Deconstructing Yoga Hierarchies: What Mark Whitwell Taught Me
I can’t believe I have to write this. I thought the yoga world might be immune from the culture of competition and abuse that defines the mainstream culture. I was wrong. Very wrong.
This article takes a long-view at the hierarchical, mob-mentality culture that we live in and how it plays out in today’s Yoga scene.
The Will to Power
Witness the social norm of people fighting and scrambling and beating and betraying one another in desperate struggle to get to the top of the social hierarchy, to feel a sense of ‘power’ through having ‘power’ over others, to take as much as you can then throw your ‘friends’ under the bus, the appeal to father figures for validation, the plea for someone to tell you what to think, naked financial greed, fabricated victimhood, all of these familiar features of commercial society on full display in the Yoga world, continuing on into the foreseeable future
We learn this behaviour at a young age, don’t we? Competition, struggle, every-man-for-himself, ascent. Convinced by the culture that we are less, we enter the adult world in pursuit of power. Glory on the social stage and success within the hierarchies of business, spirituality, sport, celebrity, art and politics. We think those at the top have something. We think they’ve ‘made it’. Our gaze makes them glow, as we imagine ourselves to be lower and less.
The mind will do anything to resolve this implanted sense of powerlessness. We will manipulate others, control our relationships, we will kick anyone off the ladder if there is just the faintest whiff of power and prestige waiting at the top.
I speak from experience, sure. But who hasn’t played this lurid social game? It is age-old. The social hierarchies of consumer society born from the medieval chain of being, the religious metrics that locate a fulfilled life as a future possibility up an imaginary chain. Born sinners, our ancestors were trained to compete for limited grace, to denigrate their relational lives here on earth, and strive toward heavenly ideals. A living-dead tradition handed down from generation to generation and operating now throughout ‘secular’ society.
Making progress. Jostling for position. Humbly bowing down before the court of public opinion. Knights offering their services to the Cause. The wielding of Virtue in attempts to climb higher and higher.
I used to think that this orthodox virus implanted in our minds had a limited capacity for damage, doing harm mainly to ourselves and intimate partners. Now I see how someone can try and become whole, can try and get a sense of okay-ness, purpose and identity, through attempting to destroy others — in awe of their perceived power and desperate to claim that for themselves.
The Insecure Male
The small little man who reveals his need for external validation every time he opens his mouth. He’s going to continue but the hype will fade down. The mob will dissipate within a week or two. What’s he going to do then? He thinks he’s going to get a sense of confidence, surety, ease, and purpose in his life from this crusade. He thinks that all the people commenting on his posts are the means to that end. He’s sacrificed so much. He’s waiting for the moment when his wholeness will be bestowed upon him by society. The small little man thinks he’s going to get it, that feeling, but he won’t, because he’s going in the opposite direction. Looking for external validation from society taking him further and further away from himself, making him less confident, less sure, seeing less through his own eyes and ears, more afraid, more needy, more dependent on the opinion of others.
He will continue to speak but getting more desperate, and more petty, waiting and waiting. Begging for redemption as he issues condemnations. Waiting for that moment when he will become worthy. When he will become someone as if he is not someone. When the small little man will merge with the shining role that he has selected from the catalogue. This is a suicide mission for the will to power’s little man that he doesn’t realize he’s on. He’s going to go to pieces. The moment will never come. It hasn’t come yet for him. He probably thought it would come straight away. But it didn’t and he’s still the same person. Untransformed. He’s still the same person.
Yoga Brand Wars
There is a real irony watching this logic play out in the yoga world where lifestyle merchants demonstrate their palpable lack of actual yoga by showcasing their commitment to social ascent, in the battle to be seen as an important spiritual personality/ brand. But the tradition of Yoga accurately practiced opens up an entirely different way of being in the world — a way of life in league with Nature, she who knows no hierarchy.
Actual Yoga ends socially contrived identity quests and saturates the mind in the given perfection of the whole body — with its tidal pulls of pleasure, activity and rest. It undoes the metrics of comparison and the relational misery that goes along with them. And allows us to feel the beauty and intelligence of our own lives, in the here-and-now. From here the beauty of others inevitably appears. Unqualified and equal. Freedom from the harsh criteria of the social mind, or at least its volume turned right down. These simple practices are shared between friends. It is not commercial activity. Yoga is relationship. It is the sowing of intimacy through the parched fields of patriarchal society.
