Travels in the Heart of Yoga with Mark Whitwell
My decision to train with Mark Whitwell came quite out of the blue when a close friend from university rang to tell me about a real-deal teacher she had met in Fiji who was offering something almost unrecognizable to the usual bullshit of the yoga world.
“Trust me,” she said, “This is different. If you can get leave from work, you could come up for the training. I’d love for you to meet Mark.”
I could tell by the excitement in her voice that she had found something worthwhile. I booked my flights the next day…
I had no prior interest in Yoga, but I was desperately unhappy. I couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that life was happening somewhere else, and that I was separate from it all, and that I needed to somehow get closer to it.
I had spent my twenties hysterically trying to resolve this sense of separation—through art, drugs, meditation, and higher education. And each time I failed to arrive at a sense of wholeness through one pursuit, I would have to start from scratch somewhere else, increasingly ground down. I knew I wasn’t living right, but I didn’t know how to get out, and I was willing to try anything.
So I flew to a Fijian island to meet Mark Whitwell and learn the heart of yoga…
On the first day of the training, a group of around thirty students gathered in the local school hall. Mark Whitwell sat at the front of the room and welcomed everybody and I immediately liked him for his seriousness.
Mark Whitwell made it clear that this meeting was not a casual matter, not some one-size-fits-all teacher training, nor an attempt to put some gymnastic patterns on us. Rather, we were gathered on Taveuni to learn what he called “the mother’s milk” of spiritual life, the non-dual tantra of direct intimacy with reality itself.
When he asked people why they had come, a common thread slowly began to emerge across the group. It turned out that everybody felt separate and that everybody was trying to feel connected.
I had thought I was living with a private curse!
Mark Whitwell reassured the room that it was a cultural fault and that we needn’t worry because it wasn’t real at all. He quickly got down to making the necessary correction:
I’m saying to you that you are the power of the cosmos, that you are mother nature perceiving mother nature, and that your body is an extreme intelligence and utter beauty that is already in an intrinsic harmony with the sun, air, water, light, the green realm, and all the intangible aspects of the cosmos. And you’re brilliant enough to say yes it’s true, right. You are as much a part of the natural world as that coconut tree over there. You exist within an unbreakable unity. You don’t have to find it, because you are it. You don’t have to realize it, you are it. If you’re looking for a connection it implies you don’t have it. The act of looking implies the absence. Therefore, looking is the problem. So stop looking!
(…!)
I instantly felt a massive sense of relief. Simply to have someone identify this cultural implant of looking for reality as if you are separate, lifted it off my mind.
Mark Whitwell went on to describe the vast fabric of religion, spirituality, and yoga as an attempt to find what had never been lost, an attempt to get somewhere sublime or extraordinary as if you are not something sublime or extraordinary. The tone of the training was set: you are here now, you can relax.
With the now-obviously insane search for reality swept off the table, intimate connection to the ordinary was put in its place, and Yoga was the practical technology to embrace it.
Each day we practiced simple, pleasurable sequences that were organized around the union of the inhale with the exhale.
“The inhale is from above as receptivity,” Mark Whitwell said. “It is the practical action of receiving your experience and those around you. The exhale is from below as strength. It is the action of giving.”
During those two weeks of practicing the principles of the heart of yoga and being in close relationship with others, I felt a simple and natural ease develop with myself, others and my surroundings.
It was as if the front of my body from the crown to my feet was becoming softer, more porous to other people.
I remember how wonderful it felt to be received as a whole person, the palpable flow of relationship among us as we shared meals and precious conversations together on the deck overlooking the dense sheets of tropical vegetation blanketing the island.
After practicing Yoga we were free to sit around or go about tasks in relationship with one another. There was no information to gather, no set texts or exams, no mistakes, no certificates, no early starts, no doctrine, no competition, and most of all, no hierarchy.
It wasn’t like Mark Whitwell was lecturing us, or being a special person at the front of the room. Rather, he passed on to us what had been passed on to him, in a very natural way, as a friend in dialogue.
It was a true pleasure to be in the room where the method of learning (sharing) was a conversation between friends. It wasn’t like any learning experience I’d ever had. It didn’t feel like a branded package experience, like “Mark Whitwell TM Yoga”.
I was so unused to seeing people actually receiving one another—listening carefully and feeling what the other person was communicating with their whole body without fear, or tensing, or reacting. Mark Whitwell was at points quite strong in his response to people. He would often uncompromisingly encourage people to drop certain ideas and apply the principles of Yoga to their relational lives.
But what was both natural and estranging about these conversations is that they were always within the context of receptivity—there was no aggression or violence in the strength of Mark Whitwell words, but there was real power. It was kindness in action. I saw the relief in people. And the softness that was enabled. This was new to me, to see that receptivity did not need to mean weakness or flimsiness, and strength did not mean brutality or bulldozing over people.
There was none of the new-age attempt to force intimacy through demanding people share their traumatic histories in a group setting; there was no comparative heroics of being the most open or the most accomplished in some gymnastic posture.
A non-dramatic sense of intimacy arose delicately but surely as people felt that they were being received by those around them. It was a simple and beautiful unfurling. When the competitive dynamics of the usual life are abandoned, people become more themselves.
And then, there would be equally as many occasions when I would feel myself failing to receive someone else and get swept up in a frenzy of my own patterns.
I was struck by how I’d mistaken intelligence for an ability to carve up another person with my mind. It was healing to be a in space where you are given the opportunity to fail to receive, without in turn being detested yourself.
What do you do when you find yourself contracting and recoiling from someone else? I asked Mark.
“Do your Yoga,” he replied. “It burns up the obstructions in the system caused by our reaction to the experience. It allows you to keep the pranas flowing smoothly in a relationship even with difficult situations. But don’t avoid relationship, because ultimately it is a relationship that moves the life energy through the body.”
By giving me a means of abiding in the wholeness of the body, I was able to bypass and gradually release patterns that had been unconsciously dictating my life, like, in my favourite writer Eve Sedgwick’s words, a “big, sloppy, psychic hurricane-footprint.”
My experience in Fiji was a massive relief. Mark Whitwell’s words from the yogic perspective of wholeness unburdened me from a desperate search that had unconsciously been draining my enthusiasm for life and obstructing my commitment to those around me.
And then, a whole new way of life was made available to me through my Yoga sadhana—a life of intimate connection to my own life and the people I cared about. I was able to move onwards from relationships that I needed to move on from gracefully without feeling existentially threatened. I discovered a new pleasure in walking the suburban streets of my hometown knowing that there is nowhere to get to and nothing to become.
End of Article
If you want to learn the principles of home Yoga practice that Mark discusses in this interview you can join the 8-week online immersion by donation at www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion.
Author Bio
Andrew Raba is a writer, librarian and Yoga Teacher from Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. He holds an MA in the visionary science fiction of Philip K. Dick from Victoria University of Wellington. When he is not teaching Yoga or relaxing in the library he can be found playing tennis or swimming at the beach.