Being alone together: yoga, bodywork, and intimate sociality in American households

Abstract

Using ethnographic data from Providence County, Rhode Island, this paper explores yoga as a bodywork practice that is part of everyday health and wellbeing routines in middle class households. In this context, participants define their bodywork practices as individual activities that answer health and wellbeing needs, but notably discuss bodywork in terms of their everyday social experience. Along with other bodywork activities, yoga emerges as a shared social practice that links participants to their partners, children, and other intimates, facilitating a sense of togetherness by allowing time and space for autonomy. By giving atmospheric and sensory attention to the ethnographic data, the paper further reveals how domestic intimacy is cultivated via the generation of bodily heat and positive energies and that yoga may tacitly facilitate such atmospheres. In this way, yoga can help households meet an American need for self-development and autonomy while still facilitating a far more enduring human need for intimate connection. Ultimately yoga is characterized as a pragmatic bodywork practice that blends self-development and social intimacy through shared energetic encounters.

Keywords:

• Fitness
• yoga
• autonomy
• sociality
• intimacy
• heat

Introduction

In the free-market economic context of the US, the body has often been considered a tool through which individuals accomplish a societal demand for fit, flexible bodies capable of withstanding the pressures of modern life (Freeman 2011). At the same time, certain bodywork practices, such as yoga, are recognized to provide a space of solace or release, cultivate spirituality, and attune the self to bodily needs for rest or relaxation (Koch 2013; Schnäbele 2013). Critical of the over-individualization of the American context and drawing on fieldwork in North American homes, I seek to draw attention to how the sensory and relational aspects of the home challenges individualism and expands upon literatures citing the expansive capacity of bodywork. By recognizing yoga as part of everyday flows and as a ‘backstage practice’ of domestic space (Shove 2003), I am able to articulate yoga as a heavily relational encounter that facilitates domestic intimacy.

The ethnographic context I draw on (Providence County, Rhode Island) shows how the practice of yoga flows within, to, and from the home, and is discussed in relation to other bodywork routines, such as going to the gym, running, or yoga. In each of these routines, the experience lingers: bodies come home hot and still sweaty, or freshly showered. Soreness can last for a day or two, injuries for longer. Workout clothes can exist in special cabinets or drawers, which, as smelly, readily-accessible items, may be separated from other clothes. When there are small children present, workout items such as yoga balls and mats often become playthings. There are also trajectories of moods and emotions: a yoga class can cleanse a partner of a bad day at work; an injury or other workout failure can sustain a felt sense of restlessness or unease; and breaks in regular routine can cause communication to falter.

Drawing on the concept of domestic atmospheres—which attends to these everyday material, sensory, and affective relations—I argue that the energetic quality sustained by the practice of yoga helps my participants work out tensions in household relationships. In this particular American context, these tensions appear to be exacerbated by a contradictory need for autonomous self-work and togetherness. As the title of this paper suggests, yoga becomes a way for participants to “be alone together.” Thus, rather than seeing contemporary American yoga as both a tool to take part in the formation of fit, flexible bodies and minds, and a means to escape global capitalist anxieties, I prefer to characterize yoga as a pragmatic bodywork practice that blends self-development and social intimacy through shared energetic encounters.

In what follows, I explain my conceptual framework as well as my field methods. Then, drawing primarily on interviews and fieldnotes, the first section of my results provides an overview of participants’ bodywork routines. The subsequent section shows how these routines were often articulated in terms of both self-practice and togetherness. In a final results section, I use auto-ethnography, in-depth experiences with one household, and two cross-cultural examples to explore how this balance may be achieved through the generation of heat and energy. In the discussion, I return to the idea that yoga is more than just a self-practice that may or may not be a part of a yoga community, but a social practice that generates human bonds.

Conceptual framework

There has been an exponential rise in all bodywork practices in the US over the last fifty years. Scholars have often connected this proliferation to various facets of contemporary capitalism, including the targeted expansion (i.e. marketing) of body-building to women and the introduction of female-oriented aerobics in the late 1960s, a rise in media and celebrity endorsement of fitness in the 70 s and 80 s, an explosion in fitness “franchises” in the 1990s, and new media technologies, such as online coaches and fitness trackers in the 2000s (Andreasson and Johansson 2014; Powers and Greenwell 2017). The popularity of yoga has similarly spread through celebrity endorsement, franchised yoga studios and styles (e.g., Bikram), and new media technologies. Andrea Jain (2014, 74) argues that ‘the model of brand image management— [which is] systematic and pervasive in contemporary consumer culture—is effective for understanding the popularization of yoga today.’ Ultimately, the conditions set by transnational capitalism made way for both the intense commodification of bodywork practices as well as individual lifestyle choice (Jain 2014) (see also: Hyland 2017; Koch 2013; Powers and Greenwell 2017; Schnäbele 2013).

