Healing Toxic Masculinity Through Yoga: An Interview With Mark Whitwell

Despite the fact that most Western Yoga teachers are women, we don’t often hear much discussion of gender or gender inequality in the yoga world, perhaps because of the unhelpful separation between the personal and the political that persists in our society. New Zealand-born, U.S.-based Mark Whitwell is on a mission to change that. We interviewed him to find out about his Yogic approach to gender equality, and how this necessarily entails a critique of masculinity and a vision of a more equal world. Interviewed by Rosalind Atkinson.

Rosalind Atkinson: Do you see your work around the world as contributing to gender equality, and if so, how?

Mark Whitwell: What I teach is the Yogic perspective that everything is made up of two principles perfectly in balance: masculine and feminine. The words are undoubtedly imperfect, as people tend to think “Oh, that means men and women,” but I’m talking about two opposites that exist in all of us, as we all come from male and female. However, as more and more people are realizing, we live in a world where everything ‘masculine’ is valued, and everything ‘feminine’ is scorned, mocked, ignored, or disregarded.

So in the sense of our bodies, nature, and basic constitution, the masculine and feminine are already in perfect harmony. But in terms of our societies, thought structures, and lived experience, they’re not. And for me that’s where Yoga comes in: teaching people to embrace, honor and live that feminine aspect that is in us all, regardless of gender identity.

Rosalind Atkinson: And what do you think that aspect is, which is devalued overall?

Mark Whitwell: It’s our intelligence beyond the mind; our intuition; what neuroscientists are coming to call “the brain in the belly,” our sense of connectedness, empathy, and compassion; our embrace of reality rather than analysis of it. Basically put, it’s our receptivity, as expressed by the soft front and crown of the body and the inhale. Almost everyone I teach, but particularly the men, has a strong, forceful exhale, but a compromised inhale. They can be strong, but not receptive. And a lack of receptivity makes all kinds of problems in our lives that we associate with imbalanced masculinity: everything from trouble listening through to all kinds of violence.

When we lack receptivity we lose touch with our bodies, our lives, and the people around us, and relationships become difficult. It’s tragic seeing the effects of socialized masculinity on the body: both men and women (but especially men) become very tight and rigid through the chest area. Women have been taught they are purely ‘feminine’ and that feminine is ‘less than’ for their whole lives. It’s a heavy burden.

Rosalind Atkinson: And how do you feel Yoga addresses this issue?

Mark Whitwell: First off we have to work out what we mean by ‘Yoga’. The Yoga that I teach comes from my teachers, who I studied with in India beginning in 1973, after leaving NZ in search of healthier cultural models. The Yoga that has proliferated in the West, while having some physical benefits, has left out the basic principles and understandings that make it an effective tool for people to undo their cultural conditioning. So that can be a dicey subject, as no one wants to hear that their favorite stretching class, with their favorite nice teacher, isn’t actually Yoga. But I persist, because I want people to experience the more profound benefits that come with an accurate and authentic practice. And when people actually start to practice, free from the LA-style gymnastic cults, they love it.

Real Yoga is each person’s embrace of their own reality. In practical terms, that means simple breathing practices that help people feel better, and feel better — two different sentences! We’re coming to understand now how profoundly mind and body are connected — the mind arising from the vast intelligence of the whole body. And so more and more people are coming to appreciate that our conditioning goes deep into our bodies — gendered and otherwise.

It’s not enough just to critically analyze the bad ideas we might have grown up with, although that can be useful. We need ways to tangibly and actually feel ourselves as larger than those limited boxes we’ve all been put into, and Yoga is that way.

Rosalind Atkinson: Can you say a little about those gendered norms, that you might have noticed growing up in the colonial Englishness of New Zealand in the 1950s, and how they affected you?

