The Promise

by Mark Whitwell

You can change your life in just seven minutes a day . . .

A soft message for a hard time, The Promise is a simple yet profound solution to the cause of all human discontent: the lack of intimacy, especially sexual intimacy. Even amidst the plethora of techniques now available for so-called enlightenment—from meditation and visualization to intensive prayer retreats or obsessive exercise regimens— the need for intimacy has been left unsatisfied.

Requiring just seven minutes a day, the practice taught in this book—called “Your Seven-Minute Wonder”—answers that need by opening the body and psyche to gratifying levels of personal and sexual intimacy. It is the practical means that allows you to tangibly realize your ideals and inherent perfection. Renowned teacher Mark Whitwell, who has spent a lifetime studying the secrets of life with the great masters, has seen through to the heart of their understanding, and created a simple way for readers to acquire it for themselves.

About the author:

Mark Whitwell is an internationally renowned Yoga Teacher who has a unique ability to make the empowering tradition of Yoga available to every kind of person as part of their everyday life. Mark’s simple mission is to bring the principles of practice that came through the ‘teacher of the teachers’ Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) into the mainstream of public life. He has taught Yoga around the world for over four decades.

Mark is the founder of the educational charity the Heart of Yoga Foundation and of the Heart of Yoga Peace Project—an organization which has brought relational technology of Yoga to conflict zones around the world.

He is the author of four books including Yoga of Heart (2004), the Hridaya Yoga Sutra (2004), The Promise (2016), and most recently God and Sex: Now We Get Both (2019). Mark was also the editor and contributor to his teacher T.K.V. Desikachar’s The Heart of Yoga (1995), a text that is celebrated on teacher trainings around the world as a “Bible of modern Yoga.”

Mark’s lifelong study of Yoga began in his early twenties when he travelled to India in search of something beyond what the usual life offered in Aotearoa/New Zealand. His commitment to teaching Yoga came after observing the gap between what he had learned in India and what he saw being taught in the US.

In particular, Mark represents a collaboration between the Tantric Siddhas of Ganeshpuri, the Yoga of T. Krishnamacharya and his son T.K.V. Desikachar (1936-2016), with whom he studied with for over twenty years, and the friendship with U.G. Krishnamurti (1918-2007) who ensured that Yoga was not a struggle to get somewhere but participation in the Given Reality only. Mark seamlessly weaves together these influences to provide a Yoga education that is natural, empowering and complete.

Mark’s books and classes emphasise of Yoga integrated into our lives and relationships, not practiced in isolation. The theme of relationship and sexuality is directly addressed, and the role of Yoga in helping shift negative relational patterns.

Teaching and education have always played a central part in Mark’s family life. His mother and father were both schoolteachers and his grandfather provided education programs in state prisons. At the core of Mark’s pedagogy is a refusal to set up hierarchies between himself and his students. Instead, Mark maintains that for any Yoga transmission to occur the relationship must be ordinary and non-hierarchical. The teacher is no more than a friend and no less, and the relationship between the teacher and the student is itself the heart of Yoga.

Mark teaches at major Yoga locations around the world, including Esalen, Kripalu Institute, Bhakti and Shakti Festivals, Hong Kong and Shanghai Yoga Festivals, the Kumbh Mela, Omega Institute, 1440 San Francisco, and at Ram Dass’ retreats in Hawaii.

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