The term habitus as defined by Bourdieu (Wikipedia link) is about how we bring our cultural history and social background into the present circumstances. It is about how our past socialisation guides us in our current action and in our interpretation of the situation that we are facing. In relation to yoga culture habitus is about our attitudes and dispositions forming the emerging popular yoga field. It is about how existing cultural programs (existing mental habits) become part of the new yoga discourses and the newly crystallising cultural fields, how the new is formed by the past. More specifically we are investigating how spiritualism and romanticist holism – both belonging to the Western female middle class’s habitus – interacted with the formation of popular modernist yoga.
Another universal symbol for the soul, water possesses the power to cleanse, heal, and transform.Standing Half Forward Bend Water provides transportation and sets boundaries here on earth, as well as within the spiritual realm. In Hinduism, rivers, for example, symbolize purification. In Christianity, baptism in water provides the ritualized washing away of one’s sins.
Standing Half Forward Bend Islam places an important emphasis on water in its depictions of heavenly paradise. Water’s personality is as diverse as its many different forms. Fire Fire has been revered as the source of light and the essence of divinity. It creates and destroys, and is associated with things both demonic and divine.
