The Tantra of Descent and Ascent | Mark Whitwell
One of the inherent harmonies of the cosmos is the perfect union of all opposites. Life is a union of invincible strength that is ascending and unspeakable receptivity that is descending: from the vast solar patterns of the sun, moon and stars, to the structures of the plant and animal kingdoms, right down to your own beautiful embodiment, life is at once soft and strong, giving and receiving.
The union of opposites: strength and receptivity, ascent and descent, above to below, masculine and feminine, is a principle of reality that you can depend upon.
So what are the implications of this fact for spiritual life?
Spiritual practice, or the science of human flourishing, is about participation in reality as it actually is; that is, participation in the union of opposites. Hatha Yoga is the anciently given means by which any person can easily do this. We practice to link our mind to life at its most fundamental level.
The special ingredient of hatha yoga is the breath. The strength of exhalation is life eternal and is invincible. It is your own body and it ascends. In turn, receptivity is enacting by the inhalation and is embodied by the face, throat, the front of the body, arms, hands, all the way down to the body-base and genitals.
In yoga we value the union rather than privileging one aspect over the other; the system is understood as a perfect union in which each aspect depends upon the other. The strength of life in the exhale and in the spine allows for utter receptivity in the crown and produces a mind that is a great bowl of receptivity rather than a knot of aggressive thoughts.
In turn, the softness introduced by the inhalation makes strength truly strong, durable, flexible and more discerning. Strength without receptivity destroys itself and eventually collapses in degenerative illness. The natural state is the perfect collaboration between the two.
In an ancient text there is a statement that reads:
“A Yogi or Yogini synchronistically descends and ascends.”
The gift of steady practice is that the qualities associated with each principle quickly permeate our daily lives. We are restored to our nature state of invincible strength (like the trunk of a tree) and unspeakable receptivity (like the softness of a flower in bloom).
In particular, it is likely to be in our relational lives that we find the most dramatic effects. My teacher Desikachar would say, “Yoga is relationship.” By enacting the life-principle of giving and receiving via the breath we find a newfound capacity to give and to receive with actual others.
The urgent need for every person to receive a Yoga education comes from the historic denial of receptivity (descent) which has caused an aberration in culture. For thousands of years, the majority of humanity has been held in the grip of religious orthodoxy in which ascent (strength) is venerated to the ignorance and denial of descent (receptivity).
As a result, the very idea of spiritual practice has become synonymous with ascent and the transcendence of all that is “low”: birth, sex, death, relationship, everyday life, and the challenges of living within a conditional body.
In many spheres of life this lack of receptivity can play out. As I wrote in The Promise,
“When you’ve been brought up from early childhood to be strong and to achieve, but haven’t learned receptivity, then by midlife you may find yourself bound and restricted. The Western cultural model has firmly implanted a need for success in all of us, and our natural response has been to become rigid in the process.
But this attitude, which is stored in every cell of the body, does more harm than good. It can be the direct cause of degenerative illness, anxiety, and depression triggered by stress. A remarkable doctor told me once,
“There is really only one illness, and it’s stress, which manifests as everything from colds to heart disease.”
Stress also causes addictive habits, including drinking, smoking, and unhealthful diets that have a causative link to cancer and degenerative illness. Don’t struggle with your habits.
Just do your practice and see what happens to those imagined needs. The healing power flows inherently in you. We can successfully cope with and even need a certain amount of stress. We thrive on it, in fact. But not too much!”
The message of orthodoxy is the denial of all ordinary conditions and the focusing of attention away from relatedness. We can see this play out in the denial of the natural need for sexual intimacy whether in the form of celibacy as an attempt to ascend or in the form of using sex and another person to attain ‘higher’ states.
We are deeply conditioned in the presumption that the material world is lesser than the spiritual. We have become fixated upon the crown and the subtle blisses that can arise there.
We are turning culture 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The message of the yoga tantras is the embrace of all ordinary conditions. The practice is to be with your body, with your breath, with your lover, with the tree, with the ocean, to be with each other. There is so much to be with!
When we are not busy trying to get out our embodiment the body becomes more organic, less angular and less stressed; the mind becomes less pointed and linear. We acknowledge all arising conditions as the appearance of God.
We love each other horizontally in life by name and form and actuality. We love another so that we cannot tell the difference between that person and God.
The paradox is that it is in the horizontal loving within and without that the pranas then ascend. Genuine ascent occurs as a result of genuine descent. The descent must be there first. This is the Yoga tantra.
If you do fluke an ascent through male yogic denial of descent, you create an ascent that makes you sick. It produces an actual psychological bind where attention is stuck in subtlety and becomes removed from horizontal intimacy with tangible conditions and with real others.
The usual offerings of spiritual systems and religion is the marketing of the glamour of ascent and without descent.
As soon as Krishnamacharya received a yoga education he joined up in collaboration with his wife Namagiriamma, had a beautiful family, and became completely committed to teaching this yoga correctly.
His mission was to spread the yoga tantras of male-female collaboration as equals and opposites, where one empowers the other in an endless exchange, to the entire world.
Hatha Yoga brings a wonderful capability into our relational lives where we can be with somebody else in a way that is equally receptive as it is penetrating. We offer these practices to you and invite you to share them within your communities.
*If you are interested in reading more see my latest book God and Sex: now we get both (2019) which is a full exploration of the historic separation between ascent and descent, God and Sex. The book offers the practical means by which we can heal the imagined split and live our lives in the natural state.
