Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in everyday mobilities: the practice of prayer and meditation in corporeal travel

Abstract

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Transformative mindfulness: the role of mind-body practices in community-based activism

“…can be transformed through specific practices such as prayer and meditation that contribute to personal spirituality'. 80 Here, we argue that mind-body practices, specifically those self-described as mindfulness, can offer an instrumental and integral way activists can further their activist aims. Instrumentally, this is through steeling the personal self to be more resilient in the face of the challenges their activism faces.…”

Sonic spaces, spiritual bodies: The affective experience of the roots reggae soundsystem

“…Whereas research was once dominated by the study of organised religions and the institutionalised praxis of religiosity, it has since given way to the exploration of more individualised interpretations and experiences of belief. This embrace of the “disruptive and unpredictable salience of the spiritual” (Dwyer, , p. 758; see also Kong, ; Bartolini et al., , ) is enshrined in Dewsbury and Cloke's () notion of a “spiritual landscape” and has yielded exploration of the everyday ways in which the spiritual becomes manifest – ways that often go beyond or reside outside of the formal prescriptions of religious spaces (Mills, ; Williams, ; Wigley, ; see also Holloway & Valins, ). Complementing this is an avenue of research that has adopted post‐phenomenological approaches to exploring the sensuous experience of the sacred by locating spirituality within the body (e.g., Holloway, , ; Maddrell, ; see also Kong, ).…”

“…Importantly, this has opened the discourse up to how the “affective registers of time and space” (Dwyer, , p. 760) intersect with notions of religion and spirituality. Finlayson (, p. 304), for example, has shown how the sacred is “decidedly transient” and is only brought about through active processes of sacralisation in place, whilst Wigley () draws on the new mobilities paradigm to show how spiritual praxis is not confined to codified religious spaces, but can also be conducted during the flows and movements of everyday life. In spite of these notable developments, exploration of the affective qualities of space remains “largely absent from the literature” (Finlayson, , p. 307), as does a related focus on how different sensory experiences can either enhance or diminish such affectiveness (Williams, ; after Kong, , ; Dewsbury & Cloke, ).…”

“…I agree with these critiques and also contend that religion and spirituality are too easily and too often conflated, with spirituality typically being treated as an embodied response to religious belief. For example, Williams's () study locates spirituality within the framework of pre‐existing Pentecostal belief, whilst Wigley's () does so within a slightly looser framework of Baptist Christianity and Buddhism. To overcome the ascriptive impulses of religious belief, more work needs to be done to decouple spirituality from religion and explore it on its own terms instead.…”

“…Beyond conflation, religion tends to colonise spirituality, yet spirituality is much more nebulous and fleeting than the religious experience to which it may be ascribed. Spirituality speaks from within, rendering it a highly personal and subjective phenomenon (see Wigley, ). It is engaged through feeling, not constructed through thought.…”