The Heart of Yoga

In this week's episode, Mark and Rosalind talk about the expansion of consciousness that happened in the 60s and beyond, "on wings of song." It was the Beatles going to Rishikesh that first took Mark to India, and we tease out these connections between the two "freedom systems" of Yoga and rock and roll. We listen to the Kinks with the first use of sitar-like drone on a western pop song (" See My...

As yoga studios shut down across the world, yoga teacher Joseph Lauricella came untethered from his Chicago teaching space, yet he wanted to find a safe way to be in Nature and continue to share practices of breath and intimacy with yourself with people. The 'The Yoga Bus' project was born. Continuing public education into Yoga as spiritual practice, so much more than fitness. Joseph Lauricella is...

Mark sits down again with his friend Andrew Raba to talk about education, cultishness, ambition, choosing a career path, the mess that is our early twenties, psychedelics, and learning Yoga. What is self-understanding? Where do we find it? Is ambition a positive or negative quality? How do we know what to do with our lives? What is Yoga exactly and how can it help? How do I find my natural directi...

In this week's episode we are joined by the eternal warm love presence of Durga Julia Sánchez, musician, yogini, and inspiration. Durga speaks to us from her home country of Colombia of her extraordinary heart-connection with her beloved teacher and husband Ramgiri, and the immense process of courage that is calling us all to open our heart to one another. And of the heart-wrenching process of gri...

In this episode, Mark sits down (over Zoom) with his dear long-time friend Ana Berry: musician, media presenter, actress, Yoga teacher and mother. Ana describes growing up in Oklahoma and the saving influence of jazz and gospel, and the imprint of culture upon her mother as a beauty queen and TV personality. From Hollywood to New York, her search for Yoga that didn't just exacerbate body self-hatr...

A special edition of the Heart of Yoga podcast as Melissa Forbes speaks about her life as an artist and Yoga practitioner and her friendship with UG Krishnamurti. How do we describe him? It's difficult, but with love and gratitude, delight and humour, Melissa and Mark reminisce about their unusual friend - Melissa travelled with UG for the last five years of his life as his companion and "balance....

These interviews are useful because they describe how many different kinds of people receive Yoga and make use of Yoga, and how Yoga is functioning in their personal and unique lives. "Yogis are not made on assembly lines." In this episode, Mark speaks with Frederic Ballario, his long-time friend, on his process of discovering the breath and the Yoga of wine and Tea. Frederic describes moving from...

In this episode, Susan Swan and Mark Whitwell talk about Susan's experience as a Yoga teacher, including suffering a stroke and continuing to teach while rehabilitating. Susan speaks about recovering language through breath, swearing and the sound of OM, coming face to face with the reality that we live one breath at a time, and teaching yoga in hospital to help other patients recover. Together, l...

In this Part 2 (you don't need to listen to part 1 first!) of God and Sex discussion, Mark and Rosalind talk about: Why we need both strength and receptivity How we develop receptivity via our asana Why we must address the denial of the feminine and put a spotlight on sex as a topic rather than avoid it How a Yoga practice is the context in which we become receptive in relationship with another Ho...

In this episode Rosalind grills Mark on the promises made by the Yoga tradition, Yogananda's classic 'Autobiography of a Yogi,' the lust for superpowers and supernatural experience and how it affects everyone, and what Mark's favourite superpower is. What are siddhis anyway? What is the "psychic greed" that we may be numbed into by culture? Understanding spiritual promises as the axiom of modern s...

"Dear friends, I was born in the spring of '54 to a farmer father and school teacher mother. Both of them children of homesteader parents. After grade 12 , in 72/'73, I backpacked and worked through Europe and Northern Africa for nearly nine months. Returning home I began farming and attending an agricultural college receiving a diploma in Ag Production. I bought my first land when I was 18, and h...

Sriram is my Gurubhai – brothers of the same teacher. He is particularly interesting to me in that he is indigenous to South India, born into the society and language of Krishnamacharya and Desikachar. Whereas I migrated into that culture and knew nothing of it in my early life. As a modern man in the West, Sriram is an extremely informed Yoga teacher who is able to communicate the nuance of the c...