Mark Whitwell: I remember that in New Zealand society at the time there was no room for difference whatsoever. I had long hair as a teenager, and guys on the beach would yell things like, “Get a haircut!” or, “What are ‘ya?” That’s just one example. It was an aggressive, very tightly policed environment in terms of gender norms. Anyone looking or acting a little bit different was seen as a threat. I left at a young age, looking for other cultures with less rigid boxes.

Coming back, I noticed the influx of different ethnicities into Auckland, and that has definitely helped break some of those rigid norms, which are usually racist as well as sexist. But even though obviously society has softened up in some regards, we still see that kind of social enforcement today. It’s passed down from generation to generation.

Rosalind Atkinson: You teach explicitly about healthy relationships and sexuality. How do you see this as part of Yoga, and is it a dicey business discussing an aspect of people’s lives that is often kept quite private?

Mark Whitwell: I do teach and write about relationships and sexuality, recommending that people treat their committed relationship as part of their Yoga: first you embrace your own body and breath, then you become more self-aware and loving and able to function in relationship with another, which is the context for profound healing and transformation. The polarity of a relationship is what life’s all about, from the atom to the flowers around us. And that’s true of same-sex or opposite-sex intimacy. That should be obvious.

Almost all Yoga and meditation teachers out there don’t have direct teachings around relationships and sexuality, and it needs to be addressed because it’s where we’re suffering. Dysfunction happens behind closed doors, and it’s good that it comes out to be seen and understood. Lack of receptivity makes relationships very unequal, as males have been taught only to get, get, get, and not to receive — either themselves or another. They try and use women to get what they cannot feel. So there is justified outrage in women and in society at large, as we’re seeing at the moment.

Yoga is a tool to keep moving through the outrage and into the natural progression of emotions: anger, pain, grief, and then compassion naturally arising from the bad deal given to all. It can help us all move forward.

Rosalind Atkinson: When I think ‘Yoga’ or meditation I tend to think celibate monks on the one hand or hyper-sexualized women’s bodies on Instagram on the other. Do you think this gendered split mirrors the very old and tired stereotypes of “male, spiritual, mind” and “female, worldly, body, object?”

Mark Whitwell: Absolutely. And that split has been made by patriarchal religions for centuries. It has been imposed on people for hundreds of years that spirituality or religion is a male affair, which women can at best support, but which they’ve usually been framed as a hindrance to. The understanding that we all have masculine and feminine in perfect harmony was all but lost — it was there in many ancient cultures.

So there has been what we could call “divide and conquer” — the assumption that men are all masculine and women all feminine, that everyone is rigidly one or the other, that men are somehow more spiritual and women more worldly, and that the male is superior. And from there we’ve inherited beliefs that mental pursuits like dis-associative meditation are somehow heroic or worthy, while the miracles of sex and motherhood are somehow not. These inaccurate beliefs, spread by know-it-alls, have been harmful to everybody. We need to reclaim the understanding of the absolute worth and preciousness of an ordinary life.

In Yogic tradition it was understood that the saints and sages of humanity were ordinary family men and women, living their lives in full relatedness with those around them. Not retreating from the world into a cave. This was lost over the years, as Yoga became an orthodox male pursuit, and an attempt to transcend ordinary life, rather than embrace it.

My teachers, Krishnamacharya and his son Desikachar, took steps to remedy this. Krishnamacharya taught women as well as men and fought to allow women to chant the Vedas [Yogic texts], something that was banned at the time. But they were still men of their time and place, and so there is obviously still work to do.

Rosalind Atkinson: And finally, what do you see as healthy masculinity — being a “good guy”?

Mark Whitwell: A healthy masculinity is a strength that is receptive, and that’s true within each person as well as interpersonally. A “good guy” is someone who is willing to take a good hard look at the socialized norms they’ve been handed, and chuck out the rubbish. It’s someone who is willing to fully feel, fully receive others, and recover the beautiful human sensitivity and relatedness to all that is everyone’s birthright. That’s what I teach: the practical means to do so.