Listening to kinaesthetic experiences: a phenomenological, pedagogical, and sonic inquiry into vinyasa yoga practices

This study explores practitioners’ kinaesthetic experiences across three styles of vinyasa yoga: Tripsichore Yoga (London), Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga (Edinburgh/Porto Alegre), and Vinyasa Krama (Online). These contemporary practices have evolved from post-Krishnamacharya and post-harmonial influences in the modern yoga milieu. The research pursues three key aims that synthesises phenomenological, pedagogical and sonic inquiries, drawing on approaches and ideas from philosophy, anthropology and art. Firstly, it explores the kinaesthetic experiences practitioners report during their vinyasa yoga practice, examining how these experiences change across different styles of practice. Secondly, it studies how yoga teachers’ pedagogical approaches influence practitioners’ kinaesthetic learning, with a focus on the implications of these approaches for theories of embodiment and knowledge transmission in practice. Thirdly, it applies field recording and feminist sound praxis as a politics of approach to challenge the visual representation of yoga in media. The phenomenological findings tune in to the conceptual ‘low frequencies’ of practitioners’ kinaesthetic experiences, from the felt resonances and dissonances they report during the process of learning and practising yoga. The sonic inquiry amplifies the audible aspects of practice, predominately the shifting rhythms of breathing and moving in each style of vinyasa yoga. The research contributes to the theory of ‘enskilment,’ emphasising the ‘soft’ pedagogical approaches teachers employ in the learning environment. It offers a new perspective on the rhizome metaphor used in yoga research by considering the changing physiological, relational and ecological affordances of the ‘rhizosphere’. Field recordings are not simply treated as passive data objects that represent a field ‘out there,’ but as fluid research material in a collaborative research-creation project titled Oceano Respiração, made in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Ultimately, this study offers a novel contribution to yoga studies and sound studies, revealing the inherent temporality of kinaesthetic learning, which spark broader theoretical and existential reflections within research in the arts and humanities.