A Week With My Family | Mark Whitwell on Releasing Childhood Karmas
Heart of Yoga | Mark Whitwell
“If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family,” the beloved spiritual teacher Ram Dass once famously said.
And see what comes up!
Ram Dass nailed it here by making it clear that freedom or enlightenment is not a dissociation from anything — including the difficulties that society and your own family are having. Freedom is not an “inner state” away from the problematic “outer state.” Indeed, it is the patriarchal idea of spiritual withdrawal from the world and the ensuing lack of relationship that causes dysfunction in the first place.
The advice from the wisdom traditions is to not to dissociate from anything at all, but to associate positively to patterned dysfunction; to outshine all difficulties and limits with your intrinsic love, the unitary nature and context in which all things are happening. We participate freely in our family and community and make a contribution that will help alleviate its limitations without being restricted by them ourselves.
Healing occurs in the acknowledgment that you and every other person is Reality/ Life itself happening. No matter what the mind is up to (their mind or yours!) or what social conditions suggest, our parents are the brightness of the sun, the flowers blooming in the garden and the mother-father embrace of the new born.
If we can be in relationship with our family and go through the valid stages of numbness, fear, pain, anger, and grief (grief for the shoddy deal that humanity has been dished up) we can get to compassion for ourselves and our parents. If we can get to compassion in our immediate relatedness to our family then it is a piece of cake with anybody else.
This is the real process of spiritual evolution.
Duḥkha: Restriction around the heart
There is grace in being able to acknowledge our feelings of restriction. Acknowledgement of pain leads us to take positive action. Our teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) would say that duḥkha, or the experience of restriction around the heart, is the unavoidable motive of Yoga practice. He would even say,
“Thank God for my duḥkha because it has motivated me to practice.”
And yet, whilst duḥkha is our goad to practice, we do not approach our Yoga (or our life) as if it were a battle with our restrictions.
Rather, we lay down our arms and gracefully engage the intrinsic intelligence and freedom of the whole body. By moving and breathing according to the principles that Krishnamacharya taught — linking the body movement to the breath, starting the breath before you move, etc — we become sensitive to our natural state (that which is prior to the socially imposed presumption of limit and separation). A new direction opens up: the embrace and enjoyment of Life as it actually is.
Over time, the things that upset you begin to carry less and less significance. Soon, they could come to a point where they are of no significance whatsoever. We fall into our native state of unproblematic relatedness to everything and everyone. Gradually or suddenly (and usually both), the restrictions that we once felt to be so intrinsic to our life are no longer there. We stand free from childhood and adolescent reactions to life as fully empowered adults with the Yogas of Participation.
An example,
I began practicing with Mark at a time in my life when things were not going well with my parents. I was twenty-six and having stayed in the cocooned environment of university for as long as possible was facing with the prospect of moving out into the adult world. I was well-read in the study of science fiction and skilled in sitting exams, but was in the dark when it came to my own desires and what I wanted to do with my life.
My confusion made me extremely reactive to my family who were anxiously waiting for me to find a proper job. Sunday dinners felt like a trial and I could barely answer the phone lest it be my mum asking what I’d accomplished that day.
Eventually, I found a job that I thought would finally get them off my back and confer the status of success onto my life. I managed to secure an entry-level position at the prestigious National Library of New Zealand where I worked in the photographic archives. My colleagues were top researchers, artists and very culturally refined people. It met all the standards I imagined that society and my middle-class cultured family expected of me. I anticipated peacefulness to descend upon my life any day.
Over time however, a nagging feeling developed in my stomach. No matter how much I tried to convince myself that I was contented, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was not quite right. I could lie to my family and friends and pretend like it was a dream job for me, but it wasn’t. The question of what I really wanted to do remained lodged in my stomach.
Halfway through that year I had the good fortune to meet Mark at a workshop in Wellington. I had played around with yoga at a few studios in town but never in a very serious way. When the workshop began however, I took notice.
“What is Yoga?” Mark asked. “Yoga is to direct consciousness via the mind in a direction of choice with continuity. When you go in the directions that are right for you then you know the drashta ‘the one who sees.’ If you do not go in the directions that are right for you however then your mind will be a mess. Yoga is to know what you want and to go there, that’s all.”
Mark taught a simple practice of moving and breathing that immediately brought relief to my mind. A numbness began to recede. A sensitivity that belonged to nobody else but me began to stir.
After decades of tailoring my life to fulfill the imagined demands of my parents, Yoga entered my life as a total reversal of perspective. Rather than looking to them to tell me what to do with my life I could now access my own native intelligence. I could move through life from a brand new place. Unsurprisingly, my whole life that I had built on such shaky grounds was dismantled. And a new life soon emerged: job, relationship, where I was living, etc.
The amazing thing was how coming into my own authority as an individual changed my relationship to my parents. I found that the surer I was about who I was the more able I was to be in relationship with my parents in a loving way.
— Andy
*For a full and complete Yoga education, including a guide on how to practice and monthly zoom calls with Mark, you can join the by-donation immersion into personal practice here.
