Yoga Is Not Religion, but… | Mark Whitwell on Faith, Practice, and Intimacy
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
There is a lineage within the Vaishna tradition that says,
“Everything is Krishna, therefore love of anything is love of Krishna.”
We might say this is the non-dual tantra within Vaishnavism. I like this the best because it erases the artificial distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ and puts the focus on the quality of our relatedness with everything, within and without.
Krishnamacharya was a scholar and acharya within the Vaishnava tradition, and Yoga asana and pranayama practice was taught as the most vital devotional practice of this Bhakti system. This intimate connection with body and breath was the practical means for everyone to be intimate with all experience, within and without, and therefore intimate with Krishna, the Absolute all-pervading condition of reality.
In his religious scholarship, Krishnamacharya made it clear that Yoga was NOT religion, but was used by many religions as the practical way to actualize their beautiful ideals and the expressions of their chosen deities. He also taught that it was the practical tool for anybody without a religious context to also enjoy their Life.
So we can take language such as ‘love of Krishna’ as one particular cultural expression of the universal principle of Yoga, which is participation in the power of the cosmos that you are. Krishnamacharya insisted on teaching Yoga in a way that was relevant to each person’s culture and not imposing his own cultural framework on another.
You Are Here to Enjoy Your Life
Ultimately, temple religion becomes true and useful when the Yogas of participation are introduced. The superstitious appeal to a “higher” power is transformed into participation in the godliness of all ordinary conditions. God, deity, guru, spouse, the body in its intrinsic union and perfect harmony with the entire known and yet unknown cosmos are clearly felt to be arising in the One Given power of this cosmos in which Everything is Happening.
Whether it is the temple faithful of Hinduism and Buddhism or the world faiths of Islam or Christian or Jewish and all their derivatives the Yogas of participation are required. As well as for all those who have rejected these systems for the blandness of secular life.
The sensitivity to life that you develop in your Yoga practice may change your relationship to religious culture. It gives you a way to experience first hand what the reality realizers like Christ and Mohammed were going on about. This first-hand tacit understanding frees you from dependence on the institutions that previously seemed to hold exclusive access to religious inspiration. You can engage with religious culture because you know what it is to be devoted to life, not just as a nice idea, but as a whole-body love-relationship.
My teacher TKV Desikachar was always interested and very pleased when one of his students reported that from Yoga they had become receptive to their family’s culture, previously rejected for its negative limits on their life. Friends tell similar stories how Yoga enabled them to receive the blessing power of their religious background that was otherwise shrouded from them by social aberrations and superstitious systems of mere belief.
- My latest book God and Sex: Now We Get Both (2019) explores how to move from a superstitious faith where God is only an idea inside your head to a whole-body participation in God, a whole-body embrace of Life.
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