Mark Whitwell was born in 1949 in Auckland, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. In 1973, he traveled to India and began a life-long study of yoga with Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his son, T.K.V. Desikachar (1938–2016). Mark Whitwell’s simple mission is to give people the principles of practice that came through Tirumalai Krishnamacharya to make their Yoga authentic, powerful, and effective. Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga foundation and the Heart of Yoga Peace Project, an organization dedicated to developing yoga communities in conflict zones around the world. Mark Whitwell lives between New Zealand and Fiji.

The love of the Heavenly Father God and the ‘Holy Father’ or priest, his agency on Earth, inherently suggest that the love of your actual biological father is lesser. There’s an English nursery rhyme that says it all: ‘I love you, but Jesus loves you the best.’ Mother or father’s love is believed to be not as great as ‘God’s love’ and its special human agents (i.e., priests, popes, gurus, swamis, etc.). These systems deny tangible reality for an abstract ideal and in so doing dissociate us from our actual lives.

However, there are some hopeful signs that patriarchal systems are gradually dissolving themselves: in terms of the behaviors of their leaders at least, if not in their social structures. For example, the present Pope insists on behaving as an ordinary person; the Dalai Lama insists he is an ordinary monk. Also in modern times, it is significant that the Beatles and other cultural icons claimed their ordinary lives in the midst of super fame, which did much to disintegrate hierarchies in secular and spiritual life. These figures made a working-class hero something to be.

The great English visionary, William Blake, wrote that God only exists in actual beings (by which he meant ‘all things’). Is it possible that mother’s love is God’s love? In original Vedic culture, it was understood that god, guru, mother, father, your spouse, your body, and your child are One, arising in the one Reality in a vast elemental interdependence and harmony. Besotted love-devotion to all in all was the sublime culture of this ancient world. It was a folk or people’s culture and practice, a way for ordinary, mainly agricultural people to embrace their own power and beauty. 

The unique union with Guru was like the relationship between the wave and ocean. It was an equal, yet profound relationship. Without this egalitarian form, so-called ‘gurus’ replicate this model of the ‘special agent’ or ‘special person.’ Within this model they can only have followers: no transformation, and no actual Guru-Shirshya (student) function or transmission can occur. In the ancient world of Veda there were never temples to the Guru and the Guru was never worshipped. The Guru had no special social or personal identity, authority or status. For there to be a Guru there must be a Shisha. When the student became free (moksha) the relationship dissolved for its purpose was over. Of course, life-long gratitude remained. The emphasis in this culture was on the liberation of the student, not the status and continuity of the Guru. This is so important. Liberation was considered the domain and possibility of all ordinary people, not the rarity of exclusive so called enlightened rarified or perfected people, implying that all other people are not perfect. 

These systems were only interested in gathering followers, continuity and power. They merged forces with political structures. The big examples of course are Rome with Christ and King Ashoka with Buddha. Wealthy people stole partialities, sublime or powerful ideas from the otherwise egalitarian culture of humble shamanic people. Arising elite built temples to create more wealth. They created social idealism without the Yogas of participation in life that are required to actualize them. These patriarchal systems used the poetry of spiritual wisdom (even of the Veda) as mechanisms of power, selling the idea of Guru as special access to God, and thereby making the human life and human love seem less than God. Our actual father’s actual love has been imagined to be less—and unfortunately, our mother or fathers’ behaviors, inherited from the patriarchy, they too deprived of love, are often less than love and affirm that assumption in this sad imposition on humanity. We must emphasis and return now to the original and actual purpose of Yoga, the liberation of all ordinary people in real life. Real Yoga for real people.

Power structures co-opted the teachings, the beautiful utterance of Vedic realizers as their own. Fearful people with the pathology to be teachers claim authority to control and feel secure in their social circumstance. They literally rob individuals of their lives and intrinsic pleasures. The Yogas of participation in life were not understood or given in the arbitrary methods of allegiance to the imagined Guru and institution. We live in a time where secular and religious exaggeration and mass stimulation consumption is ever increasing. Many legitimately reject the sham of patriarchy only to replace it only with the shallow stimulation of the middleclass massage and feeding frenzy, another form of patriarchy. Our lives and eco systems are at risk, yet in this time like no other each individual can take responsibility for their own life amidst the chaos. Each person can be who they are and claim their God given skills and intimacy with life in every way, including sexual intimacy. Each can respond to the certain fact that they are arising in and as radiance unfolding as this cosmos. The Yogas of participation that evolved from ancient times can now easily be practiced in sincere and equal relationship with others.

