Is Yoga Self-Improvement? | Mark Whitwell on the Purpose of Practice

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Above the sacred waters of Lake Manasarovar, Tibet | Mark Whitwell | Photograph by Audrey Billups

In 2019, sales of self-help books reached 18.9 million copies, an increase of 11 percent since 2013. In the same period, the number of books published in the genre has more than doubled from 30,987 to 85,253. By 2022, it is predicted that the self-improvement market in the U.S. will be worth 13.2 billion dollars: including infomercials, motivational speakers, personal coaches, holistic institutes, yoga, meditation, books, audio and weight loss programs.

The tradition of yoga has long been funneled into this lucrative industry. Through diligent effort in yoga we are promised transformation. We can become “the best version of ourselves” and “self-optimize” our way towards physical, spiritual, financial and relational perfection.

Yet, does Yoga really belong within the psychology of personal attainment and progress that characterizes self-improvement? Or, is it an altogether different practice with a different purpose? 

What is Yoga? 

In order to clarify Yoga’s relationship to self-improvement we need to take a brief trip back through the 20th century to clarify what the practice is. 

The roots of modern Yoga can be traced back to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989): a man known as the ‘teacher of the teachers’ and the ‘father of modern Yoga.’ Krishnamacharya was the guru to those who became responsible for defining what Yoga is in the 20th century: BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi and his own son TKV Desikachar. 

For seven years, Krishnamacharya studied with his Himalayan teacher Rama Mohan Brahmachari. The Hatha Yoga that Brahmachari passed on came out of the vast ancient tradition of Tantra. This tradition is non-dual in philosophy and based upon the understanding that the Source of life cannot be separate from the ordinary Seen conditions of life. Therefore, intimacy with all ordinary conditions is intimacy with God or Source Reality, starting with your body and breath. 

In my time studying with Krishnamacharya and his son, I received five key principles that ensure the Yoga you are doing truly is your intimate connection to Life itself. These are: 

1. The body movement is the breath movement.

2. The inhale is from above as receptivity, the exhale is from below as strength. 

3. The breath envelops the movement.

4. Asana creates bandha, and bandha cannot be practiced outside of the context of asana. 

5. Asana, pranayama, meditation and life are a seamless process. 

About the Author:-

Yoga is your embrace of body, breath and relationship, in that order | Mark Whitwell | Photograph by Audrey Billups

Studio Yoga Today

For those of us familiar with the studio traditions of yoga, Krishnamacharya’s influence may be difficult to detect. In the translation of Yoga into the west the crucial principles of practice were curiously ignored. In many Yoga classes and teacher trainings today, the technical precision of how to breathe during asana is often not there. 

Alongside the erasure of the breath principles, the feeling conception of Yoga was also transformed. Hatha Yoga as whole-body prayer to Life (or God if that is your culture) was reinvented as a muscular struggle, as an alternative workout program that had an appealing spiritual gloss. 

When Desikachar travelled to the U.S. in the 1990s he described what he saw in the studios as “mediocre gymnastics.”

T. Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar at home in Chennai | Mark Whitwell 

Why the Breath? 

Desikachar was emphatic that Yoga practiced without the breath is not really Yoga at all. For the principle means to experience the union of opposites in our own system (and therefore the source of opposites) is to merge the inhale with the exhale. 

The inhale is linked to the descending feminine current of Life and the exhale is associated with the ascending male current. There is a saying in the traditions that a Yogi is simultaneously ascending and descending. When we organize all our body movements around the breath our mind becomes linked to this intelligence of life.  

The social mind has been programmed over millennia to search for future possibilities: an improved self, a perfect state, spiritual bliss, happiness, a better body, the list goes on. It is this mind that fuels our endless consumption of self-improvement literature in the hope that one day we can become someone amazing, whole, beautiful, intelligent and worthwhile. 

The circular trap of self-improvement is that the constant drive to improve and better ourselves is usually predicated on a denial of who and what we already are: the gifts we already possess, the creativity we already put into action, the relationships we already nurture, and the most fundamental fact that we are a blooming mystery swirl of Mother Nature who belongs here on this planet and is held in nature’s nurturing arms. 

The proposition of an ideal to be attained is the active denial of the wonder and beauty that is already present, within and without. We get stuck in a cycle of excitement as the prospect of who we could become and despairing at the mind’s conception of who we seem to be. 

Do Your Yoga! | Mark Whitwell | Photography by Audrey Billups

The breath is the vital force that breaks this cycle. The breath is the current that takes the mind into the whole body. When we link the body movement with the breath movement, the mind automatically follows the breath. The mind gets linked to the whole body and the whole body is the intelligence, beauty, harmony of Life itself. Therefore, via the unitary movement of body, breath and mind, the mind gets linked to the perfection of life that is already the case. The secrets of the universe are in you, as you. 

Consider how Life is continually pulsing through your body, composing a magnificent symphony of cells and processes that know, without the requirement of conscious intervention, how to balance itself, to receive what is needed, to release what is old, to heal the body and to produce energy and drive, to breath, rest and Sex. 

We start from the recognition that our body is an extreme and intuitive intelligence that we can completely depend upon. Just as we trust that the sun will rise every day, we trust that our body knows best. My teacher U.G. Krishnamurti would say, “Leave the body alone. Give it a chance for its intrinsic intelligence to function.” 

Think of your daily Yoga practice as your embrace of what you are: the Power of the Cosmos, the beauty of Life, the Nurturing of Mother Nature. It is a call to recognize and participate in the fact that you are Life itself and Life stands alone, independent of culture’s obsession with transformation, improvement and change. 

The beautiful paradox of Yoga is that once we stop bullying the body and mind into culturally defined molds; when we completely give up the desire to become anything other than what we already are, we may find that the intelligence and power of Life itself is then is free to enter the mind. 

We find that the ability to love oneself and others is an in-built capacity of the whole-body; we find that the ability to listen is already there; that the beautiful faculty of concentration and one-pointedness is innate; we find that developing trust in the body and the breath allows us to trust in Life as whole; intimacy with our inhale (the receptive quality of life) is the literal enactment of the action of receiving others; intimacy with the exhale (the male quality of life) allows the active, penetrating force of life to flourish. 

We find that we have everything we need. The whole body is the cosmos. We need only participate in this that we are in order to enjoy and feel into the wonder of our lives. 

*Continue the conversation in live classes with Mark and friends in the heart of Yoga online studio. 

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.