For decades Mark Whitwell has mercilessly critiqued the commercialization of Yoga. A circus industry in which unqualified gymnasts and patriarchs sell lifestyle idealisms, physically and sexually abuse students, and exploit people’s sense of needing to become someone as if they are not someone. They have money invested in the commodity of yoga-exercise: in DVD’s, books, teacher training, and one-size-fits-all exercise regimes.
But Yoga is not commercial activity and neither it is a workout of any kind. It is an actual friendship between two people in which ancient spiritual practices of moving and breathing are shared and enjoyed. It requires a genuine relationship of equality between teacher and student so the practice is truly personal. Money might be given in the spirit of gratitude. But those who commodify yoga reverse the teachings. Actual Yoga is the end of consumer psychology and the beginning of self-sufficiency.
The yoga businessmen and businesswomen say that inequality is inherent in the teacher-student relationship because they do not know any other way to behave. They claim knowledge that you need. They claim superior states of enlightenment and awareness. Yet their socially defined sense of superiority and power directly robs the student of their autonomy. The idea that the teacher is superior is the foundation of all forms of abuse. They know this because they can feel the disempowerment they are creating. So, in order to keep students safe, they oh-so-responsibly create rules and regulations to prevent abuse of ‘power.’ But it is too late. The assumption of power is the primary abuse, and allows for all the others.
It is fair enough that we struggle to conceive of any kind of equality in any kind of relationship. Society is a collection of formalized power dynamics: parent/child, teacher/student, boss/worker, men/women, politician/ public, doctor/ patient. Despite all the rules and regulations designed to keep people safe within these dynamics, we see abuse everywhere.
How do we feel about our own relationships? Men compensate for their sense of powerlessness at work by controlling their female partner at home. Women feeling less compete for the attention of ‘powerful’ men. In casual conversation we acknowledge with wry smiles that one half always has more power. That desire in relationship is always uneven and un-mutual. How confessional we are! Because we know ourselves to be complicit in this painful patterning, we project that complicity onto others. As far as we are concerned, innocence does not exist.
The Hoax of Hierarchy
Mark Whitwell’s life has been dedicated to showing up this cultural programming as a total hoax. Mark’s message, spoken and embodied, is that the social hierarchy isn’t real. Indeed, it is the very idea that we are less which creates the struggle within us to ascend these arbitrary chains. In every way, Mark undoes the metrics of comparison and the relational misery that goes along with it.
In teacher trainings and workshops around the world, students hear this message and get it. They understand the implication of Yoga as each person’s direct participation in the intrinsic power and authority of their own embodied life. They stop projecting power onto others. They stop struggling for position within the social hierarchy. They lose all interest in socially contrived identity quests. They start enjoying their short lives. Countless testimonies uphold this truth.
Now, one thousand relaxed practitioners. One thousand confident teachers around the world who know what Yoga is and take it into their personal, private relationships. But a great noise has been carefully created by two or three malicious businessmen provoking the pre-loaded social mind to swarm upon a well-constructed victimhood fiction.
Intimacy is the way forward
Intimacy with life replaces the will-to-power swiftly as the pleasure of receiving our life and one another washes away the patterning of struggle, interpersonal paranoia, and clenched anticipations of future glory. Relaxed now in the honesty of breath and body, the innocence of life filters through. Relaxed, in the sensitive intelligence of the mind.
The unity of life felt: animal, vegetable, mineral, one to another. The breath allowing for a kind of solvent action, the pleasure of feeling combined with Life, of being held completely within a vast process, like when you close your eyes and cannot tell where your body ends and the world begins. Pleasure not paranoia is the compass of this territory, embrace not possession, receiving not dominating. As my favourite writer Raoul Vaneigem observes,
‘If ever you have tasted the unquenchable thirst for intense pleasure, you know that the life-force is a spring which never runs dry. One pleasure calls to another, and though one tires of an isolated amusement, a multitude of desires wakens a host of joyous satisfactions. And this is how one fulfillment undoes ten frustrations, time condenses instead of trickling away, and a moment contains eternity.’
Intimacy and pleasure and sexual embrace replace the psychology of warfare waged on the field of representation and brand. Do you exchange your life for the sake of representation, or just quietly enjoy your local circumstance? It is an easy choice. We can acknowledge the pain and unhappiness that is perpetuated within these relational models. But we must not consider this to be an inevitable state of affairs. Yoga offers a framework and the practical means to actualize total equality and intimacy within our lives.
Unburdened by the presumption of higher and lower, better and worse, powerful and powerless, we can go home and receive our partners as our equal and opposite. We do not need to dominate others in heroic projects of social ascent. Many of us have received this Yoga from Mark Whitwell and take this understanding into our communities and are forever grateful.
