Добірка наукової літератури з теми "YOGA BY MILLENNIALS"

<p class="p1">Is postural yoga evolving beyond merely a fitness practice into an important component of the spiritual lives of religious “nones” in British Columbia and perhaps elsewhere in North America? This article looks at Christian and Hindu perspectives of contemporary debates over the westernization of yoga, and utilizes qualitative survey data to investigate the spiritual value that yoga is taking on for nonreligious millennials seeking to enhance the self. Societal shifts indicate a growing cultural value of discovering one’s individual authenticity through self-development efforts, and research suggests that yoga is one way that this is being pursued. Using media coverage of two controversial Canadian incidents — the cancellation of a proposed mass yoga class on Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge, and the cancellation of a free annual yoga class over concerns of cultural appropriation at the University of Ottawa — this article explores different perspectives of practicing postural yoga in North America. It is argued that postural yoga is evolving into a spiritually beneficial or profitable component of the lives of many religious “nones”, and that future contestations of the practice of postural yoga may require consideration of its value in the spiritual lives of a growing population who have no religion.</p>

Health has been one of the greatest problem that Jakarta faced for years. According to RisKesDas (Basic Health Research) 2018, health issue in Jakarta has been increasing drastically in physical health and mental health or as we call it stress issue. Those health issue share the same solution, as doing routine exercises or sports, healthy lifestyle, communicating with each other, or consultate with other person. Open sports and new sports can be an invitation for today’s millennials and generation Z to do sports and starting healthy lifestyle. Sunter Permai Sports Park can be a new sports facility for people in Jakarta. Sports Park here means that everyone in the facility has to be energetic, doing sports, or communicating with each other, the vibes is sporty and playful. Sunter Permai Sports Park is using biophilic as design principal, by using natural materials, as in vegetations, rocks and stones, pond and waterfall. The highlighted programs in this project are futuristic or e-sports, and sports that are liked by Sunter Agung neighborhoods. Aside sport activities, there are healthy culinary foodstreet, health consultation, yoga and meditation. Healthy culinary foods are dedicated to educate people to start a healthy lifestyle by consuming healthy foods. Keywords: Health; Interaction; Up-to-date AbstrakKesehatan merupakan salah satu masalah terbesar yang dihadapi Jakarta saat ini. Bedasarkan Riset Kesehatan Dasar, masalah kesehatan tertinggi yaitu penyakit tidak menular dan penyakit mental atau stress. Penyakit yang mengalami kenaikan pesat mulai dari hipertensi, diabetes, ginjal, stroke, dan penyakit mental atau stress. Penyakit-penyakit tersebut dapat diselesaikan dengan berbagai solusi yang melibatkan kegiatan berolahraga, aktif berkomunikasi dengan sesama, konsumsi makanan sehat, melakukan pola hidup sehat, dan berkonsultasi pada ahlinya. Menerapkan berolahraga terbuka dan gaya olahraga baru dapat mengundang minat masyarakat generasi Z dan milenial untuk berolahraga. Sunter Permai Sports Park hadir sebagai sarana berolahraga bagi masyarakat Jakarta, khususnya masyarakat Jakarta Utara. Sports Park yang dimaksud sendiri merujuk pada kegiatan olahraga yang menghubungkan olahraga dengan alam sekitar dan komunikasi antar pengguna didalamnya. Energetic sendiri berarti pengguna didalam taman ini diharuskan berenergi dan melakukan aktivitas olahraga atau berinteraksi dengan sesama. Metode perancangan yang digunakan sendiri adalah biophilic design concept, yaitu konsep yang memasukan alam kedalam program ruang dengan kegiatan olahraga didalam proyeknya. Park sendiri memiliki arti tempat berkumpul masyarakat suatu daerah dengan bentuk taman. Program utama dalam proyek ini yaitu olahraga dengan tema kekinian dan olahraga yang disukai masyarakat kelurahan Sunter Agung. Selain program olahraga, program yang ditawarkan juga ada kuliner makanan sehat dan konsultasi psikologis, serta meditasi, program kuliner makanan sehat ini ditujukan untuk memberi pengetahuan bagi masyarakat untuk memulai pola hidup sehat dengan konsumsi makanan sehat.

