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ABSTRACT
This article demonstrates how yoga practitioners seek to attain mental balance by the constant discipline of being aware of their thoughts and actions, learning to react to emotions and desires. It focuses on the efforts it takes to achieve this mental state and the meanings attributed to the cessation of practitioners’ ‘most natural’ way of thinking and feeling. By acknowledging the adherence to norms and values of the learned yoga traditions, this article presents the tensions involved in their identity construction, for this adherence points to a contradiction at a time when it is important to ‘find oneself’ and to live according to one’s own parameters. Therefore, the article concludes that the embodiment of a life of yoga does not consist solely in the performance of certain attitudes and behaviours. While there is an attempt to attain integration of body and mind, practitioners of yoga and meditation strive to become aware of habitual social roles and, when conscious of the processes of building a self-image, they make use of these practices as a means to relativise this construction.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte and his group of students and researchers for extended comments on and insights for previous versions of this article. Also, I am immensely indebted to the two referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for a careful reading of this text and for detailed comments and recommendations.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Vedanta is a vast category of Sanskrit literature and philosophy, which covers many hundreds of years and a variety of ontological practices and hermeneutics. Therefore, the Vedanta I write about here, besides being understood by the interlocutors as ‘traditional’ and derived from an uninterrupted succession of masters and disciples, is one particular group’s emphasis and teaching.
2 Advaita Vedanta is an Indian school of Hindu philosophy that advocates mokṣa (liberation) through the attainment of vidyā (knowledge) of one’s identity as the true self, ātman (pure awareness), which is identical with brahman (consciousness).
3 Swami Dayananda, disciple of Swami Chinmayananda (head of the Chinmaya Mission), is the founder of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. He used to describe himself as a traditional teacher of Advaita Vedanta and to promote mokṣa as the most desirable end in life, which means the desire to know ātman as satyam, eternal existence free from any limitation.
4 Gloria Arieira established Vidya Mandir in June 1984 without help from any international organisation or association. Since then, her school/association has grown steadily, although it does not offer popular teachings for ‘all’ kinds of yogis, providing courses mainly for those most interested in learning Sanskrit and the kind of Vedanta taught at Vidya.
5 Of the group of approximately 200 practitioners, I conducted formal interviews with 19 (11 women and 8 men, aged between 32 and 63), but interacted with all of them as part of the twelve-year fieldwork at Vidya Mandir. The interviews were conducted in person, in Portuguese, between 2009 and 2021. Each interview lasted over an hour. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. I should highlight that those interviewed were the students who were present the most and were the most diligent and arguably the most committed to the learning process.
6 The main texts taught at the association are the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita, all of which making studying and meditating the main practices encouraged by Arieira. Students never perform yoga postures during classes, although most practise āsanas in other spaces and/or at home. Postural yoga is not seen as important as the most significant aspects such as the philosophy and/or worldview embodied by practitioners.
7 About one sixth of the group (the more committed and established members) sign up to classes on Adi Shankara’s commentaries on the ten principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita, which have more Sanskrit terms in them, but without too much explanation of their meanings, thus not exactly geared towards beginners. These classes offer discussions on the same texts seen in other classes, but have more complex and profound aspects, even though they are open to anyone interested in learning these concepts.
8 A pattern similar to that observed by Altglas (Citation2008) in Sivananda and Siddha yoga groups.
9 They consider this an embodiment of a lifestyle of seeking self-knowledge. A practitioner may be called a karmayogin and adopt a yogic attitude with reference to action and its results, which is seen as crucial for the development of a balanced mind under difficult circumstances.
10 They seem to relate their personal yoga practice “to wider issues of anti-consumerist morality and planetary health”, in which the body becomes the site of a general transformational process that seeks a more ‘holistic’ approach to the world at large (Hauser Citation2013, 31).
11 Here, it is important to call attention to the controversy of the incorporation of the Yoga Sutras as a colonial product—not to be taken at face value as ur-text (see Koch Citation2013, 225–227; Halbfass Citation2017, 91).
12 First names in this section refer to practitioners and interlocutors and are all fictitious.
13 It is necessary to emphasise that the attitudes and teachings as presented here refer to Vidya Mandir’s particular interpretation of yoga and Vedanta traditions.
14 If a developed sense of cosmology is notably absent from Protestantism, as are developed and institutionalised forms of asceticism, Flood argues that “cosmological religions are premodern. Indeed, with the gradual advent of modernity we see the erosion of cosmological religion in the West and the erosion of the performance of asceticism” (Flood Citation2004, 10). Although Flood talks about a pre-modern type of ascetic practices, I cite his work on asceticism as we can draw a parallel with the practices of the modern yogis observed. According to Flood, what is distinctive about ascetic traditions is that their account must be cosmological, meaning asceticism occurs par excellence in cosmological religion. By cosmological religion, Flood means “traditions that give an account of the relationship between self and cosmos or, in theistic traditions, self, cosmos and God” (Flood Citation2004, 10).
15 According to Flood, the non-autonomous self-assertion of yoga traditions “is not a contradiction but a central feature of the ascetic self, a self always constrained by tradition and a self that seeks through an act of will the eradication of will”. This means that the ascetic self should not be understood as individual as it “conforms to the structures of tradition, although this does not entail an externalised self. On the contrary, the ascetic self develops a subjectivity and inwardness that must be distinguished from individuality.” (Flood Citation2004, 241)
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Cecilia Bastos
Cecilia dos Guimarães Bastos completed a PhD in social sciences and was, between 2015 and 2022, a postdoctoral research fellow and collaborate professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. Since November 2023, she has been a researcher in the “Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective’” of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Her research is concerned with urban anthropology, with an emphasis on the social construction of the person, covering topics such as individualism, subjectivity, pilgrimage, embodiment, emotion, spirituality, and behaviour. CORRESPONDENCE: DFG Kollegforschungsgruppe “Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective”, Kussmaul-Forschungscampus, Gebäude D3, Hartmannstr. 14, 91052 Erlangen, Germany.