Staying Safe with Religious Tools | Mark Whitwell
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
Many of us are descendants of European colonialists, who in their struggle rejected or lost their own culture. Or we are descendants from societies that were destroyed by colonialists. We feel bereft of culture. Compared to the great traditions of the world, we seem to have little. We become attracted to cultures that seem richer and wiser than our own backgrounds. We become exploitable by ideas and fail to know our own native intelligence, bright in each cell.
One thing is very clear: all you need to be a fully-fledged yogi or yogini is your own body, your own breath and a few good friends. You do not need someone else’s culture or a sentimental attachment to an ancient culture. Such an association can be interesting, but imagining that it is somehow necessary ignores what is necessary and what is the essential matter of Yoga: your own life pulsing in your system.
The point is: you are existence, you are the truth, you are the Veda (which means “truth”), you are the present life on Earth and you can only realize what they were on about back then in your own life as life. That is all that is required. So you can be a yogi in this time and place as much as someone in a ninth-century Himalayan culture.
Reality IS power, wonder, grace, nurturing, intelligence, intrinsic harmony and unspeakable beauty. The unitary movement of body, breath, and mind is the anciently given practical means to embrace Reality/ Life as it actually is. It is not a pathway toward a future ideal but direct participation in the nurturing force that is Life.
Religious tools and cultural forms may be used as an expression of this priorly given intimacy, with the understanding that there is no necessity for them. Otherwise it is superstition only, trying to get somewhere as if you are not already the wonder of life. Trying to get into someone else’s mandala as if you are not abiding at the center of your own.
Religion Arose from Yogic Experience
Yoga is the primordial religious ‘relinking’ practice that evolved in egalitarian Shamanic societies in ancient India and Tibet prior to the rise of doctrine and the written word. It is the source practice of religious realization from which history’s doctrines and religious culture’s later arose. Religion and sacred text is the abstract, codified expression of real, embodied Yogic experience.
You may find then, as you practice, that you develop a certain affinity or respect or relationship to religious text because you know first hand what it is they are going on about.
For example, the very ancient Hindu mystical creation of Ganesh is of course embodying and expressing the power that is inherent to the cosmos and to Life itself. There is a power in us that removes obstacles. And we can call upon this force whether we are culturally Hindu or personify it as a deity or not.
The ancient world of Veda personified this force as Ganesh a very kind and omnipresent force that will do anything for you. Just ask him!
In the Hindu world Ganesh is the son of Shiva and Shakti, born of their power and perfect union, which is all Life. The exhalation is strength, Shiva ascending and the inhalation is receptivity, Shakti descending. They give birth to you and birth to the perfect power of Ganesh who walks through you with power of an elephant clearing your inner and outer pathways. Nothing can stop him now. You can visualize him as an elephant walking through his jungle pathways.
So we call upon Ganesh the power of the universe that removes obstruction by doing our daily Yoga practice — which is to move and breath, above to below, in the perfect strength of Life that is utterly receptive. This flow of nurturing is moving from your hridaya heart source and is flowing in all directions into all relatedness — the All in All.
A body and mind that is intimately connecting to its own Life and the relationship ecologies of Mother Nature is most likely going to stay well. Your immune function will continue to throw out what is not needed for an optimal Life. Life does that perfectly as a natural function and Yoga is the embrace of Life. The remover of obstacles Ganesh is looking after you.
Yoga is Not Religion
The great Yogi Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) was emphatic that Yoga was not religion, that it evolved as a separate darsana or philosophical system.
The hallmark of his teaching is that Yoga must be adapted to the individual. The teacher must create a practice that is truly personal to the student — according to their body type, age, health, and, especially, their religious / cultural background — whatever that is.
For a Hindu student, it is of course appropriate and important to relate the practice to their religious culture. Indeed, Krishnamacharya would say that Yoga was necessary in the life of any sincere religious person because it was the practical means to actualize the beautiful ideals described in the sacred texts. For a devotee of Ganesh, Yoga is the practical means of letting the life current remove what is does not need from the system. Ganesh becomes real, rather than an abstract symbol or idea.
For a Christian, Yoga is the practical action of participation in the union of giving and receiving that is the heart’s perfect function. In our Yoga, by participating in the union of opposites that constitutes our own embodiment (inhale/exhale, above/below, left/right, strength/receptivity, male/female) the source of all opposites is revealed — the hridaya heart, the place of perfect unobstructed love.
When we abide as the hridaya heart we are able to love ourselves unconditionally and then, as a natural consequence, love our friends, family, colleagues, and others in the community. So when we read in sacred text the beautiful instruction to “Love thy neighbour as thyself” we can hear it as a simple statement of truth, rather than a cultural idea.
As the reality realizer John Lennon beautifully put it, “all those old bits from religion and that about love being all-powerful is true, you know.”
For others however, religious language may completely turn them off. We must give Yoga in the language that is familiar and relevant to our audiences — that takes into consideration the unique background of everybody, without imposing a new language or unnecessary ideas. We don’t need to migrate to another culture or understand ideas that are not our own.
Ultimately, everybody can understand that the body is an extreme intelligence, harmony, and beauty that is built for intimate relatedness to life and life’s ecosystems. Within this intimate connection there is a natural process of receiving what is needed, and releasing what is not needed. Everybody knows what it is to love and embrace one another within the One Reality in which everything is happening.
When you are looking for a Yoga teacher, hold them at arm’s length until you can see that they have no cultural agenda or patterning to put on your beautiful, authentic life. Know that your body, breath, and your body’s relatedness to the cosmos is given. Abide in that, and see where it takes you.
If there is some religious or cultural language that arises, then that is wonderful! But there is no requirement for it at all. If you think that you need language around your Yogic experience, then you will ruin your life. Either way, it’s all good.
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