Locked Down in Love: Mark Whitwell on Intimacy During a Pandemic
By Mark Whitwell
Co-Author Andrew Raba
Life in lockdown has put the spotlight on our intimate relationships.
According to the New York Post, people seeking divorce in the U.S. is 34% higher than the same period last year. And as the fallout from the pandemic deepens, it is predicted to get worse. In Australia, a recent study showed that 42% of those surveyed said that they had experienced a negative change in their relationship with their partner due to lockdown.
For others however, the pandemic has been a wonderful chance to deepen their relationship. Many of my friends describe the positive effect of having more time with their partner as the busyness of the usual life fell away. A study in Japan found that 20% of married couples said that their relationship had actually improved.
In this article, I want to share with you what the tradition of Yoga has to offer for our relational lives during the pandemic. Whether you are wanting to protect a beloved partnership amidst the stress; to go more deeply into a happy marriage; or you are looking to develop a new intimacy with yourself in this period of time at home, these sublime practices are here for you, both now and into the future.
Before you close this article, please suspend the usual associations you may have with the word “Yoga.” I am not talking about the sweaty gymnastic exercises that have been popularized in the west. And neither do I mean any kind of inward spiritual gymnastics or religious obsession.
Rather, I want to share with you the beautiful practices and understanding that came through through Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989): the man known as the “teacher of the teachers.” Krishnamacharya was the teacher to BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi, and his son TKV Desikachar. Yet, curiously, in the popularization of Yoga the specific breath principles that he brought forth (that make Yoga actually Yoga) have been left out. When we put them back in, Yoga becomes truly useful.
Let’s take a look.
1|What is Yoga? Yoga is Intimacy
When we encounter relationship difficulties or stress, it can be tempting to look for more mental ideas or maps or tips and tricks to guide us. We look up psychological columns and self-help books; try and find criteria online that we can measure our relationship by; we plan days apart and date nights together on Fridays, for example.
But these external guides are not useful if we are separated from the native intelligence of our own embodiment.
Krishnamacharya and his son Desikachar showed me that Yoga is each person’s direct intimacy with Life itself, as it actually is: the extreme intelligence, utter beauty, and intrinsic harmony of the whole body.
When we link the body movement to the breath movement ensure that the breath envelopes the movement, the mind automatically follows the breath. As a result, the mind gets linked to the wonder, power, and beauty of the whole body. You participate in the intelligent flow of prana (life energy) through the system.
Through the daily embrace of your body and breath you allow for the body’s natural sensitivity to function. The dissociative patterns of the acculturated mind with its presumption of separation from Nature, from the body, and from others, is dealt to. The mind is reprogramed not to dissociate but to relate! It is this intimacy with our own life that is the basis for a sensitive relational life.
How this embrace of your embodiment affects one person will be different from another. You may suddenly recognize your need for deep rest after years of struggle. You may spontaneously release addictive habits. You may suddenly realise who you are attracted to and to whom you are not. A reliable gift of the practice however is that you will feel a spontaneous and natural pleasure develop in your relationship to others.
Intimacy with another begins with intimacy to our own embodiment. So be intimate! Merge the inhale with the exhale and see what happens.
Principle 1: The body movement is the breath movement.
Principle 2: The breath envelopes the movement.
2 | Strength-Receiving is Honest Sexuality
We have been living in a pandemic of hard-heartedness for our whole lives: a patriarchal disease that devalues receptivity (the feminine) and overvalues strength (the masculine).
We have been raised to be productive rather than to be intimate with our lives: to compete, and to struggle in the worlds of career, art, music, sport, and politics. Many of us feel a nagging sense that we are somehow ‘not there yet’ and we need to work to attain a sense of completion as a person. In that process, our poor bodies have become numb and battle hardened.
Such social conditioning places a severe limit on our relationships. Men in particular feel deprived of their ability to feel or to receive their experience, their emotions, and their partners, as they have shut down the softness of the frontal line in order to knuckle down and get ahead. Or they may have been abused in their early life and never received themselves.
On the other hand, women have become wary of unreceptive males and have closed their nervous systems off in self-protection.
Your daily Yoga practice reprograms the nervous system to become receptive. As the inhale, combined with opening arm movement, is drawn down from above, it expands and softens the frontal line from crown down to the genitals. It lifts off undigested emotion, brings prana into the system, and sensitizes the body to our own experience —including our experience of being with our partner.
The exhale is linked to life’s natural faculty of strength. We exhale from below, engaging the legs, the base of the body, the abdominals, and the spine. The exhale is linked to the action of giving. As we exhale we give back to the breath that we have just received, we give ourselves over to our experience, we give our pranas to our partner.
In the traditions, it is said that where the inhale and the exhale meet is the hridaya heart: it is valued in Yoga as the supreme locus of realization, the seat of mind, the source and basis of our Life. It is sometimes called the spiritual heart but it is felt only in the physical body. The word hrid is of made up of two parts: ‘hr’ means to receive, and ‘da’ means to give. Your Yoga practice allows you to feel the heart and to make it the basis of your relationship.
We become able to turn to our partners and to receive and give to them in a spontaneous and sensitive way, especially in our sexual intimacy.
Principle 3: The inhale is from above into the upper chest as receptivity; the exhale is from below as strength.
3|I’m Thinking About Breaking Up
If you find yourself in difficulties and conflict with your partner take the action of no action, don’t do anything. Your impulse is likely to be wrong action that is based on complex reactivity in life, external stresses of the pandemic, and the patterned roles of parents and of society.
For now, just wait and spend your time bringing the inhale to the exhale. You will find clarity of mind through your practice as well as an uncommon connection to your partner that you have not felt before.
Lockdown has deprived us of the normal things that we do to keep an even keel in life. For example, before the pandemic one of my students had the seemingly innocent hobby of spending a lot of time hiking in nature.
When unable to do this due to lockdown restrictions he became extremely depressed and started snapping at his partner. She in turn found it hard to relate to him outside of his usual sunny good mood.
What lockdown revealed is that his innocent addiction to spending time in nature concealed an underlying problem — the deep cultural assumption that we are not nature and have to get it, like a consumer, from external sources.
A simple Yoga practice allowed him to feel for the first time that he was at home in nature, in his body. He was nature and so was his partner. The joy and awe that he felt in wild places was accessible to him anywhere, anytime, even in lockdown in a small apartment in Sydney.
His girlfriend became curious watching his changed mood and joined him in daily practice. She found it easier to cope with her high pressure job and the hours she spent looking at a screen on zoom conference calls.
“The wilderness is right in front of me in the form of my girlfriend.” — Student
After a few months he messaged me and said that he had never thought that there was a downside to enjoying time in nature. But he could see now, the hidden denial of his own nature revealed by the lockdown.
Of course, he will continue his passion when the restrictions lift but without the desperation and dependency of thinking he was separate.
Principle 4: Asana, Pranayama, Meditation and Life are a seamless process. Meditation (clarity of mind) arises as a gift of our asana and pranayama.
In many ways, the pandemic is an enforced global retreat and a time for serious (not humourless) Yoga study. It is the perfect time to begin a home practice and the perfect time to transform your intimate relationship into Yogic mutuality: the union of opposites within and without; a relationship where each partner empowers the other in an endless mutual exchange.
As Krishnamacharya would say, “Do your Yoga!”
If you are interested in practicing the principles of Yoga that I talk about in this article you can visit www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion and join our eight-week online course that is available by-donation.
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