What is Success in Asana? | Mark Whitwell

Successful postures (asana) are not measured by the look of the posture, but by the feeling created within you by doing the posture.

Asana is the spiritual practice. This is where your mind is informed by your heart. This is strength-receiving and the merging of your polarities. Put your asana practice up on the high pedestal of your spiritual practice, not meditation. Asana practice is your devotion to life and God. A quiet meditation will flow from asana.

Participate in your polarities.

Everything in Nature–including ourselves–is an infinite dance of polarities ever-flowing in joined mutuality. I call this natural dance of opposites “strength receiving.” The qualities of strength and receptivity exist in each of us and both aspects are lived and expressed as us all the time. In every body, this intelligence of the male-female mutuality is present in every one of our cells. What is the simplest way to experience it? With our breath.

Yoga is extreme pleasure. It’s the embrace of life. It is intimacy with life. Because it is the merge of opposites in your own system, it is deeply pleasurable, literally, energetically, sensually pleasurable.

If you strain there is no Yoga. You must work within the parameters of the current elasticity and flexibility of your body. Allow your practice to flow naturally and feel natural. Practice without any expectation of mastering a pose.

Do the daily practice. Do the heart of Yoga and see what happens. We are all this magical wonder of life happening. We are! Do it even if your mind doesn’t quite know why you’re doing it. Breathe and move your body. Stand at the edge of your mat; inhale a strong, smooth ujjayi breath; lift your arms looking up at the hands; relax your shoulders; exhale an even ujjayi breath and bring the arms down again. Start with one breath and keep going.

Yoga is a four breath discipline. The first three breaths may be difficult, but the fourth comes sweetly. The basis of the asana practice is the breath. Inhale and receive God. Pause and be with God. Exhale and surrender to God. Pause after exhale. You are surrendered.

Move with strength and attention; comfort and ease. Asana practice is pleasure. It’s not a struggle. It’s steady and comfortable. Asana creates equanimity, flexibility and strength.

• Practice with open hands and soft palms.

• Relax your shoulders, wrists and all joints.

• Don’t put any tension in the periphery.

• Work without struggle.

• Move and breath from the core of your body.

• The core is your strength and the strength is soft; this strength receives.

There is a self-understanding that occurs in the midst of asana practice. It is a fascinating personal practice that evolves each day. Things happen. All the questions leave and there are no more questions. You are just Life itself and life is a perfected system that is freely given.

So practice asana non-obsessively, actually and naturally. No drama. Practice in comfort and you will discover intimacy. And you’ll find peace in that. In the accord of life, in the intimacy of life, there is great peace.

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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.