to want that. It’s not needy or conservative.

It doesn’t mean we try to coerce someone into being with us who insists they don’t want that, who maybe isn’t capable right now. Brahamacharya might look like taking the time to really get to know someone and their intentions, and not engaging if they don’t really like, love and lust you, and say it freely! Women are being mocked and scorned for wanting this, young spiritual guys telling them they are too needy and attached. Women are being left with a feeling like they are psychological hard work, and “not very spiritual.” Well, being treated like a casual plaything is enough to make anyone act needy and crazy. It’s abuse. The cycle changes when we decide not to go there with people who aren’t interested in going deeper together. I’m telling you, there is one thing everyone wants and needs, which is intimacy.

This movement into life, into robust intimate connectedness, arises naturally in the context of an actual Yoga practice taught to you by an actual teacher and actual friend. We need this guidance, and not from the neo-tantric sexmongerers. There is no attainment of ‘sacred sex’ without intimacy with your own embodiment. And coming into participation in the union of opposites in your own life prior to even thinking about entering into intimacy with somebody else. When you look around those neo-tantric scenes, it’s just not there. They’re all just selling their shoddy goods on the spiritual marketplace. Oppressive gender stereotypes wrapped up in appropriative pop Hinduism and soft pornography. There’s lots of it out there. It’s more exploitation. Exploiting people’s need and their lack with these beautiful ideals, poetry, steal some poetry from somebody else, some nice images, make it beautiful. But there’s nothing in in it.

The crucial point is that the capacity for relationship is predicated on your own intimacy with life, with life itself. You love yourself. And then in time you naturally share that experience, that participation in the union that is life. You don’t need to balance anything or bring anything together, that’s all just more ego. It’s all happening already, it’s all good. Just get with the program. Then in time you go out and educate this world, one person at a time. And that can turn into this power, this Yogic siddhi, of actual relatedness in the union with another. It is humanly possible. I grant you, difficult, but possible. If we don’t handle that and see that as the main point of ‘spiritual’ life, then we are not taking responsibility for a spiritual life.

Please don’t give up. Be patient. Never give up on yourself. Yoga is to choose a direction and go in that direction with continuity. This is what stills the fluctuations of the mind’s endless choices. The ego loves choices. That’s why the more conventionally attractive a person is, the greater their ego tends to be, by which I don’t mean some entity, just a mistaken identification with an idea of separate object. There is a fire, a tapas, in going in your direction of choice and burning up all that tendency to fluctuate and follow impulse and be a victim of endless reactivity. Choose wisely, with your whole self, but then hang in there. Polyamory just feeds the ego, and beyond the shallow excitement of getting affirmed by more people, it will cause misery in the relationships and misery in your life. The full power of consciousness in a direction is dissipated in polyamory.

Some polyamorists like to make a valid criticism of the cult of couples, where two people trickle a bit of love toward each other and withhold it from everyone else. That’s a valid criticism. But of course we can be polyamorous in our love – isn’t that what amor means, anyway? So it’s misnamed, hiding behind a lovely idea of loving everyone. Because loving everyone is beautiful, but that doesn’t mean having sex with everyone. Love is not sex. You love a tree, but you don’t try to have sex with it. I hope. Many fall into that trap of trying to get love through sex. It won’t work. Sex is a sublime method we have to communicate love with the whole body. Not a way to try to squeeze it out of someone. And it needs a safe container.

Multiplicity in sexuality is a temporary matter because of the confusion and dysfunction around sexuality. We have to cut a pathway for ourselves and find the right chemistries, the right energies, the match of body mind and spirit, and go with that into lifelong partnership.

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 Mark Whitwell's 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.