A Spiritual Profit for Western Yogis? The spiritual significance of postural yoga for religious “nones”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is postural yoga evolving beyond merely a fitness practice into an important component of the spiritual lives of religious “nones” in British Columbia and perhaps elsewhere in North America? This article looks at Christian and Hindu perspectives of contemporary debates over the westernization of yoga, and utilizes qualitative survey data to investigate the spiritual value that yoga is taking on for nonreligious millennials seeking to enhance the self. Societal shifts indicate a growing cultural value of discovering one’s individual authenticity through self-development efforts, and research suggests that yoga is one way that this is being pursued. Using media coverage of two controversial Canadian incidents — the cancellation of a proposed mass yoga class on Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge, and the cancellation of a free annual yoga class over concerns of cultural appropriation at the University of Ottawa — this article explores different perspectives of practicing postural yoga in North America. It is argued that postural yoga is evolving into a spiritually beneficial or profitable component of the lives of many religious “nones”, and that future contestations of the practice of postural yoga may require consideration of its value in the spiritual lives of a growing population who have no religion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".