Contemplating Phenomenology, Yoga, and the Embodied Sharing of Meaning

Experiencing the Body in Yoga Practice: Meanings and Knowledge Transfer By Krzysztof T. Konecki, Aleksandra Płaczek, and Dagmara Tarasiuk (Routledge, 2024) As an interpretive scholar of the body who has enjoyed years of yoga classes, I was pleased to review this volume. Konecki, Płaczek, and Tarasiuk have provided a descriptive phenomenological analysis of the experiences of individuals, including students; yoga instructors; and researchers who practice Hatha Yoga. The phenomenological approach taken in their research is one in which, à la Husserl, they seek to discover and analyze the Platonian essence of individuals' experience; a topic of debate within phenomenology where others argue that determining essential truths that are "unchanging, eternal, complete, separate from existence" is impossible (Wertz 2015:87). Instead, one must pursue the Aristotelian concept of edios whereby what we come to know as conceptual truth is derived from empirical research where findings are true in their own contexts. Far less often the authors refer to insights from Meadian-Blumarian symbolic interactionism and, while they occasionally cite Simmel, they curiously do not when they discuss the senses. The findings presented in this volume come from the authors' contemplative grounded theory study of Hatha Yoga practice. Their methodological approach included the techniques of meditation and self-observation, where they used their own experiences as yoga students and teachers as data in its own right, along with data collected from other research participants. In Part I, the authors present their analysis of embodied knowledge transfer. A key finding is how instructor verbal communication, not only tactile manipulation of students' bodies, enables students to feel particular bodily sensations (p. 31). Another important insight in these chapters is the distinction they draw between "theoretical knowing how" and "practical knowing how" where the latter involves embodied knowledge that is so deeply internalized that it allows for bodily movement that is nonreflexive; yet, at other times, is used consciously as a means of refining and perfecting one's yoga postures (p. 24). Finally, Part I includes analysis of coexperiencing bodies within the physical spaces in which yoga is practiced. Konecki, Płaczek, and Tarasiuk found that different types of spaces, such as specifically designed yoga studios, organic spaces like parks, or gyms, impact students and instructors differently. Gyms were negatively evaluated as noisy and not conducive to the contemplative nature of yoga practice. The authors turn to how embodied emotions are integral to the construction and experience of the self in Part II. They describe how students and instructors seek to control and avoid emotional responses during yoga practice. Among the sources of emotion they document are those that are of "bodily origin" including "hunger, fatigue," and infamously, as the source of many comedy routines about yoga, "flatulence" (p. 134). They found that the experience of these bodily sensations or observing them in others lead, variously, to emotions such as shame, anger, and irritation. Other expressions of emotion, like the pain that can occur from holding certain postures, provoke feelings of "relief and joy" when those postures are released (p. 135). When not in the presence of their instructors, yoga students disclosed emotions such as "anxiety or fear" (p. 134) about experiences of unexpected pain or their lack of expertise in executing postures. In Part II how the body is experienced when yoga is used as a therapeutic modality is also highlighted. Following a relatively lengthy review of the literature on the health benefits of yoga practice, the authors' analysis reveals that their informants see yoga as a holistic modality that addresses "mind, body, and spirit" and where "relaxing the body therefore relaxes the mind, thus causing regeneration, calmness, and a sense of detachment" (pp. 171–172). Again, the authors emphasize the role played by space and place in the therapeutic efficacy of yoga. Specifically that the "grounding" of the person is both "physical and mental" when postures connect the body to the literal ground, as is the case when yoga is practiced in nature, leading to "greater focus, tranquility, joy, relaxation, and a sense of lightness or purity" (pp. 174–175). In the final section of the book, Part III, the authors discuss the social reality of yoga. They present their analysis of the role concentration plays in yoga practice as well as how the ability to ignore certain stimuli refines focus. Their analysis here reflects Blumer's interpretation of the Meadian dictum that what we know to be our minds exist "in the form of the social or communicated activity one carries on with one's self" (pp. 199–200). The authors examine how the socialized mind finds meaning in things through a synthesis of our past, present, and anticipated future. This makes the deeper concentration of meditation in yoga difficult because not only do external stimuli like sounds, light, and the presence of others distract, but our internal, yet still socially informed, conversations with ourselves do as well. In addition, this section includes a useful diagram that shows the overarching process of achieving mindfulness that involves the dual processes of "concentration" and "deconcentration" (p. 210). They describe how advanced yoga practitioners can experience a form of "exultation" where the "feeling of time is almost completely concentrated on dureé"; the subjective experience of the flow of consciousness where "the objective linear time of the external world is not experienced … and where cosmic time is incorporated into the subjective experience of