Is Yoga a Religion? An interview with Mark Whitwell on faith, practice, and intimacy
Mark Whitwell (born in 1951 in Palmerston North, New Zealand) is an internationally sought-after Yoga teacher and author. Mark Whitwell studied at the home of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) who is known as the father of modern Yoga—he was the teacher of BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. For more than twenty years Mark Whitwell took private lessons with Krishnamacharya’s son TKV Desikachar. In 1995 he edited and contributed to his teacher’s book The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice (1995). Desikachar’s book has gone on to become a set text on teacher trainings around the world.
Mark’ Whitwell‘s teaching career has been defined by a seemingly contradictory stance towards religion. On the one hand, Mark Whitwell is a fierce critic of the what he calls ‘temple religion’ in which people follow the hierarchy of the religious authority, become seduced by the identity of belonging to a particular sect, and get stuck with thought-structures which imply that their embodied relational lives here on Earth are less than their relationship to God or the Absolute.
On the other hand, Mark Whitwell is adamant (as was Krishnamacharya and Desikachar) that Yoga must be introduced into organized religion as the first priority of a devotional life. As a result, Mark displays a deep interest in communicating Yoga into people’s dearly held religious traditions—whether Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist.
“Yoga is necessary,” Mark Whitwell says, “to actualize the beautiful ideals of faith cultures. Without this whole-body practice of God-embrace, then religion remains an abstract matter.”
Having grown up in New Zealand, I came to Yoga with a lukewarm spirituality—an atheistic belief system combined with a diffuse and bland Christian hangover. Through practicing Yoga however, I soon found that my relationship to religion underwent a gradual yet seismic change.
By experiencing for myself a sense of the absolute through this simple practice of moving and breathing, I became attracted to the language and the texts of the world’s great faiths. Suddenly, Christ’s comment that the kingdom of heaven is inside us was apprehensible as a truth.
“By giving you the means to directly embrace God yourself (as yourself and everyone else),” Mark Whitwell says, “Yoga allows you to experience what the reality-realizer’s of all different cultures were on about: that everything is consciousness itself, that reality is nothing but a nurturing force, that love is the answer.”
I would not say that I have become a convert to any faith, but I have become full of faith. As the poet Alice Notley writes, “Religion doesn’t have to be organized.”
A few weeks ago I sat down with Mark Whitwell to find out more about Yoga and religion. We take a look back at how Krishnamacharya and Desikachar understood Yoga; and we imagine what a Yoga practice would look like for a Christian, a Hindu, and an atheist.
Andrew Raba: Can you explain a little bit about your background and your experience studying with Desikachar? What kinds of practices and philosophy did you study? Was it taught within a Hindu context?
Mark Whitwell: My meetings with Krishnamacharya and his son Desikachar were some of the most important meetings in my life. These men were sincere scholars of the religious traditions of their country—of Vedanta and the Tantras. And they were very ordinary and humble in the way they related to people.
I had spent the last year exploring the spiritual circus of India and I had met so many people who were trying to sell enlightenment, or sell God. When I met Krishnamacharya and Desikachar, I could tell straight away that they were teaching out of a deep love of the wisdom tradition that they held. Krishnamacharya would always say,
“Yoga is not commercial activity.”
I began one-on-one lessons with Desikachar in 1973 in my early twenties. I didn’t identify with a particular religious group. But I was interested in the Hindu culture that Yoga arose in and I loved listening to Desikachar and Krishnamacharya chant. So during my studies I definitely learnt and imbibed the power of certain Hindu mantras. But that was not the main point.
Krishnamacharya was emphatic though that Yoga was not religion. Yoga evolved as a separate darśana, or philosophical system. It was independent from any one religious belief system.
At the same time, its independence had the effect of making it useful to all religious belief systems. And this is why Yoga travelled around the ancient world with such ease. It was universally applicable to all faiths as the practical means to embrace their deities, to actualize their ideals, to embrace the source of Life. The source that Christians call God, that Hindus call Siva-Sakti, that Vaisnava call Krishna, that Buddhists call the emptiness, that atheists may call Mother Nature.
Andrew Raba: Can you give an example of how Yoga can help a religious person actualize the ideals of their faith?
Mark Whitwell: I was recently teaching an elderly Christian nun in New Zealand. She had spent her life in a conflict between her love and devotion to Christ and her frustration at the denial of women that perpetrated by the church hierarchy. She was always arguing with the Pope (inside her head!).
We sat down together and made her a short practice of moving and breathing. We chose āsana that combined a horizontal arm movement followed by forward bends so that she could enact the cross with her whole body. Yoga was her whole-body prayer to Christ.
