Interconnectedness: Yoga and ecology

Author Identifier

Sarah Louise Gates

http://orcid.org/0009-0008-1683-2414

Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

School

School of Arts and Humanities

First Supervisor

Janine Joyce

Second Supervisor

Elizabeth Boyd

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential for yoga to contribute to sustainability objectives via pro-social and environmental attitudes and behaviours. It locates core principles and concepts embedded within the meaning of the term interconnectedness in both western and eastern histories of ideas, with particular emphasis on yoga, integralism, and ecological theory. It evaluates and investigates yoga's potential toward recognition or realisation of a non-dualist paradigm of interconnectedness that might invoke social and environmental change. It explores how a tripartite model of yoga understands interconnectedness at a deeper level than the mechanistic worldview, and could support proactive measures toward a more fair, just, and sustainable world. It locates cultural barriers to yoga's potential for a pro-environmental and pro-social worldview and lifestyle, suggesting options to advance yoga's ecological values by improved education and scholarship. To access suitable models, the study learnt and practiced traditional teachings, applied them to contemporary issues and sought perspectives from under-represented sources. To answer research questions on how yoga can benefit contemporary issues, it also critically reflected on how scholarship impacts upon the communities from which the knowledge is obtained. The project contributes new knowledge on interconnectedness, its meaning and historic cultural context. It contributes a novel epistemic and methodological framework consistent with traditional knowledge, particularly relevant for progress on culturally appropriate scholarship in yoga studies. The project is the first of its kind to deeply explore the meanings of the word interconnectedness. It is one of the most committed attempts to date to seek out a doctrinal model from the traditions that can embrace both transcendent and immanent aspects of yoga in both theory and practice toward a coherent eco-yoga model. In doing so it engages with a wide lacuna between rhetorical appeals to yoga as a sustainability praxis and mind body intervention by supplementing existing theory with some of the traditional knowledge to explain how yoga works, and how it can help to meet sustainability objectives like cultivating an interconnected worldview. The project calls to seriously examine the legacy of colonial classification systems and methodological issues in the representation of yoga cultures. It appeals for the review of academic conventions among yoga scholars and for the prioritisation of sincere regard for the impact of scholarship on yoga’s intangible cultural heritage value, particularly considering yoga’s protection under UNESCO.

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