Krishnamacharya on Relationship | The Opposites are Already in Union
Mark Whitwell shares Krishnamacharya views on Relationship.
When all the obsession with self-improvement, gym workouts, language learning and yoga come to an end, we recognize that we simply want to love and be loved in the mystery condition of Life. We all want to give and receive one another naturally and easefully.
Indeed, our bodies are built for this very purpose. From the soft feeling frontal line of the body to the masterful base and spine, we are strong and yet utterly receptive. We are here to love.
Yet, for most of us, relationship is where we are stuck. The trauma of having been born into a society that assumes separation has gone deep. Our living organism has been abused by a social mind that believes it to be separate from Nature and God for thousands of years. Because we mistrust our most essential connection to Life we struggle to love others, especially when it comes to sex.
Waves of lockdown and confinement may have brought the social dysfunction that was put in us as children up for inspection. This is all good. Our restriction is a goad to take positive action.
In all the chaos and confusion that surrounds intimacy in our culture, the great yogi Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) stands out as a beacon of hope. Krishnamacharya made available to the modern world the tools of the tantra: the practical means by which any person can be intimate with their own embodiment and then with another.
Yoga is Relationship
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s teaching on Yoga and relationship was simply that Yoga is direct intimacy with Reality Itself. It is intimacy with that which beats the heart, moves the breath and Sex and grows the trees and flowers. It is your participation in that which blows the wind across the islands and moves the ocean.
Specifically, the special technique of yoga is the union of opposites in our own system. On every inhale we receive the breath down the frontal line which is our embrace of the feminine aspect of our embodiment. On every exhale we give the breath back from the body base which is the embrace of the masculine aspect. This polarity of receptivity (the feminine) and strength (the masculine) is the way life is functioning at its most basic level. Yoga is a deeply sexual practice of enjoying the already-established union of these qualities on a daily basis. It is easy and for everyone.
Intimacy with your own embodiment naturally translates into the capacity to be intimate with somebody else. The guidance is: intimacy with body, breath and relationship, in that order. The great Yogi Jesus Christ said it in his instruction to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” First, you have to love yourself and Yoga is to do just that.
When this is not practiced and when you try to do Sex or follow the usual religious advice to suppress it and try to get away from it comes out badly in mistaken social disasters.
My friend Alan Watts once said that Sex is how we all entered this universe. It is the basis of all existence. We must educate the world on how to be intimate with Life and we must not deny the male/female union.
A Householder Tradition
Krishnamacharya made clear that Yoga is for ordinary family life. He said the best cave for yoga is pleasurable family life. It is a dignified matter to enter into an intimate relationship and yogic relationship. He was emphatic that the translation of the word brahmacharya (often translated as celibacy) was the study of Brahman through right-relatedness. He said there was never celibacy in yoga culture and that it came as a religious ideal much later.
The idea of intimacy having a place in spiritual life may come across as a bit of a shock. In conventional Buddhism and Christianity, there is the dominant idea that the ultimate spiritual life that of renunciation, meditation, monasticism, and going within: residing as ‘witness only’ to all arising conditions. It is now a universal assumption that spiritual practice is to drop all conditions and be the witness. This idea has created damage. It has dissociated humanity from our own reality.
Yoga is to turn 180 degrees around. Krishnamacharya’s view was that Yoga is intimacy with all ordinary conditions. When we are intimate with all conditions (including real difficulty), then we come to know the source of all conditions.
The first spiritual responsibility then is to heal relationship and sexuality. To participate in life and to be intimate with everybody on this beautiful planet. Sexuality must be engaged appropriately, with dignity and commitment.
Krishnamacharya, Yoga and Women
I was fortunate to have the gift of meeting Krishnamacharya in my early life. I came from New Zealand in the 1960s. I had received a western university education and so I was able to bring that scientific, discerning mind to his teaching.
In many respects, Krishnamacharya was a man with one foot in the ancient world and one in the modern. In his life, he negotiated and synthesized the orthodoxy of the Vaisnava tradition that he was born into and love and the relative radicalism of tantra. For example, in his Yoga Makaranda, he pointed to ancient texts to prove that women in ancient times were educated fully in the religious life and were educated to practice yoga.
“Everyone has a right to do yoga. Everyone — brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya, sudra, g˜nani, strong, women, men, young, the old and very old, the sick, the weak, boys, girls, etcetera, all are entitled to yogabhyasa with no restrictions on age or caste. This is because yogabhyasa rapidly gives maximum visible benefits to all… But many do not agree with this opinion. This only reveals their confusion and the absence of a sattvic state of mind. (The sastras do not forbid yoga for anyone.)”
Krishnamacharya’s emphatic point of view was radical to the orthodoxy of this time and still is today.
TKV Desikachar (1936–2016), Krishnamacharya’s son, did so much to interpret and translate his father’s teaching. Without Desikachar, Krishnamacharya would have been difficult for the western world to access. Both of those gentlemen made it clear that the lineage of Krishnamacharya not biological but based upon the sincerity of the individual.
Understanding the Culture of Abuse in Yoga
The ongoing tragedy of male teachers abusing their students is a universal story. When you do not give the gifts of intimate life to a man, the means to actually come into mutuality and deep abiding intimacy with the feminine, then that man will use his secular or religious power as a way to manipulate social circumstance to try to get what he intuitively knows is missing from his life. There is a deep sadness in us in these times.
Let’s be clear about it. The world is deeply tragic and dysfunctional in the area of sexuality and intimacy. Abuse is universal in all secular and religious institutions. We know about the Catholic Church and we know about the Swamis who came to America. Within the religious ideal of celibacy, their sexuality comes out as an explosion of energy rather than a continuity of feeling between intimates in ordinary life. Many of the public have been turned off from the investigation of spirituality and sexuality.
Nevertheless, there is something absolutely extraordinary that came out of our ancient people. Extraordinary gifts come from extraordinary saints and sages and avatars and Yogis. And these gifts are supremely useful to our modern lives. Yoga is the Mother’s Milk of human life.
Krishnamacharya wanted the world to know that there is a right yoga for every person no matter who the person is. Yoga must be adapted to that individual according to age, health, body-type and cultural background. It must be given in a way that is right for each individual.
Through Yoga, we enjoy that connection to what we already are as individuals. We make love to life within and without. Don’t try to be like another saint and neglect your own wonder. We can who we are within the unitary wonder that is life on Mother Earth. My teacher U.G. Krishnamurti said that human suffering is simply trying to be something other than what you are.
- If these words speak to you then join me and my friends in the heart of Yoga online studio to continue the conversation. We are committed to providing any person, no matter who they are, with a Yoga practice that is right for them according to the principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth.
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