The Yoga Confessions - Mark interviews Rosalind Atkinson (#48)

Mark Whitwell interviews Rosalind Atkinson about her life with yoga and realisations. In particular, Mark asks about her academic studies of english literature, especially the mystic poet William Blake, and the relevance of these studies to her life in yoga.

This episode will be of interest to anyone with a mixed experience in academia or poetry, who is interested in the yogic process of making inspiration relevant to our lives right now.

We also discuss the last two years of teaching around the world through zoom, and end with a little teaser about a new project, called "Wardrobe Dharma".

In this episode you will hear...

''And I got to the end of this research project ... and I was trying to write a conclusion that summed up what I had learned in the process. And I came across a line by Blake that said something like ... the true faculty of knowledge is experience... And it was a very unsettling phrase to me because I realized in that moment that of everything I'd written about passionately, it wasn't my experience I was writing about Blake's experience.''

''I fell straight into the spiritual seekers trap of hungrily seeking experience...for myself...''

''It's like if my mind was the king and the body was the peasants of the kingdom. Even if the king ignores the peasants, they're still there. And they're still feeding him. But he's just not acknowledging them... Abusing them, mistreating them, not appreciating their work. ''

"Blake's poetry speaks in and as that force of life that is beyond the mind. And that's why obviously people from different cultures resonate with it. If it was just culturally constructed, then the English would love Blake the best. But they didn't, they thought he belonged in a straight jacket."

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