A few months later she reported to me that she lost interest in being at war with the Pope. And she said to me the most beautiful thing about her practice. She said,
“On the inhale, is the birth of Christ. On the exhale, is the death of Christ.”
By being intimate with the profundity of her embodiment, by embracing the God-given intelligence and beauty of her breath, my friend was able to bypass the limitations of the church and directly experience her Christ-nature, to feel how close Christ was to her at each moment. She told me that in the Book of Job there is a line,
“The very breath of God is within you.”
Andrew Raba: I have a close friend who is a member of ISKCON. Can you share with us an example of how you might teach a practice to a Vaisnava devotee?
Mark Whitwell: I was in Fiji last year following a teacher training and a group of ISKCON devotees came by to learn a Yoga. They were very sincere bhaktas from around Fiji, Columbia, Ireland, and India. It is always so beautiful for to share Yoga back into Indian religious cultures, to give back to the mother, to the source.
I shared with them a short practice of standing, kneeling, lying down, and seated asana that they could do in the temple in front their deity, to Krishna. We finished with pranayama and meditation.
And of course, we spoke about the matter of relationship to their life of devotion, this matter of the male-female polarity, and sexual intimacy within committed partnership. There is a lineage within the Vaishna tradition that says,
“Everything is Krishna, therefore love of anything is love of Krishna.”
We might say this is the non-dual tantra within Vaishnavism. I like this the best because it erases the artificial distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ and puts the focus on the quality of our relatedness with everything, within and without.
Krishnamacharya could trace his family lineage back to Ramanuja of the tenth century who was clear that family life (a polite way of saying sexual intimacy) was required for God realization.
Yoga practice naturally flows into our relational lives and transforms relationship into devotional practice. By surrendering to our partner, we are surrendering to Krishna.
Andrew Raba: What kind of practice would you give to an atheist?
Mark Whitwell: Well there are no templates in these matters. There is no set list of practices for different faiths. The careful creation of a Yoga practice is a personal thing. Yoga is not the imposition of a new framework of cultural idea on the organism. It is the direct embrace of the unique irreducible wonder of life that each person is. There are no templates!
For anybody of any faith or non-faith, the most important thing is that you are teaching within the context a genuine friendship with that person—you get to know them, you find out about their life, their hopes, their dreams, their difficulties, their emotions, their family, and their philosophy.
In my lifetime of teaching I have found that regardless of whether someone is religious or atheist, or agnostic, whatever, regardless of their cultural identity, everybody approaches this world with a sense of reverence. Everyone knows, at some level, that this world is the most precious thing that exists. And everyone wants to be intimate with this world, with Life, and with each other, especially with their special partner.
I think this is what you experienced in your practice. You started practicing as an atheist and you discovered in you a natural well of devotion, a depth of care and awe at the situation you find yourself in as life itself. Yoga allows this feeling to flourish.
I was recently speaking with a few friends who are environmental activists and they really have no religious inclination. So as a Yoga teacher, you have to respect that. Instead, you learn about the wealth of beauty and poetry that can be found within their sacred texts of ecological sciences and politics.
For example, the activist affirmation that everything is connected, that all humans are dependent on this ecosystem, that all humans deserve an equal amount of love and care, and that commerce must serve human life not threaten it, are ideals that can be empowered by a Yoga practice. Yoga is the embrace of our relatedness, our connection, and the unity of everything within the one reality. Krishnamacharya would always say,
“Yoga is relationship.”
The same definition applies to ecology.
Andrew Raba: What would say the best part of being a Yoga teacher is?
Mark Whitwell: The Yoga teacher’s job is to give each person the practical tools so that they can empower and participate in their own life. It is beautiful to see people bloom as a flower in their own garden when they stop trying to live up to unattainable cultural models, when they claim their own life.
End of Interview
If you want to learn the principles of home Yoga practice that Mark Whitwell discusses in this interview you can join the 8-week online immersion by donation at www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion.
Author Bios
Mark Whitwell is an internationally renowned Yoga teacher who has spent his career travelling the world and sharing the practices of intimate connection that his teachers TKV Desikachar and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya gave him. He is the contributor and editor to Desikachar’s classic Yoga text The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice (1995). Mark is committed to making Yoga relevant and useful to both sincere religious people and non-religious people alike. He lives between New Zealand and Fiji. He is a father and a grandfather.
Andrew Raba is a student of literature and Yoga who is based in Wellington, New Zealand/Aotearoa. He first met Mark Whitwell at an evening workshop where he experienced first hand the power of the breath. He is a scholar of the visionary science fiction of Philip K. Dick. He is currently living a peripatetic life with no fixed address.