Do Your Yoga: An Interview on Daily Practice with Mark Whitwell

Q. Yoga is a major industry these days. Where do you fit within all the brands and the styles? 

The public aren’t getting Yoga. They are getting the fitness industry at best. Or gymnastics at best. My teacher Desikachar called it mediocre gymnastics. If you want to see gymnastics, go and see what the Chinese or the Americans are doing in gymnastics—that’s gymnastics. So we’ve got to sort this matter out.

What is Yoga? Yoga is the non-dual tantra of direct intimacy with reality itself. It is the technology of love, lightly applied, non-obsessively applied. It is direct connection to what life is. Which is an extraordinary power which seems to be eternal, which seems to be strength that is utterly receptive in your own case. Hatha Yoga. It is the union of strength and receptivity in your own system, and then you embody that in your life and in your relationships, and its awesome. It is a very powerful practice for each and every person and it must be given to everyone, it must be adapted to everyone. 

Q. Is Yoga best practiced at home?   

A. I remember Desikachar telling me how when he was doing his engineering degree in Delhi he’d get letters from his father, and all they said was ‘Dear Son, Do Your Yoga, Love Father.’ I really love that story. Krishnamacharya didn’t know much English, but he did know how to say ‘Do Your Yoga.’ And then there is our next line, ‘But not just any Yoga. Your Yoga. Hatha Yoga. Strength Receiving.’ The point being is that we tend not to do it, we tend not to practice. We can be really honest here. Who’s practicing? Even in the yoga world nobody practices. The teachers have practiced at some point in their lives like they’re training for the Olympic games or something and they can do all the asana and they go and show off in class. But they are not doing personal practice. And we’ve got to break that spell. 

Q. How should I begin a daily practice? 

A. Work out your daily routine, the time and the place in the house. Find some clean floorboards. It’s called your Yoga Pitta, your seat of Yoga. And have that in your home and go there at a certain time. Don’t make it random. Don’t make it “I’ll do it sometime during the day after I have read my emails.” Or after breakfast. Have some fruit or a juice first if you get too hungry. Have a time where you do your practice that fits into your daily routine, like getting to work on time or getting the kids off to school or whatever is you do. Morning is good because it sets up the conditions of Yoga for the rest of the day. 

Q. How should I approach a daily practice? 

A. To practice, it is a natural thing to do. It is the mother’s milk of human life. Have a time where you do your practice that fits into your daily routine like getting to work on time or getting the kids off to school or whatever is your social function. Get it in there. Get it in there like breakfast. Like showering. It’s a discipline to take a shower. You wouldn’t dream of going through the day without taking a shower or brushing your teecth. This is helpful to people to compare it to that. You don’t say, “Wow, I’ve showered every day this week. Wow, I’m getting spiritually disciplined.” And you don’t beat yourself up if you don’t shower for whatever reason, you just shower the next day. No big deal. You don’t give up on showering altogether. This is what I mean by actual and natural. There’s a line Desikachar told me, he said, “When there is no issue around practice, then Yoga starts.”

Q. So Yoga has nothing to do with self-improvement? 

A. It is wonderful to improve in life’s disciplines, like trying to play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix. But we do not measure ourselves in their success or failure. We are all already the power of the cosmos arising. We are that. We are not less than that. Yet we’ve been convinced that we need to work away on ourselves and relate to ourselves and the world in a special way, as if we aren’t already the perfection of life. I want to launch a sober investigation of this fact: You are the power of this cosmos. This ordinary body. You are. Give that some serious attention and thought. And its extraordinary how the body is functioning. And it is beauty itself. The one thing you can depend upon is the beauty of existence. So now you’ve got this steady asana practice, steady, non-dramatic, as your direct participation in the beauty of your life. Not looking, not requiring any result, not having to go into samadhi. Not even having to realize bliss. I had one teacher, who said ‘Boring bliss.’

Q. But if we are the power of the cosmos already why do we need to do any sort of practice? Isn’t it just more of the same? 

A. Because it’s necessary when there is still trauma in the system. You can’t depend on any circumstance, on any people around you, even on your own family, to drop the trauma in order for you to be okay. They are not going to. We have to do it. You have to see through that whole get-up that’s occurring. Humanity — they settle for a permanent state of trauma as if that’s okay. It’s obviously not okay. We don’t have to live like that. We can have our own life. We can imbibe the power of our life, the beauty of our life. We are allowed to do that. Even in this world as it is. And we can be in those difficult places, in big cities, and we are still allowed to do it. And it just takes a discipline to not get entangled in those social dynamics of disempowerment. You fall out of them. And doing your actual asana practice allows you to do that. This is not some stimulating asana class where all go home and say “Wow, that was fantastic!” We are talking about us practicing on from here and going beyond our parent’s trauma and society’s trauma. And having your own life. And in my spiritual investigations and I’ve been through so much and met so many people and been through all of it, there is no substitute for a Yoga practice. None.

Q. How does asana work to release trauma from the system? What is the process of it? 

A. If some reaction is occurring that is hurting me, the point is there is a means or a method to transcend this contraction, which is essentially ‘Do Your Yoga.’ I’m just making the point this morning to lift the mulhadara chakra into the agni [fire] and the agni, the fire of the body, the heat of the body, cleans the nadis—nadis means pathways like the meridians known in acupuncture—so that the nurturing force of life can flow. So it is a remedial activity. This asana is remedial. It is to clear the system so that nurturing flows.

The point being if I don’t react in the first place the pranas keep flowing. This is the idea of a yogic relationship, which is a relationship in which there is a continuity of feeling between two people in any relationship including marriage/union, that continuity of feeling. But if there is reaction, which is there is, because we’ve been socialized and traumatized in our early lives, then you do this remedial activity of clearing the pathways so that you can re-enter the related condition, the related condition being the primary definition of Yoga.

Its nothing obsessive. You’re not trying to get anywhere. That’s most of the problem solved, when you realize that it is not an obsessive activity. Most of the problem is also solved when you realise that it is pleasure. You do this for pleasure. It is making love with life. The merging of opposites. Literally. It is deeply pleasurable. The body loves its breath.

Q. I was wondering if you had any advice other than ‘Do Your Yoga’ because I’m not sure if I’m missing something. I’ve been trying for a really long time to have a daily practice. And I don’t know if I’m lazy or I just need to commit. 

A. That’s my whole thing about trying to popularize Yoga with ‘Your Seven-Minute Wonder.’ The German’s called the book ‘Your Seven-Minute Wonder.’ It’s like: seven minutes, commit to that, that’s all. The way the seven-minute practice came up was that I would be out teaching Yoga and I would say do this half-hour practice and then nobody would ever practice. I had no students practicing. Twenty minutes: a few people would practice. Then fifteen: still hardly anybody.

Then I was in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House—there was a Yoga festival there—and there was this lady there and she wasn’t very well. I said to her, “Would you do this for ten minutes?” And she said, “Oh, my morning is so busy, I’ve got to get the kids off to school, I don’t know, ten minutes in the morning...” I said, “Okay, would you do seven minutes?” Suddenly, the Sydney harbour went into a hush and this golden light came down through the clouds, like God was coming down, and she thought about it, and then after a pregnant pause she said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ So then I knew seven minutes was it. I’m trying to get the public to start doing Yoga sadhana (practice) for seven minutes. That’s my goal. And I want you to be participatory in that goal. But first you gotta do it yourself. But I am completely confident. If you do your Yoga for seven minutes it is so pleasurable, that it sometimes becomes longer, it’ll be ten, twenty minutes, and then it will be Sunday morning the light’s coming through the window and you’ll do forty minutes of practice.