Physical Practice And Faith In Social Interaction

This thesis is a result of the research on the Sahaja yoga from an anthropological perspective. The data is gathered during the field work from July.2014 to March.2015. The purpose of the research is trying to provide some clues for answering the questions such as:Why did some people choose practicing Sahaja yoga? What are the characteristics they share and the distinctions they have? If possible, I hope I can further provide some clues on the questions such as:What is faith?During my field work, I became a Sahaja yogi myself, because I was advised by all of the practitioners that the only way to understand the benefits and characteristics of Sahaja yoga is to experience it, more important, this group of practitioners has very definite boundaries, which fairly restricted the communication of internal knowledge, and the only way to closely observe the group and Sahaja yoga is to become one of them. Later on I found this is the only way to have deep conversations with other practitioners and obtain valuable data. In the beginning, I took Sahaja yoga as a meditation method with Hindu background.But then I realized it’s a organization whose practitioners hold a special worldview of theism. The founder of Sahaja yoga, Shri Mataji, is the guru of the practitioners whose footprints have spread globally including more 100 countries. The members of this organization treat each other equally in the name of brothers and sisters, and they have fairly often communications from time to time among different cities and countries. This organization has already become a object of anthropological research, which means I have to modify my original research method, which is focusing on the meditating method, to the one that focuses on the both the method and the organization formed by practitioners. I wish to describe the process of the establishment of their faith through three perspectives:bodily sensation, charisma and social interaction.