Working with a Body: Flexible Conceptual Models in Contemporary Yoga

This chapter analyses two contrasting examples of yoga for health and healing, namely the popular American YouTuber Adriene Mishler and Swami Ramdev, who has been described as the most popular tele-healer in contemporary India. By exploring these two apparently contrasting examples, this chapter elucidates the variety of ways the body is understood and explained. A schema of different bodies will be suggested that includes anatomical (biomedical), ayurvedic (systems focus), yogic (energy focus) and soteriological framings of suffering. It is argued that (in most cases) practitioners move flexibly between these different ways conceptualising the body – and that this flexibility of understanding the body is an essential aspect of how practitioners experience health and healing in yoga spaces.