Your Very First Yoga Practice | Mark Whitwell

The Heart is the place where all opposites are in union. It is the whole body, and its natural relationship with the universe, seen and unseen. In ancient Sanskrit the Heart is called Hridaya.

Hri means to give and daya is to receive. Hrid is a similar to the word hatha, the ancient word for strength that is receiving, the basis of Yoga and Life. It is by practicing hatha yoga, participating in the union of opposites, that the heart is revealed.

All of life is made of these opposites in union. Look at a tree. The trunk is utterly strong and as we get up through the branches the foliage is utterly soft and receptive absorbing sunlight and nutrients. It is one perfect system. Without the trunk, there could be no leaves, no nurturing. Without the nurturing leaves there could be no trunk.

In our own case, when our strong fathers surrendered and received the feminine, the heart mother came into existence. One cell of Life, the Hrid, came in to being. From the unseen source to form we came. From there the whole spine grew and the great crown above. And here we stand. Spirit has taken form.

Our hatha yoga is simply the participation in this form of opposites, as strength receiving and by practicing it we know the Hrid or heart.

In 1970 at the age of 19 I followed The Beatles to India. They were and are great teachers who celebrated their humanity, the ordinary man and women even while they became super famous. I spent the next 30 years crisscrossing that country in search of secrets to yoga and life.

I found and studied with some of the 20th century’s most noted Indian sages and yoga scholars. Today I teach what I learned all over the world. Everywhere I go I see students hurting them selves with punishing yoga workouts that are simply not necessary. It is possible to heal and know yourself through yoga but without pain.

No physical or spiritual gymnastics required! Trying to get somewhere as if you are not Somewhere, the full blown wonder of Life already Given. I teach yoga that is not measured by the look of the posture, but by the feeling created within you by doing the posture. It is what you feel that is most important.

Your very first yoga practice can be an experience of peace and energy. You can have an immediate affect of moving prana or life-energy within your body. When you practice Yoga you are steady and comfortable, strong and alert while being soft and receptive.

You use the same quality of energy it takes to live in this world without stress. You create equanimity, flexibility and strength. These principles are for you whether you are a beginner or advanced. Use them with the yoga you already know and love. It will make it powerful, efficient and safe.

The principles are profoundly simple:

•Do yoga only for pleasure.

•Do the posture for the breath, not vice versa.

•Breath initiates each gesture and envelopes your movement. You begin to breathe slightly before moving, and continue the breath slightly after the movement ends.

•Inhalation is from above and exhalation is from below and they meet at the heart. (Inhalation is receptive and moves from the crown down the soft front. Exhalation is strength, and moves up the spine from the base. This is strength receiving.)

•Bandha (internal locks of the whole body) serve the breath. While asana (postures) serve the bandha. Breath is senior.

•Posture prepares for conscious breathing (pranayama). Pranayama allows meditation. You cannot meditate willfully, just as you cannot put yourself to sleep. It comes naturally, as a gift.

•You are the extreme intelligence of Life. Source cannot be separate from its expression, this life. This is the non-dual understanding of yoga, from which practice proceeds and makes possible for you the direct absorption of what is already Given.

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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.