The Heart of the Matter | Mark Whitwell
For millennia, human cultures have known that intimate connection to one’s breath is the very means of being intimate with Life at its most fundamental level. Across world languages, we find that the words for breath and spirit are often the same, illustrating its sacred power. In Hebrew and Arabic, the word for both is Ruh. In Latin, Spiritus. In ancient Greek, pneuma. The Aztecs called it ehecatl. And the Native American Sioux and Dakota tribes called it niya.
In the language of Sanskrit, the mother-tongue of the Vedas, breath is synonymous with life, vitality, animation, and spirit. More, the so-called atman, that which our ancestors understood as our deepest essence, the Self, our soul, also refers to the breath.
Feeling-participation in breath is how we participate in the very core of life. This realisation lies at the heart of the Yoga tradition. It is why the breath is always the central feature and purpose of asana — and has always been so.
The downward flow of Life is the receptive inhalation. The upward flow of Life is the strong exhalation. Where the inhale and the exhale converge is the Source Heart or hridaya — the place, felt in the physical body, from where the nurturing force of life began to flow through you at conception, and still does.
The very core of Life is the wonder of Nurturing Source Reality — the power, beauty, harmony and intelligence that is the origin and present-moment substance of All: plants and animals, earth, water, fire, air, and every human being (including you and me).
Our birthright is to feel this sacred connection within every cell of our body, within every movement of our breath. Your personal Yoga practice is the simple means by which you can embrace this most fundamental and already-given intimacy.
There is a great urgency in communicating real Yoga to the world. Across all geographies of Mother Earth, people are not enjoying their intrinsic connection to Nurturing Source.
Instead, with their roots in religious hierarchy, patriarchal cultures of womanless men have lain heavy on the public their bleak mythologies of separation. Whether by religious sin or a quirk of genetics, humanity is painted as one-step removed from the natural world; as a spectator-species to the cosmos, rather than the cosmos itself; as lonely bodies wandering, bodies that are vaguely disconnected from the powerful forces that sustain and regenerate all life.
We know that when human beings feel separate from Life, we lose our mental and physical health. Everyday in the news we see the epidemics of addiction, suicide, apathy, and despair running rife through the adult population. And increasingly, children and young people are becoming unwell, as two reports from the U.K. and the U.S. recently revealed.
Prior to the stress of the world’s dreadful social conditions, is the stress of feeling separate; the pain of feeling divorced from Nurturing Source; the loneliness of feeling isolated from our context and from one another. The myth of existential separation is the first and deepest hurt that is put on the human body, and is the root cause of dis-ease and anxiety.
There has been wonderful research done by luminaries such as Gabor Mate on the role of interpersonal connection in the treatment of addiction. Relationship is a healing force. It is deeply in the Yoga tradition that relationship is the primary spiritual practice.
Yoga is relationship. And Intimate and visceral connection to body, breath, and relationship in that order draws the mind into what is Real. Intimacy cuts through our troubles like a hot knife through butter.
We can go one step further beyond this initial insight and acknowledge that connection and relationship is already given. Yoga begins with the simple acknowledgement that the body-mind is currently functioning within and as one, vast, indivisible, field of Light.
From the starting point of this prior unity, we can then move to embrace every thing and every body. Yoga is participation in the connection that already is, not an attempt to get connected as if we are separate. It is easy to align the mind to this truth, but there must be a practical means given, which is our breath.
Every person must be given Yoga soon, their direct participation in Nurturing Source Reality. Every person must be told that they are the power of the cosmos arising now as pure intelligence, harmony and beauty — your ordinary body. The one thing you can depend upon in this universe is the beauty of the natural world, and you are that.
The idea of separation is just that, an intellectual error that has gained a terrible momentum. Despite the turbulence of the human mind the fundamental condition of reality is utter peace and power.
*Come spend time in good company at the heart of yoga online studio and learn the Yoga is your direct participation in Reality Itself.
