As a Teacher Do I Need My Own Practice? | Mark Whitwell
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
The one thing that qualifies you to teach is that you practice yourself. If you practice, then you can teach others from the authority of your own experience of what Yoga is: your direct participation in Reality Itself.
It can be a difficult job being a Yoga teacher because your students will have had teachers and authorities telling them the right way to practice. People will say, “This is not yoga” and “Why is there so much focus on the breath?”
With the strength and the certainty of your own experience you meet the student with their mixture of ideas. And with the authority of the fact that you are intimate with Life as it actually is, then you teach them.
A Yoga teacher is not an authority in the usual sense of hierarchy and power. But an authority that is born out of a sense of love for all other people. You love everybody in a fundamental way as Life Itself. And you know that this technology of asana and pranayama enacted according to the principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth actually helps people feel their prior connection to Life.
The key is to translate your own experience of Yoga according to the needs of the student. We adapt the Yoga to individual needs according to body type, age, health and culture. Many students will be religious people and many will be people who have thrown out religion. We teach by making Yoga relevant to each person’s background and with respect to who they are.
Within the ongoing waves of lockdown, the need for people to have access to a Yoga practice in their homes is huge.
Yet, even if the usual pre-pandemic world stumbles back there will still be massive problems.
The mind of civilization has dissociated us from our own Reality via the transmission of Doubt. What has been transmitted to us from babies is that we are a separate body in a separate world and therefore we feel lonely and problematic.
This presumption that we are separate from Reality has caused real pain in the body mind. In this pain we become exploitable by cults, authority figures, knowers and spiritual salesmen. Otherwise we numb the pain and the doubt through drugs and alcohol.
Within this craziness we need the wisdom tradition of Yoga like a baby needs mother’s milk.
Life is a Unity
The world of separation that is created by the thought-structures of society does not actually exist: it is a vast illusion. What does exist is the cosmos in all its harmony, beauty and intelligence and power and you are that. How could you not be that? What could create the vast intelligence that is your body? What lives the body? What brings it through to existence and what is breathing it?
You have to agree that life is a Unity and it cannot be lost. My teacher U.G. Krishnamurti would say, “Nobody need give this you because you already have it. Nobody can take it away, because you are it.”
Therefore, even though we may have wild dreams of pain and separation, our pain is not the whole story. The thought-structures of separation and doubt certainly create momentum in the psychophysical forms that we are in. But we know that we are the peace, power, harmony, intelligence and beauty of Reality Itself.
If the pain of presumed separation gets intensified enough, it may lead us to the understanding that we are not separate, so long as somebody speaks it to us. Ultimately, the pain takes us to Reality Itself. We let that which is Prior wash over us. Then we will all get home.
- Join me and my friends in the heart of yoga studio to continue the conversation, take live classes, and collaborate with one another to learn how to teach this much-needed technology of Reality Embrace.
