There is a Cave in your Heart | Mark Whitwell
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
There is a cave at Mount Kailas where the Yogas of participation were given. The Yogas that are now flowing through the whole body of Earth so that all ordinary people everywhere can embrace the union of opposites in their own embodiment and abide in their heart; reality itself arising as the whole body.
Last year we left home, circumambulated Mother Earth, circled Kailas and came home again. We found that the blessing is everywhere…in our own backyard, our own bodies, our own breath, and all our relationships. Everywhere is the unspeakable beauty of reality itself. We are life itself and that is the end of the teaching. The rest is fiction. Sadly, humanity has been living in a fiction. But we can engage the Real of Life even as the fiction continues.
We made a garland of gratitude and placed it around Kailas from everybody from the West to the East. We are all given over to the Himalaya, the place of origin and wisdom evolution. The pinnacle of Mother Earth’s cosmic Mandala where heaven meets earth and where Mother Earth sees herself as She is. “Where the doors of perception are cleansed and everything is known to be infinity” — Blake.
We discovered caves with the remains of extra rooms built from flat orangey-grey rocks in the cliffs overlooking Lake Manasarovar. This could well have been the home of Ramamohan Brahmachari and his wife and children where the young Tirumalai Krishnamacharya studied Yoga with his guru. After seven and a half years at Lake Manasarovar, Krishnamacharya asked how to pay for what he had received. His guru requested that he go back to South India, get married, and give Yoga to the whole world.
When Krishnamacharya’s son T.K.V. Desikachar took this Kailas pilgrimage in his late life he said: “There was only rubble, but there was a feeling.” The Lake has a curious luminosity with turquoise and emerald hues. It is sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus and the ancient Yogas that were practiced here are shared by both. Thanks to Krishnamacharya, Desikachar and their guruparampara, Yoga can spread through the world today in a way that respects the individual and each person’s unique needs and their body type, age, health and cultural background. It is the practical means for each person to actualize the beautiful ideals of their faith including the aspirations of secular modern lifestyles.
You have a cave: the hridaya heart from where the nurturing force of life flows in all directions as the whole body in perfect dependence and harmony with all. It is the place where all opposites arise from and return to. This heart is open and flowing otherwise you would not have a body. It is the place where the inhalation meets the exhalation; the place of perfect giving and receiving of life, which is the natural form, function and state of all life. By participating in the breath as the whole body, as strength that is utterly receptive, the heart is revealed. From the heart the nurturing force of life flows through the whole body as spirals like a flower blooming in all directions. Participation in the heart is the purpose of Yoga asana.
In your Yoga the hands are always returning to the heart. A space or place or even a cave of infinite depth. The cave in the hands is associated with the cave in the heart. In your practice, keep the hands very soft as if you could hold a flower without crushing the petals. The hands return to the heart and the finger tips rest in the very centre of the circle that our arms have been traveling in. We have formed a yantra; a perfect completeness which is how life is functioning. Let the finger tips rest there; let the hands rest there; let the heart rest there; let the whole body rest there; and let the mind rest there in this yantra of wholeness, completion, nurturing, and motherhood enacted with the hands moving as breath.
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