Sociologist Robert Crawford (2006, 410-11) has attributed the rising middleclass interest in ‘holistic’ wellbeing to an expansion of ‘the quest for health beyond medical practices’ in the 1980s-90s. He describes this expansion as part of neoliberal changes in health care, such as privatisation of health care, an enthusiasm for health promotion, and growing attention to individual behavioural change policies and lifestyle disease. During this period, he argues, health became a ‘super-value,’ part of the ‘pursuit of the good life.’ Crawford’s observation is part of the greater body of work on neoliberal self-making, much of which builds on the influential work of Foucault (1978, 1988, 1994), Giddens (1991), Rose (1992, 1996) and others who have worked on the relationship between the body and neoliberal self-care (see Freeman 2011 for review). At this point, it is almost scholarly common-sense that we could situate contemporary yoga, especially ‘branded yoga’ (Jain 2014), within this body of work, where flexible, self-attentive bodies and selves appear to be a demand of neoliberal modernity (Freeman 2011). However, as Verena Schnäbele (2013) describes of yoga in the German context, while yoga aligns with the demand for individualized self-care, the practice becomes subversive as the body learns to pay attention to its needs, resulting in small or even large breaks from the workplace (Schnäbele 2013). As such, yoga (and likely other bodywork) becomes something of a middle ground bodywork practice, where individuals can both relate to, but also withdraw from and learn to cope with, the precarious, uncertain conditions of the modern world (Koch 2013; Schnäbele 2013).

Yoga of course has also been linked to the practice of what Paul Heelas (1996) has defined as self-spiritualties for much longer than the neoliberal turn. As Singleton (2010) and Jain (2014) describe in their separate books, dissident Protestant countercultural movements such as American Transcendentalism, Christian Science, and New Thought helped facilitate the spread of various yogic practices at the turn of the 20^th century. As a key geographic stronghold for these particular esoteric movements, the New England region (where fieldwork took place) certainly has a distinct lineage of alternative and complementary spiritual practices, many of which focus on individual self-development through a personalized connection to Spirit, God, or the Universe. Singleton (2010, 119) describes how ‘mind-body-spirit’ models of ‘self-culture’ ‘underlie mainstream physical culture’ since the early 20^th century, notably in the work of the YMCA. Thus, whether scholars look at yoga in terms of bodywork, economics, or mind-body-spirit practice, the concept of yoga being a self-practice is highly present.

Self-practice has a unique relationship to the US cultural context. Individual autonomy is considered a primary feature of American society, often at the expense of community and leading to experiences of isolation (Bellah et al. 1985; Low 2003; Putnam 2000). For instance, ‘lifestyle enclaves’, including romantic love partnership and yoga communities, have helped Americans find small communities that resonate with their preferred individual lifestyle (Bellah et al. 1985). In terms of yoga, there are numerous journalistic and word-of-mouth accounts of yoga communities forming in ashrams or studios or even private homes, while partnered yoga, like AcroYoga, encourages collaboration. Specific brands of bodywork are also community-oriented, designed to make individuals feel a part of something bigger than themselves, such as CrossFit or ToughMudder. While experiences of isolation and the formation lifestyle communities might have once been considered an American phenomenon, ethnographic accounts of the conditions caused by neoliberal precarity have pointed to similar tensions in other contexts (e.g. Allison 2013), suggesting that the neoliberal-individualist problem is now globally pervasive and people have needed to seek a remedy from their own devices.

Without downplaying this very real phenomenon—what might be called the neoliberal cultural economy of the self— pervasive notions of self-spirituality, neoliberal self-practice, and American individualism can sometimes disguise the resilient nuances of everyday life, most notably, intimate care. Some scholars have specifically been critical of how the treatment of individualism has neglected ‘the coexistence of intimacy and the valuing of interdependence of kin, genders, and generations and forms of collectivism’ (Jamieson 2011, 2). I do not go into detail here on the vast array of sensory approaches to anthropology nor notions of affect that have attended to these gaps. I rather draw specifically on an everyday practice approach to the home environment, which emphasises the ways in which yoga and other bodywork practices function as part of the ‘ordinary habits’ and ‘back stage practices of the home’ (Shove 2003) (see also: Miller 2001). Such habits and practices flow within, to, and from the home as part of the household’s everyday infrastructures (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Steiner and Veel 2017).

