Why Do I Go Crazy When I Fall in Love? | Mark Whitwell on Yogic Intimacy
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
The classic definition of Yoga from Patanjali, outlined in the first four verses of the Yoga Sutra, is that Yoga is to go in a direction of choice with continuity. By merging with your object of choice, you know the object deeply. In so doing, you experience the same depth of knowing at the level of the perceiver. In other words, Yoga is relationship. When you are intimate with your experience, including others, you then know yourself to be what you actually are: Consciousness itself, Reality itself, or God, if that is your cultural framework.
Yet, our schools, our teachers, our families, our political institutions, and our religious traditions do not acknowledge this most essential need for intimate connection to our reality. Instead, we have been given all kinds of spiritual and psychological methods and goals that take us in the opposite direction, away from intimate connection and towards ‘higher’ more so-called ‘spiritual’ ideals. Whether it is old world or new world religion, mindfulness apps, all the glossy offerings of the commercial world there is scarce help in how to be successful in intimacy and sexuality.
The world’s great spiritual leaders such as the Pope and the Dalai Lama actively deny the value of relationship as the most fundamental context in which positive transformation and healing takes place. The pantheon of eastern saints and sages, many of whom we adore and love, do not even mention Sex and relationship; or they promote the idea that Sex is an obstruction; a mere egoic attachment. It is Rama Krishna saying that “women and gold” are obstacles to enlightenment.
Intimacy, Not Enlightenment
If we come into intimate sexual union then all of society’s loveless patterns, including all of the pain and trauma of past failures and our parents’ failures will come up. We appear crazy: the fear of abandonment, the fear of not being loved, the fear of not loving, and so on. Love brings up everything that is unlove to be seen, understood and released. So there is nothing to worry about here.
Yet it can be an incredibly disturbing and challenging process as pain that we did not even know was there is exposed and released. We move, in our own unpredictable time frame, through the sequence of emotions: from numbness, fear, anger, pain, to grief. We feel grief for the whole shoddy deal that humanity has been dished up when it comes to intimacy.
We want to assure all sincere people out there that the emotional turmoil that relationship brings up is completely natural. Do not think there is anything wrong with you personally if your love relationships raise uncomfortable emotions. And do not run away at the first signs of disturbance.
It is at this point that the value of our daily Yoga practice bears its fruit. Having your own practice of intimacy with your body and breath will give you the necessary strength (the quality of life linked to the exhale) and, most of all, the necessary receptivity (the quality linked to the inhale) to maintain your relatedness to another in the midst of society’s pain and patterning leaving our bodies.
The Practical Response
“On a daily basis,” we recently wrote, “we participate in the relatedness of the whole body with everything in existence. The mind is felt to be connected to the trunk; no aspect of our body/mind has any existence independent of the whole. The body is strong and yet soft and responsive. The inhale is linked to the quality of receptivity: the breath sensitizes the feeling front of the body so that it has the capacity to receive our experience, our life, and ultimately another person in sexual union. The exhale is linked to the quality of strength: we feel the support of the legs, base, and spine as the breath moves from the base of the body.
“We just naturally, non-obsessively participate in the essential mutuality of life — strength and receptivity, stability and sweetness. Then we can simultaneously receive and give to our partner in the intensity of relationship and sexual embrace. We bring our loving to our partner. They receive it and surround us with love. We then have more love to give. This is the empowering process and it is endless. It is why it is said in the traditions that two people can bring each other to God. A literal flow of feeling through the whole body like a great river, nurturing and cleansing, broad and dependable, a vehicle for all of life’s activities around it.”
— God and Sex: Now We Get Both
As you practice your Yoga, you become a beacon of hope in your community. It is a big deal to release the patterning of society and to uncompromisingly make a stand in life for intimate connection. There is no other way through the mess that we have been handed but to be intimate with our body, our breath, and our relatedness to others.
Many friends around the world can affirm that these tools from the ancient traditions of Yoga really do work. They are not some fancy brand made up by a Yoga businessman named Mark Whitwell in Los Angeles and then sold as a commodity on the spiritual marketplace. They are the tools of actual Yoga as it came through Tirumalai Krishnamacharya from ancient times into the modern world, for all people, of all religious backgrounds or not, for all time. Thank you for passing these treasures on.
*Find your Yoga in our eight-week by-donation online immersion course and make love to life every day.
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