You Live Your Life Like a Candle in the Wind
Mark Whitwell is interested in developing an authentic yoga practice for the individual, based on the teachings of T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989). He is the author of four books including ‘Yoga of Heart’ and ‘The Promise’ and was the editor and contributor to TKV Desikachar’s classic yoga text ‘The Heart of Yoga.’ Mark Whitwell continues to facilitate teacher trainings and workshops in the heart of yoga all over the globe.
Many women have told me that Marilyn’s experience is essentially their own. Born fresh and free, wild and sexual, they became inappropriately sexualized objectified, abused, manipulated, feared, threatened.
Some, having been sexually exploited, learned to turn the tables and went on to exploit. Others were depressed or even suicidal usually living in compromised situations pacified by media and legal or illegal drugs.
Either way, all had to go through a life crisis to claim their own life, free them selves of the sexual dysfunction of society and the predatory male and learn how to be in relationships of mutuality, the cooperation of autonomous equals.
I have been very touched by the outpouring of response to this post from a few days back that shows Norma Jean doing yoga asana that she learned from Indra Devi who learned from our source scholar Krishnamacharya. It was a fun connection to be made but the seriousness of the consideration has not gone unnoticed by many.
“You live your life like a candle in the wind. Never knowing who to cling to when the pain set in”, said Norma at some stage in her life. Elton John replied: “I would have liked to know her. But I was just a kid. The candle burned out long ago. But the legend never did.”
I would like to have known Norma Jean too. I would like to have given HER yoga to her, strength receiving, inhalation / exhalation, intimacy with the power of her own life. I would like to have given Marilyn intimacy with her own life prior to potential intimate connection to others. I would like to have taught yoga to her potential intimates too; so they too could love their life; so they would know how to receive her, the wild power and beauty of the natural life; instead of the need to control, manipulate, objectify, penetrate for some brief consoling moment with the feminine.
The insidious manipulation and degrading of the feminine is universal and must be corrected in our time. “Even when you died the press still hounded you. All the papers had to say is that Marilyn was found in the nude.” It is not a simple equation, like male is wrong, female is abused. It is a vast cultural mistake based on the doctrines that have created civilization. That God or truth is “other,” elsewhere” and not in the Earth, not in the miracle of appearance, not in sex, not in woman, not in man.
This vast mistake is of course the cause and fuel of fundamentalist terrorism we are suffering. The only long term cure is education. God is in the Earth, God is in sex, the miracle of life arising. We can correct the imbalance.
We can create collaboration, cooperation between the sexes. It is not about one teaching the other but just a matter of receiving the power of the other for the mutual empowerment of both. To reside in and as the source of both for the benefit of both and for the benefit of all creation. Please help me deliver this into the world on behalf of Marilyn, all women and all men.