Yoga is not a struggle toward a future Ideal.
Mark Whitwell
Heart of Yoga
Yoga is participation only in the Given reality.
Adapt Yoga to the individual not the individual to Yoga.
There is a right yoga for every person according to individual needs, body type, age, health and culture.
Yoga is heals. Yoga gives you your life back.
From a student who discovered Yoga…
“Mark, thank you for all that you are, and all that you do. I wanted to let you know something. As you know I had major surgery about one month ago, which has meant that my physical activity has been very restricted. As a committed yogini, it has challenged me in many ways to be limited physically. I have relied on my meditation practice to allow me to move through the various psychological, emotional and spiritual dimensions that accompany the physical trauma of surgery. On the advice of highly qualified surgeons I waited until yesterday to resume my Seven Minute Wonder ( Mark Whitwell: The Promise). It was such a great relief to have this simple and gentle practice to return to as my body heals and repairs itself. I felt no stress or concern that I would not be “good enough” to return to yoga. It was completely natural, uninhibited and filled with self-love and nuturing. Today I have awoken with new clarity, light and energy that has made the last month of medical ‘fog’ seem like a dream. I cannot thank you enough for making this available to us all. Yoga is not acrobatics, or competition, or some kind of ‘performance’. It is the natural act of breath and body — my own practice taking place in pyjamas on a grass mat in a rustic Chiang Mai bungalow. The innate ATTITUDE of LOVE within The Promise practice is what made the difference to me in a vulnerable time. From my heart to yours, thank you so much. Love to all. Shelle Belle xx”
In our life as Yoga, we let the wonder and utter connection to life be sufficient. We let breath be sufficient. We let this sitting here be sufficient. We let the Reality be sufficient. We enjoy the intrinsic, inborn powers of life moving in us. Life itself moves us into every kind of wonderful relatedness, including deep, abiding sexual intimacy freely chosen in the way that is right for us as individuals.
Once again… we are okay as is! In fact, we are more than okay. The life current is in the skin, it is in the spine, it is in every cell of the body.
You don’t have to do anything about that. It is made abundantly available all the time. I am not separate from Nature. I am that. And nothing is required — no meditating, no yoga, no stillness of mind, no philosophy, no places to get to, not beyond, not higher, not deeper. That is all distracting us from the fact that life is utterly given and comes perfectly delivered. This living organism has its own perfection along with everything else in Nature.
If there is any yoga, any moving and breathing, it is only participation in the given reality.
The notion of having to do anything to improve ourselves, to get to some better state, is itself the problem that prevents us from enjoying the profundity of the flesh, the livingness of life current, that is our very condition and birthright. We suffer because we try to be something we are not. However, the fact is that we have been conditioned by the social mind, which is telling us that we are separate from Nature. So there is this feeling of separation; it is painful. And it is abusive to the living organism.
Understand what has happened to humanity. Relax, move and breath in life as it actually is. In reality as it actually is. The body appears in and as the vast grand. cosmic domain. The body duplicates the intelligence, beauty, and harmonies infinity.
Mark Whitwell
Heart of Yoga
