The Cult of the Normal | Mark Whitwell

Let us be clear, the so-called normal life that most of us are born into is a cult.

The cult is organized around the presumption of separation.

In our everyday lives the thought-structures of modern society create and normalize a felt sense of separation in each person. Everybody is carrying around the feeling that they are a separate body struggling away in a frightening world of “others.” The lens of science and its methodology of splitting the “observer” from the “observed” (the “subject” from the “object”) creates an apparent rift between ourselves and our experience, between our life and its context.

People in modern cultures have become so habituated to this mode of perception that it is not even recognized as a particular way of perceiving and relating to life. It is no longer lens that is picked up and put down but a pair of glasses that are permanently worn. We think life is about analysis and knowledge “about” things rather than whole-body feeling participation.

The result of feeling separate is great anguish, fear, anger, pain and grief in the body, mind and nervous system.

Some of these mass dissociating patterns are perhaps more benign than others but they are all based on the false presumption of separation. Much public dialog and conflict is in this uninspected presumption of the cult of the normal.

The good news is that separation is obviously and factually not true!

Life is a Unity and the body is the cosmos. In Reality, there is no divisiveness, no separation; not two, only One. There is only One Reality and everything is happening in that Reality.

What is Reality? Reality is the power of the cosmos: that which beats the heart, and moves the breath and sex. The body is Reality and is always and already functioning in a perfect harmony with everything: air, light, water, sun, moon, stars, the green realm, and all human others.

We are not talking about cultural ideas of enlightenment and the parlance of spiritual talk. It is much more ordinary, serious, sober, logical and urgent to investigate what is actually real and to relax. There is Reality and that is All. This is why my teacher U.G. would say, “Stop looking. Start Living!”

Nevertheless, you know how hard it is to convince people in cults of what is really going on. They become very convinced of a prevailing point of view in an impenetrable bubble of their own logic. Sometimes people will refuse to even hear of any other point of view. They believe the world as it is to be the only “truth”. So we need to be very careful of the world, even gentle, and to be respectful toward cult members. Everybody is Life happening and everybody has a heart. We help people get out of the cult and to understand that life is a Unity.

Yoga begins when you realize you are not actually in the cult. The practice takes you gradually or suddenly into the power, intelligence, beauty and intrinsic harmony of capital “R” Reality: your Life as it actually is — as it it always was and will continue to be.

Yoga and spiritual life is about relationship only: Participation in the always Given Reality. It is not a manipulation of the presumed separate body and world to get to Reality or God. In Yoga we start with the FACT that you are Reality and we connect to what is already true.

In the heart of Yoga there are many teachers of many flavours; just as there are as many perfumes as there are unique flowers. All who teach in the heart of Yoga have unique personalities, teach in their own unique way, and embrace various aspects of Yoga.

Yet each teach the essence of Yoga and the principles that ensure that your Yoga is adapted to your unique individual needs: body type, age, health and cultural background. The point is that there is a right yoga for you that ensures that your Yoga is direct intimacy with Reality itself.

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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.