dureé" (p. 237). The strengths of this volume lie in the rich data the authors present about the embodied experience of the practice of Hatha Yoga, including how knowledge is transferred, how emotions play a significant role, and the experience of the social space of Hatha Yoga as a "finite province of meaning" where "yoga gives us distance from the taken for granted life-world" (pp. 229, 240). It also rests on the thoroughness with which Konecki, Płaczek, and Tarasiuk use their findings to illustrate key features of phenomenological, and occasionally, symbolic interactionist theory related to the embodied sharing of meaning. In addition, the many conceptual models of process they include, like the process of concentration (p. 210) and the process of reconstructing self in yoga practice (p. 178), are useful in helping the reader to understand the complexity of the experiences of their informants. Although, some processes, such as the process of knowledge transfer (p. 43), are so complex that they do not lend themselves to graphic representation and are thus confusing, rather than enlightening. Despite these contributions there are problems that detract from the strength of this volume. For instance, the authors make more than one declarative statement, that they do not support with explanation or evidence, that are contestable on a prima facie basis. For instance, they write that "sociologists usually treat common sense thinking and constructs as taken for granted … and they do not analyze how common-sense language has influenced the scientific construction of reality" (p. 6), despite scholarship devoted to the social construction of scientific knowledge that does just that. The authors also make claims about the scholarly import of their research that they do not concretely demonstrate such as the considerable "contribution" they claim to make to "sociological theories of embodiment" (p. 279). While their research certainly makes a substantive contribution to the phenomenological and symbolic interactionist literature on the experience of the body, it is not clear how the book moves beyond illustrating, rather than transforming theory in some fundamental way. Additionally, while the authors do make the important point that findings must be contextualized, aside from brief mention of yoga in the context of Western society or general statements like "socialization differs experiences across cultures" (p. 1), they do not discuss the specific historical, political, socio-cultural, and biographical contexts relevant to their findings. Also problematic are issues related to how the volume was composed. While the authors state that they "wrote the book together," each was responsible for writing different chapters and all three jointly wrote the introduction and conclusions (p. 7). This has led to unnecessary repetition where they discuss methodology in several chapters, as well as in the introduction and in a methodological appendix. It also gives the impression that the chapters are based on separate studies and reads as a sandwich thesis, where three separate articles are bookended by introduction and conclusion, rather than an integrated volume. In addition, the authors claim that "this book will be of interest to … all practitioners dealing with the body … such as in sports, recreational activities, physical education, rehabilitation, physical work, educational activities, etc." (Preface). However, their discussion of phenomenological theory is at the highest level of abstraction through the use of undefined concepts that only sophisticated phenomenologists would understand. Further, the discussions contained in the conclusions to chapters often read more as justifications or rationales for their study that one would find in a proposal, rather than efforts to use their findings to interrogate the literature. A further issue with how the book is written concerns the authors' inconsistent use of a variety of terms to refer to the people who took part in their research. These include exerciser, student, teacher, instructor, and respondents; as well as practitioner, a term that refers variously and interchangeably to students, teachers, and the researchers, all of which makes it difficult to know whose experience is being referred to in the analysis. And there are random words and phrases in bold text with no explanation of why some were bolded and not others. Sometimes it is clear that a concept is being highlighted, but not in other cases. Finally, I ordinarily would not comment on style matters in a scholarly review; however, such issues of prose merit mentioning when they are such that they interfere with the reading of the book. The result of insufficient copyediting, the book is replete with grammatical and other errors of writing, including cases of repetition, sentences where words are missing, and many, many instances where present tense is required, yet future tense is used, making it seem as if one is reading a proposal, not a presentation of completed analysis. Thus, in sum, Konecki, Płaczek, and Tarasiuk's Experiencing the Body in Yoga Practice: Meanings and Knowledge Transfer is by turns both an interesting analysis of the body in the finite world of meaning of yoga and a book that is at times painful to read. Jacqueline Low is a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Her areas of expertise include the sociology of health and the body; deviance and social problems; symbolic interactionism and interpretive theory more generally; as well as qualitative methods, in particular grounded theory. She is coeditor of Sociology of the Body: A Reader, 2nd ed. and among her most recent publications is "Interpreting Disability: Epistemological insights and Methodological Strategies," in Handbook of Interpretive Research Methods, Elgar Publishers, in press.