Healing Lifestyles & Spas

Finding Your Own Yoga

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By on Healing Blog

By Kyle Roderick

Perched high above the roaring Pacific on California’s Big Sur coast, the Esalen Institute and its natural oceanfront sulfur hot springs are ideal for a yoga retreat. At Mark Whitwell’s five-day Esalen program, “Your Own Yoga from the Source,” participants practice yoga for two hours, three times a day in a white, yurt-like Dance Dome overlooking the ocean.

Unlike other celebrity yoga teachers, Whitwell stresses that yoga is not about attaining certain physical postures. Rather, yoga serves as a vitally nurturing technology for realizing intimacy with one’s body, breath, and relationship with all things in nature.

Whitwell has a solid background in classical yoga, having studied in India for decades with such masters as T.K. Desikachar and Desikachar’s father, Krishnamacharya, the master who taught Pattabhi Jois, creator of Ashtanga, and B.K.S. Iyengar of the eponymous yoga style. “Yoga must be fitted to the individual rather than the other way around,” Whitwell said, quoting Krishnamacharya.

Toward that end, Whitwell gives beginning students and those with injuries or other physical limitations a tailored practice on the spot so that the whole class can see how everyone can practice yoga with perfect skill. A major and empowering tenet of Whitwell’s teaching is that yoga, rather than being an activity that one practices only in a yoga studio, should be enjoyed in our own time at home or anywhere else. In Whitwell’s workshops, everyone goes home a yogi and capable of continuing to practice in easy and direct ways. “My goal is to have all participants merely and sheerly participating in the natural wonder of our source; of our mother, and everything else in nature,” Whitwell explains.

According to Whitwell, there is no such thing as perfect alignment or a perfect yoga pose, so stop worrying and start breathing and moving. “What is perfect is every person’s breathing, living body and mind [which are]experiencing direct absorption in spirit,” he said. This spirit is freely available as “The extreme intelligence and wonder of life already given.”

In ancient yogic understanding, the life force was considered feminine, as in Mother Earth, Shakti, or Cosmos. Yoga practice was not a linear process toward a future goal or state but a direct, non-obsessive, non-competitive participation in this life force. In Whitwell’s world, yoga is the experience of Now as wow. Now that’s a breath of fresh air.

For more information call (831) 667-3005 or visit www.esalen.org.

July/August 2006

Healing Lifestyles & Spas Team
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