Okay. Hello, my friends and new listeners. Welcome to Yoga Talks podcast. My name is Jay Brown. Thank you for listening. It's a big day for the podcast for me. I'm talking to my most

influential teacher, Mark Whitwell. And I have to admit that this was a challenging

episode for me. When I first decided to do the podcast, I made a list of people, like an initial list of people that I thought would be on the podcast.

And Mark was on that list.

And I've long since had everybody else who was on the list here to talk, but I hadn't done it with Mark.

And I think it was because I was nervous.

I was nervous for maybe two reasons.

I was nervous, one, because I felt like I needed to know what I was doing with the podcast more

before I could really have him on and feel secure enough in what I was doing for it to be good.

And the other thing that I think was making me hesitant is because I've known Mark for a lot of years, 15 plus years, and in that time, we've talked.

We've talked on a personal level and a professional level.

It felt awkward to me that he would come on the podcast

and we would, I don't know, recycle some kind of conversation that we've already had,

which I think would be a risk that I would take and having a mom because it's very easy for us to

just kind of drop into some of our our canned stuff like all yoga teachers have canned stuff

i mean if you if you watch enough of them on youtube or whatever you'll see everybody's got

material that they use and my whole thing with

this podcast has been i don't i don't want to have that stock question and answer where i turn to the

guest and i say what is yoga and they give me their stock answer i don't want to do that i don't want to

do that definitely not with mark so i just i wasn't sure what to talk to him about. I didn't know how to, I didn't know if I

was going to be able to do what I want to do with this podcast with Mark. So I just

avoided it, just sometimes when I do, I'll avoid something for a while. And I, at a certain point,

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