Becoming the Universe: Self-Realization and Meditative Practices in the Sahaja Yoga Community of the Czech Republic

In recent years, meditation has gained significant popularity worldwide, especially with the mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation, which is widely promoted as a tool for self-development. The expansion of meditation research, including the field of contemplative neuroscience, has contributed to the legitimization of meditation, bridging traditional spiritual practices with scientific inquiry.

This paper explores the anthropology of self-realization within the Sahaja Yoga community, as a lower-legitimacy movement, that offers a unique perspective on meditative practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a post-socialist region of the Czech Republic, this study investigates the meditation as a culturally situated practice where bodily experience is shaped by broader discourses of power, capitalism, and biomedical knowledge. The study addresses how Sahaja Yoga practitioners negotiate sensory boundaries and conceptualize the body in contrast to biomedicine's emphasis on the physical body.

The project seeks to address the following questions: What role does the body play in a community focused on self-realization, especially in relation to biomedical understandings of the body? How are sensory boundaries negotiated and performed in the Sahaja Yoga community? And what makes the meditative movement (il)legitimate for the meditation researchers in the Czech Republic? The paper thus contributes to the fields of anthropology of religion, medical anthropology, and sensory anthropology by offering insights into the lived experiences and cultural dynamics of a meditative community navigating the intersection of spirituality, healthcare and science.