Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work in Yoga and Taiji Practice

Abstract

Based on our ethnographies of yoga and taiji, this chapter offers an analysis of “spirituality” and “internal movements,” not as subjective inner states, but as embodied work and social practices. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate just how, in the cases of teaching and learning yoga and taiji, these properties and details are involved in achieving “internal affairs,” whilst working with and oftentimes against one's “own body.” This chapter explores how embodied work is made observable and accessible to the practitioners themselves, when they pursue new ways of moving, feeling, thinking, perceiving, and so on. Instead of emphasizing essentially “exotic,” “special,” or “hidden” properties of yoga and taiji practice, we elucidate how they are embedded in everyday interactions and practices for achieving social order and thus also “internal order.” In this way, these cases pivotally utilize and ultimately challenge everyday, bodily situated, and socially oriented ways of “being-in-the-world” as well as the vernacular distinction between “inside” and “outside.”