Learning to feel: on practice and precarity in an Amsterdam yoga studio

Abstract

This article articulates the practice of learning to feel taught in an Amsterdam yoga studio. Tattva Yoga constitutes one localized manifestation of postural yoga practices flourishing within neoliberal systems worldwide. As a scene of adjustment (Berlant, in Cruel optimism, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011) to conditions of precarity which shape the everyday lives of participants, Tattva Yoga encourages students to cultivate feelings of flexibility, openness, and balance. A close reading of Tattva Yoga practices identifies a performative logic to feeling, through which embodied action constitutes a form of subject cultivation. The case study, thus, offers an exploration of feeling as the intersection of body, subject, affect, and discourse, and as one means through which individuals enact subjectivities both continuous with and alternate to the demands of precarity.