82 Spirituality Studies 11-2 Fall 2025 Rachel Brown Yogalands: In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World 1 Introduction It is not often that an academic book can also take up a prominent place on our bedside tables. I personally reserve that space for books that are a joy to read and usually have nothing to do with my scholarship, books whose sentences flow and that help me to encounter places and people that contribute to my maps of the world. Though Bramdat’s writing verges on the poetic, his methods remain those of an academic: Yogalands is a book that moved from my desk to my bedside table and back again. Yogalands is a book for scholars of religion, practitioners of yoga and the still-elusive category of scholar-practitioners. As a reader, I consider myself to be amongst the scholar-practitioners, but there was a time before belonging here that I was more comfortably ensconced in the skeptical scholar camp. I have had the privilege of reading Yogalands many times, both while wearing my critics’ lenses and now from my yoga practitioner vantage point. The book has been impactful for both versions of myself and this is what I think is the strength of this work: it can land with and challenge a scholarly audience, while also finding home with practitioners. Writing for an academic audience and a popular audience is almost impossible – writing for outsider, western trained, critical scholars of religion, while also writing to deep insiders who are passionate about their practices seems like a paradox. Yet, this is exactly what Bramadat has done with this book. The text is about yoga of course – or better, about ‘what yoga also is’ as Bramadat says – so scholars will find it intriguing, with many connections across its pages to other studies of modern postural yoga in North America. It is also about general trends in religion and spirituality in Canada and the US, about wellness discourses, and about the prevalence and impact of new spiritualities. But principally, in my reading, the core question that drives the work is what it means “to think dispassionately about anything – not just yoga but also religions, societies, families – that one loves passionately” (Bramadat 2025, 10). Book Review
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