The Embodied Experiences in the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga Practice: Transformations of Everyday Life
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Babovic, Mojca
Abstract
This thesis is a qualitative analyses of seventeen individual stories of embodied experiences in Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga. Initially, on the foreground of a phenomenological perspective and by employing a method of in-depth interviews, the purpose is to critically assess yoga’s ability to transform individuals’ bodies as well as their lives. Embodied yoga routines, especially when fully intertwined with ones’ social existence, cause both individual transformation and reorganization of everyday life. However, when Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is problematized within an extended social settings wherein it is performed, new issues arise. In this thesis, therefore, I offer few commentaries on new directions in understanding Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga in Taiwan. First, through the lens of health promotion perspective, which emphasizes individualized approach to health, Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga can be misunderstood as a toll for self-development in order to construct a healthy and self-responsible individual. This shows that yoga practice is not only an embodied routine that reshapes individual’s health and personal relationships but also an everyday lifestyle choice implemented by enhanced rhetoric of self-development usually found in neoliberal settings. Second, the rhetoric of self-development in yoga is not only creating a self-relying subject, who is discouraged from understanding life in terms of any collective obligations but also a subject that is eager to consume. Individuals seduced by consumer yoga lifestyle constantly apply images of self-development in hopes of experiencing a more satisfactory everyday life. Lastly, a brief survey of research on the rising tension between paid work and other non-work related life activities proposes that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga in Taiwan is a suitable tool for overpassing the imbalance. That is to say, those who develop a more ascetic and routinized practice are more successful in detaching from work related pressures.
Subjects
embodiment
Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga
body managemen
health promotion
individualized responsibility
routinization
commodification
work-life balance
Type
thesis
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