The term yoga has many different referents, as it always has. Often translated from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning “yoke” or “union,” it can also simply mean “path” in popular Hindi parlance. Like any path, it can take the traveler to many different territories. The fact that one is on a path does not define where one ends up. It is the direction of the path that determines the destination. Foregrounding this colloquial definition perhaps makes it easier to reckon with the extraordinary diversity in contemporary yoga practice.
There are distinctive features to yoga in the United States today that signify seismic shifts from its lengthier and more diverse tradition in South Asia. Coordinated sequences of postures have become central, and the notion that yoga should be practiced because it is good for bodily health has become widely accepted. What has become popular practice in the United States is a “virtual hegemony of a small number of posture-oriented systems in the recent global transmission of yoga, [which] has reinforced a relatively narrow and monochromatic vision of what yoga is and does, especially when viewed against the wide spectrum of practices presented in pre-modern texts.”105 These are particular developments that stem from a host of social and historical conditions that have been widely discussed by scholars of modern postural yoga.106
The yogis in this study emerge from a variety of yoga classes, studios, and teacher trainings. However, the very fact that they are participating in transformational festivals means that they are at least nominally interested in the notions of spiritual transformation or raising consciousness. Isolating this intersection between physical and metaphysical aims immediately eliminates the majority of yoga practitioners in the United States, who attend yoga classes online, in their gyms, at Pilates studios, and in physically oriented yoga franchises like CorePower Yoga.107 There may be some overlap, however. At Shakti Fest, I was once situated behind a man in a yoga class who had a CorePower Yoga tattoo on his right shoulder. Still, it does mean that at this particular juncture in their spiritual journeys or yoga practice, these practitioners are looking for something more.
As will be discussed in detail in the pages that follow, yoga classes offered at transformational festivals, despite the diversity of yogic lineages represented, tend to be more focused on incorporating spiritual or metaphysical concerns. Discourses of this particular strain of yoga, what we might delimit as “soteriological” yoga,108 attempt to draw yogis into the broader philosophical tradition and extend their interest in the practice beyond its physical effects. The yoga mat is repositioned as a space of self-inquiry and connection to divinity, a sacred space wherein the individual sanctifies a space of introspection through a daily practice. Many of these practitioners are also exposed to Indic yoga traditions through travels to devotional centers in Asia and the reading of Indic scriptures. Usually, this involves exposure to “a small canon of texts, which includes the Bhagavadgītā, Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the Haṭhapradīpikā and some Upaniṣads,”109 which are incorporated into yoga teacher training programs. In particular, Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras has been elevated to the position of a canonical urtext for many contemporary yogis, as it is referenced and taught in yoga classes and teacher training at levels far beyond that of any other Indic text.110 As a result, this study privileges this text above others when analyzing and interpreting how yoga teachers translate Indic philosophical discourses for their students. This methodological decision is not an attempt to justify the elevation of the Yoga Sūtras but rather an effort to trace yoga teachers’ discourses to the primary interpretive frames that inform them.
In addition to references to religious scriptures, there are other markers that attempt to define yoga performed at transformational festivals as spiritual. Some yoga classes incorporate guided meditations, partner-based spiritual exercises, rituals, prayers, and ecstatic dance accompanied by devotional music. At Bhakti and Shakti Fests, devotional music (kīrtan) accompanies nearly all of the yoga classes, drawing on the strengths of the assembled kīrtan musicians at the festivals. It is also commonplace to see yogis marking their yoga mats with talismans, mālās (prayer beads), Native American ceremonial pipes, chakra wands, crystals, and other sacred objects. Some write their intentions and affirmations on pieces of paper and slip them under the mat as they practice, invoking the twenty-first century iteration of the New Thought notion that repeating affirmations attracts “harmonizing vibrations” and eventually makes them become reality.111 Stepping on someone’s yoga mat with outdoor shoes is a faux pas that warrants an apology for the defilement of their designated sacred space. The body-length rectangle of the yoga mat draws boundaries between the sacred and the profane and sanctifies the practice on the yoga mat as distinct and “special,”112 set apart from actions that occur outside of the mat.
Methodologically, focusing on the practice of yoga was particularly revealing because teachers espoused their spiritual values in lengthy lectures during postural practice. The yoga class provided a means of drawing practitioners into a receptive state wherein teachers could then influence them to adopt a distinct set of values or practices. Yoga classes are an exercise in acquiescence and social (group) influence on individual behavior. Students are told to move their bodies in particular ways, and they are praised for the skill with which they mimetically model the teacher. This builds a relation of receptivity on the part of the student that is bodily, psychological, and somatic. In shaping the body and mind to the teacher’s demands, students become mentally and physically supple. Through group yoga practice, they are conditioned to be receptive to a teacher’s philosophical interventions.
Exercise-oriented yoga studio spaces are wary of this reality and often restrict what yoga teachers can say outside of directions related to bodily postures. Usually, yoga teachers are under advisement (or contract) not to cross boundaries into religion or philosophy. But in the yogic spaces of transformational festivals, yoga teachers use the opportunity to attract students by espousing their distinctive modes and philosophies. During our interview, Bija Rivers explained: “A festival class is not the city yoga class. The boundaries are expanded so people are more open—like in terms of Bhakti Fest—people are more open to the interior aspects—and in particular, what is bhakti? It is unusual for a spiritual tradition to really highlight that, and I think it is really helpful for the yoga tradition, which seems to be, in the mainstream reflections, propelled by people who are curious and get into yoga for physical reasons.”113 Yoga classes are a site of reproduction, wherein the values and practices of SBNR communities are generated and sustained. Attention to these sites of reproduction provides answers to the enduring question of how social values are produced and reproduced in the absence of overt and explicit directives.
As I discuss in chapter 5, my research suggests that these sites of value reproduction/production are surprisingly consistent in their messaging. The core tenets of this ideological commons are iterated in myriad ways, in a variety of vernaculars. But despite their diffusion and transience, the messages promoted and received at transformational festivals and during yoga practice construct institutions of spirituality that bind practitioners in ways that are recognizable and remarkably constant. These consistencies of message are what form an ideological field of continuity. Within these ideological affinities, this ephemeral yet connected anthropological field emerges.
Between 2011 and 2019, I attended twenty-three festivals over a total of approximately 129 days. I have sorted, transcribed, and coded my audio recordings from approximately ninety-seven interviews, fifty-six spiritual workshops and lectures, and sixty-two yoga classes. I also attended related events, such as kīrtan gatherings in local yoga studios, yoga classes, Burner meetups, and social gatherings. In most of these environments, I was both a participant and an observer. I participated in kīrtan, workshops, guided meditations, and yoga classes. I had my astrological chart read, and I danced, made new friends, and in time, ran into familiar faces and developed lasting friendships. Sometimes I sat in the back of these spaces, recorded, and took notes. In 2015, I was part of the sevā (selfless service) team at Shakti Fest and worked several volunteer shifts. In 2017, faced with the retirement of the existing leadership team, I stepped into a leadership role for the French Quarter Black Rock Bakery at Burning Man.114 This role taught me a tremendous amount about the backstage and production aspects
