VOLUME 11 ISSUE 2 FALL 2025

84 Spirituality Studies 11-2 Fall 2025 As a critical scholar of religion, chapter 2 – Religionish – is a gem for anyone interested in the ways religion shows up in various contexts, the ways people engage with it, and what that tells us about broader societal trends and experiences. Here Bramadat shows through his data how 1) religion is on the decline and a source of unease, 2) the way people talk about yoga tells us something about the broader culture, 3) there is plenty of evidence of orientalism, and 4) students and teachers of yoga have variable levels of knowledge about their practice and the religious elements/ background to it (Bramadat 2025, 70–78). One can only work with the data one has, but I was left wondering after reading this chapter about other religious backgrounds/cultures of yoga practitioners beyond those who are Christian or none – how this chapter might work out differently if a practitioner was Hindu or Muslim, for example. For many religious studies scholars who do ethnographic fieldwork, at some point we come face to face with the problem of magic. In Yogalands, you can see how Bramadat has an openness to magic (the mystical, the other worldly, the inexplicable) when it shows up. He shows how to be an effective ethnographer, you need to leave space for the possibility that enchanted elements of the community, practice, or tradition one is studying could be real. The whole of chapter 4 on so-called Superpeople is case in point as you see there how Bramadat, and others around them, are often times blinded by the light of these ethereal beings. True to his commitment of being open to the idea of magic, his writing here gleams like copper. The same dedicated attention he has shared of his own practice shines in his descriptions on these magical people and moments, “The research assistant shared my impression: Toni was enthralling. In her presence, time seemed to pass differently. We left her home rather reluctantly, I confess, and were briefly speechless as we drove away, with the first words in the car being ‘what just happened?’” (Bramadat 2025, 140). Bramadat reflects how as much as he didn’t want to move to the west coast and become a deep insider (practicing yoga, getting a kayak and a tattoo), he also “did not want to become that other guy: the one whose disciplined approach to thinking about religion ruins any chance of having religious experiences” (Bramadat 2025, 200). Many of us become ‘that guy’ in our scholarship but in Yogalands the reader can see the potential for rich engagement with the bits of our work that are sometimes hard to explain and just need to be experienced. 3 Reading from a Practitioner Perspective Once my deeply engrained trauma was healed by and through my yoga practice, and after yoga changed everything for me, I picked up this book again and found myself reading it in a completely different way than before. Instead of being annoyed by the uncritical ‘amazing grace’ stories found throughout yogaland by practitioners of all sorts, I now nodded along – past me would have been incredulous. I saw myself, my story, reflected in the words on the page, in the stories of the practitioners, in words of the writer’s own practice. It’s from here that I found the heart of the text to be chapter 3 The Body Settles the Score. In this chapter Bramadat outlines how yoga, for the practitioners he interviewed, and for himself, helps fragile bodies cope with the hostile world. He shows how, à la Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score, but goes on to offer the brilliant insight that the body also settles the score (Bramadat 2025, 107). From my own experience, no amount of talk therapy would have healed my trauma, the trauma kept in the body had to be settled in the body, and yoga was the door to this process. In Yogalands, and in this chapter in particular, Bramadat provides academic language to help story some of this often inexplicable experience. While reading the book from this vantage point, I wondered, alongside the stories of how yoga can help practitioners heal from trauma, what about the stories of the ways that yoga has also traumatized? Bramadat deals with the MeToo moment in yogalands (Bramadat 2025, 162–178), but I was curious about more subtle traumas that get ignited on the mat and wondered if any of his interlocutors reflected on whether or not there might be a downside to opening oneself up to the settling the score process. A prominent yoga teacher and scholar once said to me, “Yoga has this funny way of both shaking things up and giving you the tools to deal with it.” Perhaps this could be another place to allow for practitioners to critically engage with their own practice; to see that one can doubt, can sometimes feel uncomfortable, and that they are not alone in that experience. As I read Yogalands as an insider-practitioner, I found myself wondering if practitioners should, like critical scholars, “know better” than to take up a practice that is rife with issues of appropriation and colonial imposition – issues that Bramadat deals with skillfully throughout and especially in

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUwMDU5Ng==