I am particularly interested in practices that create a sense of familial closeness or domestic intimacy (Daniels 2015; Gabb and Fink 2018; Jamieson 2011). Lynn Jamieson (2011, 1) defines ‘practices of intimacy’ as ‘practices which enable, generate and sustain a subjective sense of closeness and being attuned and special to each other,’ whereas Inge Daniels (2015, 50) defines domestic intimacy as that ‘which nourishes the family group and assists in creating the feeling of home.’ Together, these definitions suggest practices of domestic intimacy are both about people’s relationships with one another as well as about their relationship with the dwelling space. While some elements of domestic intimacy are both empirically catalogued and easily articulated, other elements seem to fall between the cracks and can only be excavated by paying attention to more ephemeral moods. The term atmosphere has been used in accounts of space to address this liminal ‘in-betweenness’ between subject and object, helping to explore what constitutes the ‘mood’ of a space (Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen 2015; Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen 2015). Domestic atmospheres in particular can contribute to a sense of ‘homeyness’ (as well as disruption or unhomeyness) (McCracken 1989; Olesen 2010) and thus are a part of what constitutes domestic intimacy. Daniels (2015, 54) argues that ‘homely atmospheres emerge at the intersection where the ideal and the real coalesce in complicated ways,’ particularly because ‘relationships between the individual and the group are continuously contested, negotiated, and recreated inside the home.’ She concludes: ‘homeliness is not locatable in separate (living or dead) individuals, nor in specific items of material culture, but that atmospheres are all-encompassing phenomena that guide people’s collective activities.’

Philosopher Teresa Brennan (2004, 1) has also used the term atmosphere to describe the ‘transmission of affect’ or how one feels others’ moods and emotions. Atmospheres, she describes (6) ‘literally get into the individual,’ altering their biochemistry. She importantly nuances how the ‘[t]he transmission of affect means, that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the “individual” and the “environment.”’ In essence, attending to ‘atmospheres’ begins to deconstruct embedded assumptions about the constitution of the individual body and its practice.

While Daniels speaks of the role of heat as an intimacy generating atmospheric quality in the Japanese context, I am interested in Western notions of affective energy. Writing of such energy, geographers Philo, Cadman, and Lea (2015) use a composite account of a day in the life of a yogi in Brighton, UK, to illustrate how their participants spoke of energy as a kind of spiritual, physical, and emotional flow that was omnipresent in everyday life. They describe this energy talk as part of wider ‘new energy geographies’ that attend to embodied experiences of spirituality, relationality, and emotion. Their work resonates with how my own participants talked about energy, as well as yoga’s relationship to these somewhat ambiguous energy flows to and from the home. In sum, atmospheres and energies are heavily relational, and can help elucidate the sensory and tacit ways that yoga might balance the need to autonomy and togetherness.

Methods

The ethnographic data presented here are drawn from a larger, exploratory study of the health and wellbeing practices of urban middleclass households in Providence County, Rhode Island, in the North-eastern United States, from April 2015 to April 2016. The study was informed by my background in both critical obesity studies and material anthropology; however, the study of transition, change, and uncertainty emerged from the field site (Bird 2018, 2019). I did not design the research to be representative, but rather to gather in-depth data from a smaller number of homes.

I recruited participants through a snowball or word-of-mouth approach (Morgan 2012). I began with a few willing participants that I knew through previously established personal and professional networks, who in turn introduced me to further participants. This method is often used in home-based ethnographies, where an initial sense of trust helps secure access to a community. Additionally, some participants were recruited via striking up conversations at neighbourhood events. In total, 18 households and 33 adults took part in the research. Participants gave two recorded, semi-structured interviews, one sharing their daily routines through an active tour of the home and a second one, after some time had passed, exploring health and wellbeing in the home. I also followed a small subset of these households over the course of the year to observe and participate in their lives. In these households, I conducted regular short-term visits, such as having dinner, coffee, or going on a walk, either with all or only one member of the household. As a female researcher, solo visits tended to be with female participants. These visits might occur once a week or once or twice a month, depending on how busy participants were. In some households, I helped with everyday routines, including accompanying participants on shopping trips and other errands, attending social events and parties, having lunches with their friends, and playing with or taking care of their children. These methods are well-established in classic Euro-American studies of home life (see Gullestad 1984; Heiman 2015). All participants received an information sheet detailing the project and what participation entailed. Each provided oral consent to participate in audio-recorded interviews, and ongoing oral consent was gathered from participants throughout the process of data collection.

Open-ended tours of participants’ daily routines accounted for participant interpretations of their own lifestyles, while second interviews attended specifically to health and wellbeing. After I asked about their daily routines in the first interview, where things like exercise and eating habits came up without prompt, I explicitly asked participants to elaborate on fitness habits. In a follow-up interview, I asked about ‘objects, spaces, or experiences’ that were important for or in the way of wellbeing, and ‘objects, spaces, or experiences’ that were unhealthy or healthy. I also asked participants to comment on the distinction between health and wellbeing. As participants gave a tour of their homes when they discussed their daily routines, what would otherwise be a semi-structured static interview became slightly more dynamic, involving interactions with objects, other household members, and pets. Many interviews also had more than one person present, such as a couple sharing their independent and collective routines or children playing in the background. Interviews with couples are recognized to offer deeper ethnographic insights into household dynamics, particularly if couples are also interviewed separately (Kaufman 1998). Such interviews encouraged couples to ask questions of one another, have real-time realizations about their partners, and even argue about disagreements, thus elucidating household compromises. Much of the data presented stems from such dynamic interviewing, as well as ethnographically following the health and wellbeing practices of a smaller subset of participants.

