Experiencing the Body in Yoga Practice inspires more mindful and contemplative qualitative research on body and knowledge transfer in bodily practices in hatha yoga. The book explores the work of the mind, as well as the role of emotions and body sensations in perceiving reality and in reflecting on it. Procedures and research methods are an extension of our mind, which wants to reach into the social reality to describe it objectively. It usually refuses body and emotions. The techniques of sampling and representativeness are also tools of the mind. Using these tools, our contact with social reality produces emotions and feelings of the body. These phenomena surrounding the mind and body often go unnoticed during research and are only partially reported in the conclusions. Experiencing the Body in Yoga Practice examines this gap. It presents the application of a contemplative way of thinking and proceeding in qualitative social research and a first-person perspective, focusing on experiencing lived body and knowledge transfer in hatha yoga. It analyzes how the mind focuses and stops working, proceeds in the limited province of the meaning of yoga, how the body produces emotions and deals with them during yoga sessions, and how the knowledge is transferred by using the body in some linguistic and cultural context. The book will be of interest to sociologists and social scientists who want to concentrate on and analyze the experiences of the body from contemplative and phenomenological perspective. It is also key reading for all practitioners dealing with body and bodywork, such as in sports, recreational activities, physical education, rehabilitation, physical work, educational activities, etc.

This book interprets the social significance of yoga in a world that emphasizes corporeality and the body. Immersing himself in the social world of hatha yoga participants, from an urban studio to a mountain retreat, the author's personal experience with positions and techniques, group meditation, and joint mantra is juxtaposed against interviews, photographs, video recordings on the social meaning of yoga, and philosophical analyses of where the physical and spiritual meet. This book's use of empirical qualitative research and participant observation allows for close analysis, even outright experiencing of the participants' world.

The book is about a new paradigm in social sciences, contemplative inquiry. It concerns theory, methods of research,and practical applications. Deep contemplation of a situation could be an epistemological choice for social scientists. It is a fundamentally different approach to research, whereby the investigator is researching not only the object, but also the situation of research and herself/himself in it. Contemplating is a dual way of approaching the truth. It does not mean that the researcher is mentally divided; on the contrary she/he wants to be complete and achieve the unity of being as a researcher-human being and as an element of the situation (psychosocial and historical). Contemplating enables researchers to see how the mind works and create images and reports from the field: What is available for the mind and what is silent or repressed because of the dominating rhetoric of description and rhetoric of feeling? Contemplation is not only analysis, it is also an ethical choice of stopping here and now to see the situation clearly and reporting it together with all th reservations that could result from the mindfully observed interaction of mind, self, and situation at one historical moment.