The Feeling of Enlightenment: Managing Emotions through Yoga and Prayer

This paper explores how two spiritual communities—a Catholic prayer house and an Integral Yoga studio—shape the emotional lives of their members. I find that both organizations promise to facilitate what I call holistic emotional change: modifications of deep-seated emotional habits and dispositions. Moreover, both organizations transmit a comprehensive emotion management system—a regimen of different practices, or techniques of emotion management, with distinct goals and temporal horizons. At both sites, these practices—prospective, reflexive, and in situ techniques—are thought to work in tandem to overcome negative emotional habits and cultivate abiding dispositions of joy, peace, and contentment.

Duke Scholars

Author Erin Johnston