In her classic account of home life, Marianne Gullestad (1984, 46) explains that the nature of home-based work put her in contact with some participants more than others, following the natural progression of friendships, and leading to varying levels of depth of data collection. I had a similar experience; in particular, my own yoga practice was a facilitator of connection. My willingness to be involved as a participant-observer in fitness-related activities, such as going to the gym or cycling, offered a more comprehensive vision of my participants’ bodily fitness practices. I incorporate my experiences as a way of discussing my positionality in relation to my observations about bodywork practices amongst participants and North-eastern American fitness culture more generally.

Of course, conducting anthropology at home, in homes, presents unique challenges. Most prominent of these include a shared sense of society or culture and thus language. In describing this challenge, Strathern (1987) gives the example of how a Malay anthropologist in Malay society is not the same as a Western anthropologist in Western society, because the very concepts anthropologists use stem from Western thought. In this vein, many of my participants and I use a common vocabulary that rarely sparks disagreement, and so it can be difficult to discern the difference between my analysis and participant choice of words. For instance, as an insider, I did not recognize the ubiquity of the term ‘energy’ until I coded my interviews and fieldnotes. Ultimately there are both benefits and drawbacks to any ethnographic method and context; in this case, familiarity became a benefit for access but became an added constraint to my analysis.

As a final note, I do not differentiate styles or ‘brands’ of yoga or meditation in order to protect participant anonymity within their own yoga communities, which may be identifiable to insiders. Participants also generally referred to their practices as ‘yoga’ and/or ‘meditation’ even when they belonged to very specific genres of each. Some meditation practices were more spiritually-oriented than others. Similar to elsewhere in the Western world, contemporary yoga in the United States generally incorporates a series of physical poses (asanas), breath work, and relaxation (Schnäbele 2013).

Findings

Bodywork routines

The yoga and fitness scenes in Providence are likely typical of small, liberal American cities influenced by global trends. Despite its small size in both population and geography, Providence receives significant popular culture influences from New York City and Boston, including health and fitness trends. Health and wellbeing are a part of the everyday values and ethics of many of my participants and could be considered part of the middleclass culture of ‘healthism’ (Crawford 1980; 2006). A number of what I call explicit health and wellbeing practices were reported during interviews with all households, which included single adults living alone, couples, roommates, and families. For the majority of participants, health was described in interviews as ‘physiological’ while wellbeing involved a combination of the mind and body. Some participants saw them as one and the same. As can be viewed in Table 1, yoga practice, meditation, and ‘going to the gym’ were the three most common bodywork activities participants preferred (both occurring in approximately half the households), but walking, running, and cycling were also popular, followed by specific instances of Tai Chi, kickboxing, Barre, and CrossFit. Participants generally considered yoga as a part of their fitness repertoire and yet somehow different, often depending on the level of spirituality and/or meditation attached to the practice. However, my own observation was that they were very much entangled, particularly as participants most often described all bodywork routines as being for reducing stress and anxiety, weight-loss, and providing space in their busy lives for self-time. Several participants noted during interviews that their fitness practices were related to their management of anxiety or depression, reporting that regularly engaging in bodywork practices helped keep their mental health balanced. Carolina, for instance, who was in her late 30 s and lived alone (with her cat and dog), cited physical fitness as a daily necessity, particularly because it reduced her anxiety and helped temper her depression. Meditation served a similar anti-anxiety role for Carolina and others. I include meditation as a bodywork practice in Table 1 because it was as popular as going to the gym or yoga. Despite meditation not being physically demanding, in this context it has a similar mind-body orientation to yoga, and often people practiced both meditation and yoga. Integrating mindfulness into everyday life was an achievable aspiration for many participants; for others, the concept would still be familiar.

Table 1. Household demographics and key bodywork practices.

Household Type	Ages and Genders Household	Ethnic/Cultural Backgrounds	Key Bodywork Practices
Family	44F; 46 M; child, 2	White, American, Jewish background; White, American	Yoga; Tai Chi; meditation
Family	36F; 36 M; child, 1	White, American	Yoga; gym; meditation
Family	23F; 56 F; 58 F; 60 F; 84 F; 86 M	White, Italian-American, 3^rd-5^th generation	Sports
Family	38F; 3 children 4-10	Indian-American, 2^nd generation (parents Indian)	Yoga; meditation
Family	50-55F; 50-55 M; 3 children, 21-27	Native-American; White, American	Gym; meditation
Family	38F; 35-40 M; 2 children, 2 and infant	White, Italian-American, 3^rd generation; White, American	Participant reported she did not exercise (interviewed alone)
Family	40F; 45 M; 60 + F; 4 children, 2-12	African-American, 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd generation (from Ghana)	Gym
Couple	31F; 45 M	White, American	Yoga; gym; meditation
Couple	32F; 30 M	White, American; White, European	Gym; CrossFit; Barre
Couple	34F; 34 M	White, American	Outdoor sport and running
Couple	49M; 57 M	White, American, Jewish background; White, American, Portuguese background	Yoga; meditation
Couple	34F; 37 M	White, American	Yoga; outdoor running; meditation
Single	34M	American, 2^nd generation (parents South American Jewish)	Yoga; meditation; miscellaneous activity
Single	64F	White, American	Yoga; walking
Single	37F	Puerto Rican, American, 2^nd generation (parents Puerto Rican)	Yoga; gym; meditation
Single	45M	White, American	kickboxing at gym; cycling; meditation
Shared Housing	34F; 29 M	White, American	Cycling; yoga
Shared Housing	27F; 29 F	White, American	Gym; occasional yoga

