(R)Evolution Toward Harmony: A Re/Visioning of Female Teen Being in the World : The Un/Layering of Self Through Hatha Yoga

• Main Author: Kyte, Darlene
• Other Authors: Sanford, Kathy
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Female Teens; Yoga; Embodied; Emancipatory; Consciousness Raising; Self-hood; Transformative; Arts Based; Self-awareness; Performative Inquiry
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5358

This work is a collectivist engagement between researcher and participants in a knowledge quest for self-hood through engaged bodily awareness and sense. The world of the teen girl is explored from a philosophical, social, and political perspective that emphasizes expression of self through embodied knowing and being. The process is performative where yoga is used as an arts-based method to explore the self through bodily awareness. The body is reclaimed as a way to know oneself. Yoga is the expression of the living, being, and knowing body. The asana practice, the still of meditation, and the flow of the breath are emancipatory discourse where each of us moves, changes, and grows; and ultimately becomes. This becoming is a consciousness raising experience that finds and grows voice. The transformative process engages a physical expression where participants’ and researcher’s individual sense of self is connected with their universal sense of self hereby replacing current patterns of harmful thinking with new consciousness that is reflective of self awareness and realization. Found poetry is used to explore the experience of the participants. The poetic representation brings the reader into the world of the teen girl. Voices that have been secret and silenced are celebrated. The body is the instrument through which power and ownership of the moment and the self are expressed through emotion and experience. The participants and researcher move collectively and intuitively from passive objects to self-knowing subjects; subjects who are thoroughly engaged in the world and aware of their highest potential as liberated selves. The findings of this collectivist and activist research approach indicate that embodied engagements elicit the space where flesh speaks and external and internal become unified as one. Yoga is an artful, embodied expression that is about experiencing the world without being enslaved by the world. This is not a passive engagement but an activist engagement that challenges hegemonic ideas of girls in the world and in the world of a girl. This further embraces the idea of the unity of whole-self and mind-body interconnectedness where we are not passive observers of the body with awareness of self located in the head watching over the body as object. Subject and object as separate dissolve and mindfulness is the present. The end result is one where we become; we become fully engaged in a creative and fluid self-hood enabling self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-love. === Graduate === 0727 === 0525 === 0273 === [e-mail]