In the pain of the parent-child dysfunction, we transfer the attempt to feel love from parents to the hoax of illusory authorities (most of whom support the illusion) rather than to our actual parents where real love is, despite it having been obstructed. The teacher is not a substitute for the love of spouse and parents. This is where the healing must occur: in actual human relationship. To do so, all power structures must be thrown out of your system. In Reality, there is no such thing as social power or unequal relationships. They are a socially contrived swindle and do not truly exist. Yet regretfully, there are many individuals from all walks of life who exploit the social dynamic of disempowerment that civilization (and therefore our thought structures) are built on. The world is still rife with people looking for love from apparently powerful men or women who are imagined to have special access to an ideal—whether this is phrased in spiritual terms or seen in secular terms of success, wealth, or fame. True Yoga does not occur in this arrangement, yet ‘yoga’ in its popular forms is unfortunately duplicating this social dynamic of disempowerment. People who are imagined to be superior are followed and emulated… until we realize that no such person exists. This dynamic of seeking is engrained in our thought structures, and people yoga don’t realize that they are exploiting others or being exploited with arbitrary practices by which a person tries to reach a future idealized state…  rather than the anciently given Yogas of participation in the perfection of reality, which is always already each person’s natural state and beauty.

In recognizing this, we can now pass through all the necessary stages of emotional reaction, in this order: fear, anger, pain, and grief, until finally the siddhis of compassion and forgiveness naturally arise for ourselves, our parents, and all relationships. By seeing and understanding the shoddy deal that has been dished up to all of us, compassion comes for all and to all. The patriarchal structure of society must end, as we return to authentic, (honest and real) spiritual life—direct embrace of our own reality, which is arising as power, pure intelligence, and the utter beauty of all natural things in their vast intrinsic harmony with the cosmos. This is simply how it is and Yoga is merely participation in what we are. It is intimacy with all ordinary conditions. The source and seen are one, therefore “the seen” is full and sufficient The absolute condition of all conditions, that which is great is simply spontaneously apparent.

I urge those of us who are involved in Yoga, either as students or teachers, to understand that we are not involved in the patriarchy. We are not “knowers” or trying to know. We are not authorities, or subservient to authorities. To be a Yogi is to be exactly what we are, utterly unique manifestations of life participating in life and teaching exactly as we are. Otherwise, teaching is merely a gross duplication of obstructive social patterning. Patriarchal systems may attempt to use Yoga to actualize its beautiful ideals, but then its power structures will dissolve as individuals become self-empowered. The Yogas of participation must be given or the usual guru cultures, from Christ and Buddha, to modern day guru-ism that proliferates are disempowering. These are insidious system that robs people of their own reality, sex and incarnation of individuality.

Human suffering is trying to be something that you are not. We are all the power of this cosmos arising as pure intelligence and utter beauty in perfect intrinsic harmony. That is simple a fact and must be taken seriously so that the Yogas of participation may begin. We embrace the fact. We don’t “teach” yoga: we share Yoga as we have experienced it ourselves. That is all. There is no social or personal identity in being a teacher or student. We are no more than friends and no less than friends, and Yoga teaching is no more than the flow of nurturing in the local community, a natural phenomenon of Mother Nature. We teach the skills of intimate connection with all tangible conditions, which makes possible real relationships with real people, including the healing of the parent-child / adolescent relationship and the male-female intrinsic harmony, the nurturing power of life. We stop looking for love in all the wrong places.

Regretfully, much Yoga has been, and still is, taught by people imaging themselves to be authorities, but I encourage all to throw off this legacy. Stand in your own ground and relate to everyOne in and as reality itself in the one unitary movement of life, one to another. No power structures. As Jiddu Krishnamurti said to his friend and teacher T.K.V. Desikachar, ‘Don’t become one more monkey.’ He never did.