“Like a Vibration Cascading through the Body”: Energy-Like Somatic Experiences Reported by Western Buddhist Meditators

There are numerous historical and textual references to energy-like somatic experiences (ELSEs) from religious traditions, and even a few psychological studies that have documented related phenomena. However, ELSEs remain an understudied effect of meditation in contemporary research. Based upon narratives from a large qualitative sample of Buddhist meditators in the West reporting meditation-related challenges, this paper offers a unique glimpse into how ELSEs play out in the lives of contemporary meditation practitioners and meditation experts. Departing from studies presuming a “kundalini awakening” framework, this paper presents a broader scope for understanding ELSEs by describing the metaphors practitioners used when speaking about them; the trajectories and impacts of ELSEs, including the factors that were reported as influencing their nature or trajectory; the various ways in which they were interpreted and appraised by practitioners, teachers, and specialists, such as doctors and therapists; and how practitioners responded to them or managed them with particular remedies. Deciding how to interpret and manage ELSEs entailed recruiting frameworks from within and/or beyond the meditator’s specific Buddhist lineage.

Dimensions of the ‘Body’ in Tranquility Meditation

A perusal of selected forms of early Buddhist tranquility meditation brings to light the complexity of the roles assumed by the Indic term kāya, usually translated as “body,” which corresponds to the domain of the first establishment of mindfulness. The present exploration of such complexity, which proceeds in critical dialogue with positions taken by Eviatar Shulman, covers the significance of the supernormal feat of conjuring up a mind-made body, the mindful contemplation of the somatic dimensions of absorption attainment, and the transition from these to the immaterial spheres. The patterns of early Buddhist thought that emerge in this way make it preferable to understand the compass of the term kāya to cover a continuum of somatic experiences that can range from gross materiality to more subtle types of embodiments. Even immaterial experiences, based on the complete transcendence of materiality, can still be conceptualized with the help of the term kāya in a phrase that serves to convey direct and personal experience.

Earth(l)y pleasures and air-borne bodies: Elemental haptics in women's cross-country running

A rich and multi-stranded sociology of sporting embodiment has begun to emerge in recent years. Calls have been made to analyze more deeply not only the sensory dimensions of lived sporting bodies but also the values prevailing within particular physical–cultural worlds. This article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing theoretical perspectives drawn from phenomenological sociology to explore cross-country runners' sensory encounters with the elemental, contoured by the values of the running lifeworlds they inhabit. Autoethnographic and autophenomenographic data were collected via three research projects. Senses of touch still remain under-researched within the sporting sensorium, and here we focus on the “elemental haptics” of earth and air on our cross-country training runs. We also explore the rich, complex somatic experiences afforded by various of these elemental combinations. For runners, as for many sports participants, the haptic emerges as a key aspect of our sensuous running lifeworld.

Embodied Engagements with the Megaliths of Carnac: Somatic Experience, Somatic Imagery, and Bodily Techniques in Contemporary Spiritual Practices

This article explores bodily interactions, somatic experiences, and embodiment of New Age and contemporary Paganism practitioners conducting spiritual practices in the megaliths of Carnac in northwest France. Inspired from the sensory ethnography approach and applying a specific methodological framework elaborated for this study, the article argues that participants’ spiritual experiences are constructed using three main elements: somatic experience, somatic imagery, and bodily techniques. Collected data provides understanding of the practitioner’s elaboration of spiritual experience, while also suggesting further inquiries to assess sensory models prevailing in contemporary spiritual practices.

(Re-)engaging touch as a tango dancer: An experimental framework for kinaesthetic listening1

This article explores how the felt sense of touch, as engaged through the enabling constraints of the Argentine tango duet, can facilitate an experience of kinaesthetic listening in the spaces emerging between the dancer’s inside and outside worlds. The author’s habitual perception of giving and receiving touch as a tango dancer is destabilized by framing a series of somatic experiences in settings where customary tango conditions and assumptions do not apply. This involves experimenting with methods and tools of inquiry borrowed from contact and contemporary dance improvisation. The article argues that when practiced as a form of kinaesthetic listening, tango is conducive to a process of sensing and feeling together. In this process, it becomes possible to be touched both physically and affectively by the movement impulses negotiated between the partners. This possibility unsettles the reductive idea of one’s body as a separate entity preceding the encounter.

Does inappropriate behavior hurt or stink? The interplay between neural representations of somatic experiences and moral decisions

Embodied models suggest that moral judgments are strongly intertwined with first-hand somatic experiences, with some pointing to disgust, and others arguing for a role of pain/harm. Both disgust and pain are unpleasant, arousing experiences, with strong relevance for survival, but with distinctive sensory qualities and neural channels. Hence, it is unclear whether moral cognition interacts with sensory-specific properties of one somatic experience or with supramodal dimensions common to both. Across two experiments, participants evaluated ethical dilemmas and subsequently were exposed to disgusting (olfactory) or painful (thermal) stimulations of matched unpleasantness. We found that moral scenarios enhanced physiological and neural activity to subsequent disgust (but not pain), as further supported by an independently validated whole-brain signature of olfaction. This effect was mediated by activity in the posterior cingulate cortex triggered by dilemma judgments. Our results thus speak in favor of an association between moral cognition and sensory-specific properties of disgust.

Body and belief in Timor-Leste

This chapter is based around the story of a young man from Oecussi called Jake Lasi. Born in a village where stones are sometimes sacred, his choice to later study geology raises a range of compelling ontological tensions. For he and his friends maintaining their connection to the land and the social networks embedded in it can be a matter of life or death. This chapter explores how meto spiritual and economic realities travel with highlanders who seek an urban life as somatic experiences of terror, sickness and death that question the nature of what it is we mean by the term ‘belief’.

The Body Responds

The first author uses a hermeneutic approach to reflect on her somatic experiences with clients diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa. Using poetry, imagery, and metaphor, as well as understandings drawn from the psychodynamic literature, she attempts to convey something of the nature of her journey towards making sense of her experiences. The second author was the supervisor of the first author’s dissertation, from which this article arose.

Mothering, Migration, and Im/mobility in the Age of the Muslim Ban

In this essay, I consider issues of migration and im/mobility through experiences as a qualitative researcher of the aftermath of mass violence. In doing so, I consider how the progression of my scholarship has occurred in tandem with the development of my identity as a mother, and contemporary geopolitics, all of which implicate questions about migration and mobility. Attending to the embodied, somatic experiences of both movement and the process of qualitative research, I engage issues of identity, particularly gender, sexuality, race, and nationality. While not re/solving the tensions of qualitative research addressing im/mobility, I illustrate the ongoing relationship between motherhood, movement, and migration.