In recent years, there has been a burgeoning of academic interest in exercise embodiment issues, including a developing field of phenomenologically inspired analyses of the lived body experience of physical activity and exercise. Calls have been made for researchers to explore the sensory dimension of such embodiment, and a corpus of sensory ethnographic studies is now beginning to grow, focusing on the ways in which people engage in ‘making sense of the senses’ within a sociocultural framework. This article contributes to a developing body of phenomenological-sociological empirical work on the sensory dimension, by addressing the lived experience of organised physical activities in ‘natural’ outdoor leisure environments. We draw upon the findings from a two-year ethnographic study of a Welsh national physical activity programme, ‘Mentro Allan/Venture Out’, which aimed to increase physical activity levels amongst specific ‘target groups’. Based on fieldwork and on interviews (n = 68) with Programme participants, here our analytic focus is upon the visual and the haptic dimensions of sensory engagement with organised outdoor leisure activities, including experiences of ‘intense embodiment’

Unlike the spectacular diffusion of modern Western sporting forms, Eastern movement forms (martial arts, Eastern dance, Yoga, meditation, Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, etc.) have been quietly entering the fabric of everyday Western life over the past few decades. Adopting a structurationist approach that seeks to retain relationships between macro-, meso- and micro-levels of culture, this article considers data gathered from a range of long-term Western practitioners of a variety of Eastern movement forms in juxtaposition to broader media and documentary data also gathered on these practices. The analysis explores three Western social forces (Orientalism, reflexive modernization and commodification.) identified as acting on these movement forms in ways that intensify the process of (re)invention of tradition with particular transformative tensions. In conclusion, we identify three dispositions (preservationism, conservationism, and modernization) emerging from our analysis of these movement forms that seem to drive how individuals respond to the transformative Western social forces highlighted.

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Th is paper explores the transformation of a dualistic mind-body relationship as reported by participants in a recent qualitative study involving modern yoga and meditation practitioners. Th e stories of the practitioners focused strongly on transforming a body-self that was confi gured as a result of living a life in Western cultural contexts where philosophies of mind-body dualisms were taken to underpin daily practices. Th e practitioners described a well-trodden somatic pedagogical pathway towards liberation from domination that they called 'physicalisation'. Th e paper illustrates physicalisation as cultivation of bodymind unity and de-identifi cation before exploring the three dimensions of the practitioners' embodied spatiotemporal transformations that we have termed: empowerment, mustery and negating domination.