Bodywork practices often occurred outside of the home, but were supplemented by at home workout routines, sometimes accompanied by online instruction. Participants often pragmatically switched out routines based on the needs of a particular day.

Autonomy and sociality

Chloe, a participant close to my age in her early 30 s, took me to the gym several times to weight train. While yoga was something of an access point for me due to my own ongoing practice, the gym was entirely foreign. My first visit (ever) to a gym happened during fieldwork and I quickly became something of a novice addict, fully embracing this participation-observation element ethnographic experience. Chloe was pleasant and helpful during my novice gym days and said that I had ‘good form’, likely from yoga. In addition to her tutorials in basic weightlifting, Chloe and I talked about how she used to weight train at a boutique gym several years ago, and about her current anxiety about her diet and increased body weight after her move to Providence. After a few visits, Chloe noted that she found it ‘weird’ to go to the gym with someone because it was a place where she often went alone ‘to do her own thing’. She explained that she did not even like going with her partner, even though they went to the same gym, because their workout routines were so different: ‘I don’t even know what he does at the gym’, she once commented. I took her remarks as a cue that we were done being gym buddies. Nevertheless, she and her partner continued to be key informants into the Providence gym culture when we met in their home. They preferred a more expensive gym franchise popular with young professionals on the East Side of the city. In their home, her partner, Bruce, showed me his gym cabinet, commenting that physiological health was very important to him and that the gym cabinet probably smelled. Their daily routines were very much centred around getting gym time in, and thus while they did not go to the gym together, they both understood this shared routine.

Fundamental to my findings is the notion that while participants engaged in bodywork for distinct individual and even biological reasons, such as stress reduction, anxiety management, and weight loss, many defined their bodywork routine as a space for both self-reflection and self-care that was ultimately linked to togetherness. In the interviews, a father in his 30 s told me that he enjoyed going to the YMCA with his toddler because he could leave her in the day care, which she loved because she was a social butterfly, while he got a bit of a break from parenting. A couple in their 50 s found that after their kids all left home for college, they had to learn how to take care of themselves again. They joined the YMCA down the street and built it into their routine to walk there together. While the home is often recognised as a site of intimate care, it can also be ‘unhomely,’ particularly in households under duress (Brickell 2016; Varley 2008). In such cases, external spaces can also be an escape from the home. One working mother of four in her 40 s described her morning hour in the gym as the only time in the day she was able to spend alone, away from the chaos of both work and home.

While these examples relate to the gym space, participants also described the yoga studio as facilitating a balance between the self and togetherness. This is best exemplified by Paige and Jesse, both in their mid-30s, who moved in together mid-way through fieldwork. They found that moving in together required a merging and remaking of their lifestyles. They understood that they wanted to spend time together, but to not overdo it, and to be able to leave work-related stress outside of their home. They developed a joint yoga practice at a Providence studio, going together two or three times a week, directly after work and on Saturday mornings. This excerpt from our second interview, at the close of fieldwork, offers some insight into their yoga practice:

Jesse: I feel like I need that release of the end of the day […] it resets my mind so I’m not bringing home any negative energy from work. […]

Paige: I’ve actually stopped seeing the therapist, and I think that I’m able to do that because I have yoga, like, consistently. […] I don’t know if [the decision to stop going to therapy] has to do with this apartment or the fact that we have a life that’s more in sync since we’ve moved in together. You know we do practice together.

Jesse: It’s just coincidental. Like you had been wanting to go back [to yoga] and I had never done it before, and I tried it and really liked it. It’s just like clicking.

Paige: I think that both of us really need something to decompress.

Jesse: Yeah, I used to run. I don’t really like doing that anymore.

Paige: Your knee hurts. But it’s nice to do something together too, even though [laughs]-–

Jesse: It’s kind of a solitary activity.

Paige: At first, I was nervous I would be self-conscious, but it just seems so natural. And it’s nice that we both appreciate it. I don’t know. Yeah, I feel like it’s sort of a necessity, which I used to feel like that too but then I got poor, and I couldn’t afford it.

Ultimately, yoga helped articulate their need to spend quality time together, one that increased their sense of health and wellbeing, separation from work, and domestic synchronization. Jesse also mentioned how yoga helped shed the ‘negative energy’ from work before he entered the home space, a component to which I will return below. (I do not address the affordability of yoga/gym memberships or classes, which Paige briefly mentions, but the fact that she could now afford it speaks to the middle classness of this sample).

Paul and George, who were 49 and 57, also both attended yoga classes several times a week, similarly described its relationship to work and partnership in their interview. George reported going to a 45-min yoga class at lunchtime during the work week (in part because it was a cheaper, $5 class), while Paul went two to three times a week to different classes. While they practiced yoga separately, Paul and George bonded over it being a shared activity, and also were interested to know about my own practice. Paul and George also both practiced meditation, but they again appreciated different types and experiences. These separate practices helped them sustain independent lifestyles around a shared interest. It also helped them articulate the home as a space where they did things they liked doing together, such as playing cards, cooking and eating, spending time with their dog, and physical intimacy, including cuddling, massage, and sex.

Joyce, who was in her mid-60s and lived alone, provided another insight into yoga as a socializing practice. In an interview, she told me that her yoga practice increased several years prior after leaving a difficult relationship and moving to Providence. At this time, attending classes six days a week was her salvation. However, when she got a puppy, she said her yoga practice dropped to once a week, only because she didn’t want to leave him, preferring long walks instead. Here a tension between solitude and sociality emerges differently: the yoga class becomes a space to ease loneliness that is quickly discarded when that loneliness is fulfilled elsewhere.

Rachel, in her early 40 s, was both a participant and a teacher, making her insights into the body, health, and wellbeing a part of the co-productive nature of anthropological knowledge, and blurring my own boundaries between researcher and student.¹ I attended her class once a week during fieldwork, learning about anatomy, breathing techniques, and yoga-wisdom. Each week, I said hello to new friends, caught up with another participant, and learned to sink into the quiet of this participatory space. I witnessed other regulars greet one another, catching up on both mundane details and meaningful experiences. More often than not, new faces would also join. Rachel’s regular students had a sense of care and adoration for Rachel that was palpable. At one point she had to leave right before class started because her husband texted to say their son fell and had to be taken to the emergency room. Rachel, teary, apologized to those of us in the waiting room. Another instructor offered to lead the class. Her loyal students offered words of support and affirmation: ‘Definitely go. We are fine. I hope he’s alright’.

Rachel’s son was fine—only a twisted arm—but like other families with toddlers, each day was full of a new challenge or disruption to regular routine. In her first interview, Rachel expressed some of her frustrations with parenting, and how yoga helped:

A willpower fight with a 2-year-old is really kind of impossible […] without feeling really shitty about yourself. So you have to find other ways to do it […] it’s different every time. You’ll find something that works and then do it again and it doesn’t, so you have to find something else […] sometimes it’s getting really quiet and whispering, sometimes it’s affirming what he’s seeing and giving words to it […] but you know sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t. But at least we have a few tools […] and if that doesn’t work, we can fall back on our practices, our yoga practices, and be like oh right, I’ll come back and breathe […] and to be able to come back and say, this is why I was loud, I was actually scared for your health or your safety or whatever it was.

Rachel also recognized that when she did not have a chance to take her daily meditation (for instance, when Adam was sick), she noticed a huge difference in her level of patience with her toddler. She explained this to me once after a yoga class in the form of advice, saying something along the lines of, ‘it’s important to know what you need to have patience, and to find a partner who supports it.’

Rachel and her husband Adam both sustained a yoga practice at home, as well as regular, daily meditation, and they both recognized how important these routines were for their family. For Adam, yoga was a practice that helped them find ‘harmony in the home.’ In their second interview, he explained:

I think to me the biggest contributor to health and wellbeing is my meditation practice, and also being able to do yoga in the space. You know I’m not a big yogi in terms of asana practice like Rachel is, but I do a little bit and when I don’t do it, I feel like shit. And it’s good to be in a household where we have a common understanding that for us foundationally to be able to meditate optimally twice a day, and you know not small amounts, but 45 min twice a day, to be in a relationship where that is understood and it’s not like selfish or something like that. It’s really intensely supportive to our health and wellbeing. You know, emotional, choice making, it really bleeds through every part. Our ability to manage stress throughout the day, it really has a huge effect on all of that, you know, executive functioning, all that. And you know without it there is a deficit.

As Rachel and Adam illustrate, disruption to bodywork routines can have downstream effects, including adding strain on social relations, whereas maintaining a regular practice has a positive impact on the entire family.

These ethnographic insights suggest that yoga is a way to both create and maintain boundaries, such as those between work and home, between parent and child, and between partners or other people, in order to facilitate more interconnection. Thus, while yoga is something of a self-care and individuating practice, it facilitates participant desires for connection.