Litiana returns to the podcast for part two of this conversation on how yoga helped her throw out colonial and religious legacies from her body and embrace her own indigeneity, and truly feel at home in her body. Mark and her discuss her experiences, her vision for teaching dissociated world leaders, and their shared relationship with the Indian High commissioner and her poetry honouring Fiji. "Yo...

Producer, creator, model, Yoga and Qi Gong teacher, and advocate for empowered aging and beauty at all ages, Karen Williams joins Mark from New York City to talk yoga, healing, transforming attitudes to aging, embracing difference and emotionally surviving the US elections. Karen Williams is equally at home in front of or behind the camera. She is on a mission to revitalise global attitudes toward...

From dark times in Europe through to personal victory. Croatian yoga teacher Domagoj Orlić joins Mark and Rosalind to speak about his twenty-year friendship with Mark, his evolution from a gymnast to a yogi, the influence of J Krishnamurti, and the confluence of Sri Vidya and yoga in his life. What a precious conversation with a dear friend and holder of yoga. "Powerful peace and peaceful power of...

This week we are so very glad to welcome Richard Schechner , who is a director, pioneer and founder in the field of performance studies, author of innumerable books, Professor Emeritus at New York University, editor of The Drama Review, and… a dedicated practitioner of the yoga he learned from his teacher, T. Krishnamacharya, in Chennai (then Madras) in 1971-72. What a blessing to talk life and In...

In this episode, Rosalind takes the position of the everywoman yoga teacher, interviewing Mark on a lot of the questions and concerns people have as yoga teachers in our modern yoga scene. Rosalind and Mark discuss: The initial habit to put teachers on a pedestal and how we undermine it. What is "the Mick Jagger effect"? Dealing with embarrassment of being associated with the 'yoga industrial comp...

In this episode of The Heart of Yoga podcast, Mark and Andrew discuss: The relationship between Yoga and autonomy: empowerment, ideologies, and power structures Becoming your true Self and the role of culture in that process The acknowledgement of the teacher intervention in Yoga The teacher in Yoga: not a social, nor personal identity, but rather the force of Mother Nature's nurturing and local c...

God and Sex: Perhaps the two most powerful and loaded words in the English language. This book is a serious, yet not humourless, stake in the ground for bringing the two words together in their intrinsic harmony as the creative force of life. Why a few publishers were frightened by the title "God and Sex" How sex has been vulgarized by religious culture and the burden of pornography How, by separa...

In today's episode, Mark interviews Litiana Lagibalavu, a yoga teacher, entrepreneur, lawyer in training, Indigenous Fijian, and a fierce activist philosopher building essential bridges between the ancient traditions of yoga and modern people of all kinds. She shares her story, her observations on teaching yoga in Fiji, and her journey into Yoga: Why she got interested in yoga in the first place a...

Breath is our direct participation in the power of the cosmos that you are. It is the central feature and even the purpose of asana, and yet is all but lost in much modern yoga. Breath is given lip service rather than careful engagement. Yet public attention is now turning to the power and healing potential of that overlooked miracle, our own breath. "If you can breathe, you can do Yoga!" Breath i...

T.K.V. Desikachar left us a vast wealth of practical knowledge about life and yoga by passing the precious jewels of wisdom from his father, Krishnamacharya. We continue to receive the gifts of Desikachar's dedication to his father Krishnamacharya's teachings and their friendships with Jiddu and UG Krishnamurti. Mark Whitwell first met Desikachar and his father in 1973, following extensive travels...

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world ever since he first met his yoga teachers, T.K.V. Desikachar and his father T. Krishnamacharya, in Chennai in 1973. He realised straight away that our body loves its breath, the inhale loves the exhale and vice versa, and that yoga is an immensely practical and useful tool for everyone to respond to inspiration and grace. The Heart of Yoga is t...