The Dharma of Intimate Connection | Mark Whitwell

When people first come to spiritual practice they are usually a faced with a choice between two views or dharmic perspectives.

The first choice is to abide as witness consciousness to all arising conditions until eventually you reside only as consciousness itself; where there is no subject and no object but only Reality Itself.

This is the popular view of modern day Buddhism and Hinduism; and the practices of ‘witnessing your experience’ are foundational to modern meditation and mindfulness traditions. It is where we get the popular spiritual methods of detachment, stepping back from experience and even celibacy.

The second choice is to embrace or merge with a chosen direction/ object with continuity until you are completely merged with that object. As a result of that merge, you know the object and simultaneously you know the ‘knower’ of that object: Consciousness Itself, that in which all object/subject relations are arising.

This is the view or method of Yoga which can be summarized as a spiritual method of intimate connection. Patanjali defines Yoga famously as “Yogaś-citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ” which translates as, “Yoga is to direct consciousness via the mind in a direction of choice with continuity.”

When we merge with our desired directions/objects the mind becomes clear and steady and we know ourselves to be at One with Reality.

So Yoga (intimacy with all ordinary conditions) is the practical means by which the first idea, “residing as consciousness only,” is bestowed upon us as a spontaneous gift or “siddhi” of practice.

The recognition that you are Consciousness Itself and so is everything else, arises unpredictably within a life of Yogic intimacy. Like going to sleep, you cannot force it; but, like sleep, it comes when the conditions are right.

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya summarized the matter succinctly when he said, “The Buddha was a Yogi.” That is, the Buddha’s realization came amid his life of intimate connection. Krishnamacharya regarded the orthodox emphasis on witnessing practices as a sort of distraction.

He saw intimate connection as the main spiritual priority; that is, intimacy with body and breath (asana and pranayama) followed by intimacy with others including family life.

When we compare the logic of the two dharmas against each other we can sense the likely trajectory of the practitioner’s life. In a life of Yoga, the widespread human problem of dissociation from one another and the ingrained sense of separation from Life/Reality/Nature cannot occur.

Yoga is the embrace of all ordinary conditions including birth, sex, pain, death, emotions, the body and all people and things that are arising in the One Reality. Yoga transmission occurs between two people who love each other: the guru-shirsha relationship.

It is a discipline that moves us directly in the opposite direction to the miserable and complicated avoidance of relationship that is the norm in patriarchal cultures world-over.

The danger of the witnessing methods of modern meditation, if they are practiced outside of the context of Yoga and intimacy, is that they can cause further dissociation in practitioners. We are not here to merely be ‘aware’ of Reality and one another. We are here to be intimate and connected.

Many sincere young people around the world have reported their partners becoming interested in spirituality and meditation and then find that they withdraw from relatedness in pursuit of a pure, personal inward state of peace or clarity; the search for ‘enlightenment’ takes them away from their loved ones.

It is a false peace. The lack of intimacy that these practices cause only create more disturbance in the mind. When we feel connected we are at peace; when we feel separate our minds go crazy.

What we need is a robust life of intimate connection to all tangible conditions. This is the spiritual priority of Yoga and what asana and pranayama allows for.

When we are intimate with our embodiment we are able to be intimate with all aspects to which our body-mind is in relatedness to: the nurturing context of Mother Nature; all beautiful people that we meet; and our family.

This is why Yoga was understood in the ancient world as the mother’s milk of spiritual culture and why it needs to be there in the life of any sincere person exploring these matters. Because it has been popularized so badly and transformed into male muscular struggle and the imposition of straight lines on the body, most spiritually sensitive people rightly assume that there is nothing of value for them in it; and so, turn to meditation and mindfulness.

Real Yoga is now coming to light thanks to the pioneering work of Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar. Asana is moving meditation; a whole-body prayer to life; and it is necessary for people to release restrictions from their system and be intimate with Life in all its aspects.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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.