Backstage bodily practice, social heat, and energy

As I spent considerable time in Rachel and Adam’s home, I was able to witness how their practice also entered the backstage: the irregular placement of the yoga mats, the way that yoga blocks became playthings, and even the casual ‘downward dog,’ a playful name for an inversion asana common in yoga practices that the toddler liked to do in order to see the world upside down. While such practices are perhaps not as ordinary and routinized as cooking, eating, cleaning, or going to the bathroom, they still happened in an unspoken way on a daily basis. My own bodywork routines are not altogether dissimilar: while a certain intentionality is needed to actually practice yoga or work out, I often casually move into tree pose while cooking or working at my standing desk, balance on my yoga blocks as a type of absent-minded play, and swing from my pull-up bar while chatting with a friend on the phone. My yoga mat also regularly showed up on my Zoom during the covid-19 lockdown, when I was too lazy to put it away, which my students once collectively chuckled over as they remarked that they liked its presence.

Some backstage practices can become a part of the comfort of everyday life, and help sustain domestic sociality in part because they provide a tacit experience of sociality amongst household members. For instance, noting that the Japanese home is one where a balance ‘between dependence and autonomy’ is needed, Daniels (2015, 54) describes that ‘intimate forms of sociality, which do not necessarily sacrifice individual yearnings for relaxation and escapism, may emerge within a warm, expansive heat, that is generated by bodies in close proximity and assisted by heated technologies (whether they produce warm air or water).’ She describes how backstage practices such as sleeping, eating, and bathing, all help to generate social heat. Coziness, heat, and other sensory descriptors are often cited in literature on the home, particularly surrounding the production of a homely atmosphere (Bille 2017).

While the American notions of dependence and autonomy are certainly different from Japanese notions, Daniels’ idea that a homely atmosphere might somehow sustain a balanced resonates in the American context. It is not hard to imagine that yoga, which quite literally produces a kinaesthetic heat, might become a part of the sustainability of homey atmospheres. Personally, I encounter a sense of warmth and familiarity when I find out that others practice yoga, a quality that is heightened intimate relationships, particularly with a partner who also practiced yoga and during a period when I regularly went to yoga class with a friend and roommate. I also find that the bodily heat of my practice, whether in the studio or at home, is carried with me for hours or even days. I would not notice this if not from my occasional absence from yoga, when stiffness sets in and my body feels abnormally fragile and even cold. However, while in Japan, people may explicitly regard heat as part of the making of homey atmospheres, in the American home people might be more likely to speak of shared ‘energy.’

When I coded my fieldnotes and interviews, I found ‘energy’ to be one of the most common words used. Energy described anything from kinaesthetic or psychological capacity to the positive or negative feeling of a space, person, or thing. In regard to physical capacity—specifically bodywork—one participant referenced his ‘energy levels,’ which ‘skyrocket after a really good workout.’ Another found that drinking less alcohol gave her more energy, allowing her to focus on yoga, which was better for her wellbeing. One man once compared dissatisfaction at work to the gym: ‘it’s like when you go to the gym and you do the same fucking routine all the time, your body adapts to it, and it starts to get boring. That’s where I’m at with [my work]. But I don’t really have the energy to go where I want with it.’ Geographers Philo, Cadman, and Lea (2015, 40-41) note that ‘the forms of energy gathered into the bodies of human beings, as they convert nutrition into ‘muscular force,’’ have been ‘accorded scant attention.’ The ‘new energy geographies’ they describe not only include kinaesthetic energy, but affective energy, which attends to embodied experiences of spirituality, relationality, and emotion. This sense of affective energy is noted when Jesse described yoga as something that ‘resets my mind so I’m not bringing home any negative energy from work.’ Discussing mood or energy shifts resultant from bodywork is indeed so ubiquitous in my fieldwork, and indeed in the everyday lives of many academics, that it is easy to overlook ‘energy talk’ as a potential cultural phenomenon as Philo et al. define.

I suggest that energy talk also becomes another way to describe relational atmospheres. While this instance is not about bodywork, Adam once reflected that he did not like the ‘aesthetics’ of Rhode Island, which he described as ‘a depressed environment’ that made him ‘feel heavy.’ He mentioned going to the bay, and how it looked beautiful at first, but then you could not go into the water, and there was glass on the beach. ‘Just talking very energetically, there’s like a degraded quality that permeates everything.’ Such energy talk is spatially and socially relational, meaning that energies are carried into spaces and are felt within those spaces. Similar to Daniel’s observations, if yoga (and other bodywork) generates an affective energy (‘homeyness’) from a practice that is already both individual and socially attuned, yoga likely helps cultivate an enduring sense of domestic intimacy.

Discussion

This ethnographic exploration situates yoga within other bodywork routines and within the home, and complexifies perceptions of yoga, and bodywork more generally, as individualized practices. Interview data and other conversations with participants illustrate participants’ attempts to strike a balance between autonomy and social intimacy through their bodywork routines. While participants define bodywork as individualized self-care, they often do so in terms of their abilities to be good social humans, particularly with partners and children, but also with roommates and friends. Notably, time for individualized bodywork practices help demarcate a boundary between the home and work, or intimate others and the self; these boundaries in turn facilitate appropriate times and spaces for intimate connection. In other words, making time and space for intimate interconnectedness in the household is dependent on regular experiences of individual autonomy.

The individualist notion of wellbeing, which Crawford notes accompanies the rise of neoliberal ‘healthism’ amongst the American middle class, disguises the social complexity of embodied self-work. An individualist notion focuses on the individual body’s capacity to engage in practices deemed healthy, including the biological impact of the practice on the body (e.g., weight-loss, stress-reduction) and the practice’s influence on the individual mind or spirit. The fact that many participants articulated their bodywork as individual, biological activities situated in everyday social structures challenges the reach of ‘healthism’ into the intimate space of the home. As my fieldwork took place primarily in homes, I was able to observe such talk; it is quite possible that were I to conduct fieldwork in gyms or yoga studios alone, the social nestling of the individual might have been lost.

My ethnographic account incorporates the shared home (amongst roommates), couples, families (with two parents, one parent, or multi-generational) as well as single adults. Single adults living alone have their own notion of what constitutes domestic intimacy, be it with pets, lovers, close friends regularly coming over, or participating neighborhood communities. Their health and wellbeing practices still tend to reflect care for and attention to others through the maintenance of self-practices that increase their capacities for sociality. Regardless of home ‘type’, there is value in articulating the home context as a space that continuously challenges assumptions about American individualism.

Attending to affective energies further contests the neatness of the boundary between the self and others (Brennan 2004). As Brennan (2004, 2) articulates, while we have come to regard thought as socially constructed, Western scholars are often ‘particularly resistant to the idea that our emotions are not altogether our own.’ The ‘affective turn’ in anthropology helps elucidate our more ephemeral, non-material, and dispersive natures. Yoga is caught in this binary between the self and other, particularly in popular discourses of yoga as an individual, spiritual, and energetic practice (e.g. Philo, Cadman, and Lea 2015). By imagining the possibility of a yogic atmosphere of the home, we can begin to attune yoga to something beyond the body, something that is part of the bodies of others, and a part of the spaces the body inhabits during energetic shifts.

While this sample is too small to note any real differences between yoga and other bodywork, yoga appears to be more integrated into everyday home life than other bodywork routines. This may in part be because yoga’s materiality, including yoga props, mats, and especially yoga clothes, tends to be fairly well integrated into everyday life in this context. Yoga’s meditative nature—particularly breath work and devotional asanas—may also be easier to access in the home, and function with other meditative practices. Further, as other scholars have noted, yoga is historically recognized as heterogeneous, adaptive, and assimilative (Hauser 2013; Jain 2014), which may help it disperse into everyday life. Finally, if the practice of yoga produces more spiritual and emotional ‘energetic’ shifts, in addition to physical ones, as noted by Philo, Cadman, and Lea (2015) and my own participants, this affective energy would be carried with the body as an atmospheric presence. This energy would thus go wherever the body goes, for whatever period that energy is felt.

Conclusion

Having conducted fieldwork in households, and as a yoga practitioner myself, I characterize contemporary yoga in the US context as somehow pragmatic, fitting in to the everyday needs of its practitioners and filling certain longings or gaps in daily life. As a self-practice, yoga may help individuals escape the precarious conditions of the present, including economic, social, and political upheaval, by attuning themselves to the needs of the body, forcing them to step out of what Rachel once called the ‘rodent wheel’ of life. Part of this pragmatism, however, may lie in how yoga helps practitioners answer a concurrent need for autonomy and togetherness in their everyday, intimate lives. The practice of yoga not only attunes the individual to their own body, but also to the bodies of others, and to their impact on the energy of a space or environment. Similar to Daniel’s (2015) observations, it is the combination of the articulated need for autonomy and togetherness and the felt sense of ‘homeyness’ that sustains domestic intimacy in this context. If a practice can fulfil both these needs, as yoga does for some participants, it may have a more enduring effect on domestic intimacy and togetherness.

Ethical approval

This research was approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC) at the University of Oxford.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Drs. Susan MacDougall, Esra Kaytaz, Alison Shaw, Margot Weiss, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on various versions of this draft, as well as the participants in the panel Yoga Bodies and the Transformation of the Self, at the Association of Social Anthropologists Annual Conference in 2018. She is also indebted to her participants, one of whom offered comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author was partially supported with funding from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Magdalen College at the University of Oxford while conducting this research.

Notes

1 This area of my research most aligns with a move in the social sciences and humanities towards care oriented or heart-centred research (see for instance, Probyn 2016). To take part in a self-described ‘heart-centred’ yoga community as a peripheral element to the research practice was to learn this care on an embodied level from one of my participants.