Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga

New York City NY

11 January, 2021

5:54 AM

Description

How Can Yoga Help Change the World? Mark Whitwell on Yoga and Social Change First of all, I want to thank you for your commitment to serving humanity and the more-than-human sphere. The very fact you feel interested to read this article means you are a person who feels deeply and cares. Thank you for being a serious person who perceives clearly the utter chaos of human cruelty and suffering we exist in in these times, and for bringing your love of life to bear on whatever the area of life is that you have felt compelled to attend to. I honour the stand you have taken. Compared to even a few years ago, our decisions now carry a profound urgency. How we choose to engage in the world, or not, will either pull us as a species back from the cliff edge, or send us over. Everybody has a different part to play in the ecosystem of change, and no one will be exactly like anyone else. So thank you for your unique function. The world is lacking clarity as to what yoga has to offer as a means of empowering our life and life’s work. It may seem strange, at this point in history, to suggest taking up a home Yoga practice; a bad joke in the context of the scale of global grief and carnage. Yet beneath the commodification of Yoga and our resulting perceptions of it, lies a radical and ancient science of self-restoration and self-determination, a technology of love. And it is this tradition that we are seeking to recover and share. Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga We are all painfully aware of the Yoga industrial complex — the money-making, sweaty exercise, Instagram pornography, and lifestyle self-improvement. But we cannot let the usual process of hegemonic co-optation win. We are willing to go in there and wrest the tradition back. We refuse to concede the word “Yoga” to banal and dangerous gymnastic cults. We run into the heated downtown studio, seize the treasure, and sprint out again, before anyone can say “namaste, have you paid.” For culture is always contested space. We are with Belgian radical Raoul Vaneigem, who wrote: “I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout”. The yoga that we share is a radical matter, a revolution in the deepest sense of turning around the deep logics of culture that have been placed in us. It is the result of friends coming together to share their experiences and discuss the many challenges, as well as the immense pleasures that can come from this kind of creative activity. We have been gifted the great tradition of yoga, so we have a duty to give it relevant context to everyone as modern people. Read the full article here: Mark Whitwell About:  Mark Whitwell has taught yoga for over three decades across the globe, and is the founder of the Heart of Yoga foundation, and the Heart of Yoga Peace Project. Mark Whitwell is interested in developing an authentic yoga practice for the individual, based on the teachings of T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his son TKV Desikachar (1938-2016), with whom he enjoyed a relationship for more than twenty years. Mark Whitwell is the author of four books: ‘Yoga of Heart,’ ‘The Promise,’ ‘The Hridayasutra,’ and, ‘God and Sex: now we get both.’ He also edited and contributed to his TKV Desikachar’s classic yoga text, ‘The Heart of Yoga.’ Mark Whitwell is a father of three and a grandfather. He now resides between New Zealand and Fiji and continues to write, teach, and speak.