Read: Conspiracy and co-regulation

A thumbnail image of Ty Gunnard’s infamous ‘Great Awakening’ poster

I have been putting the finishing touches to a new academic article on conspiracy theories and yoga, titled Conspiracy and co-regulation: meaning-making in contemporary wellness. It’s just passed peer review, and will be published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. As it’s behind an academic paywall, many of you won’t be able to read it. At some point, I want to produce a more accessible version that any yoga teacher can read, but in the meantime, as a gift for my paid subscribers, here’s two of the most important sections of the article – from the start and the conclusion.

Introduction

Global responses to the pandemic were complex and unprecedented in many ways, but included removing in-person access to community spaces of all kinds, worldwide, to diverse degrees. In the years since, ethnographers of contemporary wellness movements, including yoga, have also seen a global rise in what Ward and Voas (2011) first termed ‘conspirituality’ in this journal. During the COVID pandemic, conspirituality discourses became increasingly prominent within yoga communities, in online and offline spaces, and personal and professional contexts. By the end of 2020, one of the yoga world’s most prominent commentators, Matthew Remski, had even joined two contemporaries to start a well-known podcast simply entitled ‘Conspirituality’ (Beres, Remski, and Walker 2023). Suffice it to say that for many commentators and researchers of contemporary yoga, and for wellness practices more broadly, ‘conspiracy theories’ and similar politicised, marginalised knowledges, have become a newly inescapable part of the research field (see as examples Baker 2022; Conner 2023; Heřmanová 2022; Olsson 2024).

Therefore, the question this article starts with is this:

Why are contemporary yoga communities so vulnerable to ontologies that rationalise felt experiences of isolation with marginalised sources of knowledge?

Or in simpler terms:

Why were so many avowedly apolitical or liberal yoga practitioners drawn to often far-right conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic?