You are not Separate – so why do I feel so sad? || Mark Whitwell

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Let’s face the facts. Sitting there, you, reading this, are part of the natural world. The power, beauty, intelligence and harmony of nature is sitting there as your body.

You are not separate from life.

It’s a primitive fiction, like “the world is flat.”

After Copernicus proposed that the earth was not the center of the solar system, and rather that we revolved around the sun, it still took hundreds of years until this became accepted. Galileo waited until the end of his life to publish his observations confirming the thesis, because he knew he would be risking his life to contradict the church position. We are fortunate if we live in a time and place where contradicting such orthodoxy does not get us imprisoned or killed. Many people around the world still do live in such situations. 

But it must be said: the belief that we are separate beings in a separate universe is no different from the religious presumption that we are the center of the universe. It is provably untrue, but it is taking a while to sink in, and we have this religious hangover that proposes that this material ordinary life is less than special, less than sacred. 

It is a misunderstanding of the world that we are in. 

This is an ordinary consideration, not an effort to work on yourself.

Yoga is relationship only, connectedness to what is the case. And that is what you are doing when you do your yoga, practicing intimacy with reality. That is the starting point, not the outcome of Yoga. You realise what you practice. The practice is not for a different result. Whatever you practice is the result. 

We can participate in this beauty of life no matter what is going on. In spite of the social presumption of separate bodies in a separate world. 

This presumption is causing pain and anguish and fear, and I acknowledge that. Great compassion for everybody who is in that, who is feeling that. But your realization of the facts of your existence, that life is a perfect wonder and it is already the case. And your yoga of participation in that allows you to relax and feel who and what you are. 

You do not need to ‘get connected.’ This just reinforces the assumption that you are not connected. A new study just came out that shows that human sleep patterns are completely affected by the phases of the moon — even when we don’t see the moon and have no idea what phase it is in. You see, you are a part of this world, embedded in relationships with air, water, light, green, sun and moon — whether the mind is obstructing and concealing this fact or not.

This is not a spiritual statement. It is not wishful thinking or a poem. It is a simple fact of our situation. You don’t need to realise it in a blast of permanent bliss. You don’t need to seek any experience or change of state. Seeking a change of state is a denial of the present, a very stressful activity. Just surrender into what is. You are already the power of life. Whatever you are feeling. The search to realise something extraordinary is founded on incorrect information. It is like looking for the edge of the flat world, you will never find it because the search is based on a false premise.

You just acknowledge that it is an obvious fact — I am part of an interconnected natural world. I am part of the natural world. My body is of the natural world. The intelligence of nature is in me. I am interconnected with water and air, light and food and sound. I am part of things. No matter what my mind is up to, I am still part of things. Reality is reality no matter what the mind is up to. We can stop taking its silent belief of “I AM SEPARATE” so seriously. 

You may not consciously believe you are separate. The belief is so deep, taken so much for granted, that it might just be felt in its symptoms — feeling afraid of other people, feeling knotted and painful, stressed and tense, anxious and depressed, lonely and left out. It is like a fish wondering what water is — we are so used to being marinated in this feeling, that we have forgotten the effect it is having on our body and mind. We don’t even know we believe it. 

If you feel the pain, the anguish, the fear and the loneliness, you are normal. Everyone alive today barring a very few indigenous peoples are victims of the legacy of religious beliefs that have not recognized or honoured the interconnected unity of life on earth. Instead, an invisible and separate essence has been proposed – Spirit, God, essence, mind, reason – some kind of disconnected driver that is assumed to be our real self, controlling an inert and annoying body. 

But modern science has shown us what the Tantriks already realized — that the body itself and all of the material world is a realm of light. Matter is just denser energy. There is no dualistic division to be made, just a continuous spectrum of light. No mind-body duality. No heaven-earth duality. You are not a separate personality inside a body vehicle. You are part of a continuous whole, a fabric, a unity, a woven continuous Reality. Some may be understood and some may be a mystery, but there is no denying that whoever you are, you are part of that. 

The belief that we must reconnect is a symptom of the illusion of separation. Pursuing a mission of trying to connect — with anything — will reinforce the belief that it was separate to start with. Just as the way to be happy is to stop trying to get happy. The effort to connect is a denial of connection. 

Knowing that connection is already the case, that you are always already a part of life makes you an effective teacher. You can see that each student is also the power of the cosmos, the manifestation of life in front of you. Not a separate person, not an empty vessel, not a work in progress. Not someone you need to be a follower or admirer.

Your embodiment is reality itself! Life as it actually is. The yogas of participation serve that embodiment and throw out any presumptions of separation, that wreak such chaos. 

You don’t have to ”become a yoga teacher” — just share this understanding in your existing networks.

For example, my friend Stefan, who teaches boxing and MMA in West Sydney, and now shares some yoga with these same people. There is no need to morph or migrate into some kind of Yoga teacher identity or image. Or my friend Sarah, who works in the Australian outback with geologists, and teaches Yoga to these men way out in the desert. You can just stay you, and share yoga within that. In fact, please don’t try to become a Yoga teacher! Don’t try to duplicate me or any ideal, please don’t try to teach “Mark Whitwell” style or anything like that. You just share as yourself. 

To try to ‘become’ a yoga teacher is a hideous trap, and deeply contradictory, as a genuine yoga practice will undermine this kind of identity-based personality establishment. You notice that you are just the power of life happening, you don’t need to fit into any box or conform to any preplanned standard. 

In Yoga the closest word we might have for this is avidya, or ignorance. It is seen as a global issue associated with being human, not a personal failure.

You can choose to take up a simple daily practice and practice your participation in what is always already the case. The truth of the situation… the reality that you are nature, you are the beauty and power of the cosmos, already. No matter what is going on, you are that. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.