AbstrakPerubahan gaya hidup masyarakat Indonesia sebagian sudah mengarah ke pola kehidupan modern. Peningkatan ilmu dan teknologi yang sangat berkembang pada masa kini secara tidak langsung cenderung membuat tubuh jadi kurang bergerak (low body movement). Pada zaman milenial ini olahraga sangatlah diperlukan, selain untuk menjaga agar tubuh tetap sehat, olahraga juga dapat membuat badan menjadi lebih ideal. Kini kian banyak orang yang memperlakukan yoga sebagai kebutuhan utama, bukan semata gaya hidup. Yoga ini diyakini banyak orang bermanfaat bagi kesehatan fisik dan psikis. Yoga merupakan seni olah tubuh, pernafasan, dan pikiran dalam bentuk gerakan-gerakan yang bersifat flowing, continue dinamis, ataupun gerakan yang ditahan dalam beberapa kali hitungan dan dibantu dengan olah pernafasan dan meditasi ringan. Oleh karena itu dalam penelitian ini diajukan suatu aplikasi membuat Media Interaktif berbasis mobile android gerakan yoga sebagai media pembelajaran tentang Gerakan yoga yang memiliki kemampuan dalam membantu user dan sesuai dengan kebutuhan user. Pada penelitian ini pengalaman pengguna aplikasi gerakan yoga di evaluasi dengan 2 metode yaitu User-Centered Design (UCD) dan System Usability Scale (SUS). Pada pengujian UCD dilakukan saat mulainya perancangan sebuah aplikasi, sedangkan selanjutnya aplikasi di uji kelayakan dengan menggunakan metode SUS. Hasil penelitian pembuatan Media Interaktif Gerakan Yoga berbasis mobile android memperoleh skor kelayakan sebesar 75,3% atau masuk dalam kategori B (Baik).Kata Kunci: media interaktif, yoga, aplikasi android, user centered design, system usability scale AbstractPart of the change in the lifestyle of the Indonesian people has led to modern life patterns. Increasing science and technology, which is significantly developed today, indirectly tends to make the body less mobile (low body movement). In this millennial era, exercise is essential. Apart from keeping the body healthy, exercise can also make the body more ideal. Now more and more people treat yoga as a primary need, not just a lifestyle. Many people believe yoga to be beneficial for physical and psychological health. Yoga is the art of exercising the body, breathing, mind in flowing, continuous dynamic movements, or movements held for several counts and assisted by breathing exercises and light meditation. Therefore, in this study, an application is proposed to create interactive media based on mobile android yoga movements as a learning medium about yoga movements that can help users according to user needs. In this study, the user experience of the yoga movement application was evaluated by two methods, namely the User-Centered Design (UCD) and the System Usability Scale (SUS). The UCD test is carried out at the start of designing an application, while then the application is tested for feasibility using the SUS method. The research results on mobile Android-based Yoga Movement Interactive Media obtained a feasibility score of 75.3% or included in category B (Good).Keywords: interactive media, yoga, android application, user centered design, system usability scale

High enterprise failure rates, the need to pivot, and fleeting runways are contributing to mental health issues among entrepreneurs. To treat a myriad of mental health conditions, western medical practitioners are acknowledging the effectiveness of consciousness and mindfulness tools, like yoga and meditation that have been practiced by indigenous people and eastern cultures for millennia. Some entrepreneurs are starting to use consciousness practices as not only a tool to balance the mind-body connection, but they are also using them to optimize performance. Implications for practice are discussed.

While music plays a significant role in many of the world’s religions, it is in the Hindu religion that one finds one of the closest bonds between music and religious experience extending for millennia. The recitation of the syllable OM and the chanting of Sanskrit Mantras and hymns from the Vedas formed the core of ancient fire sacrifices. The Upanishads articulated OM as Śabda-Brahman, the Sound-Absolute that became the object of meditation in Yoga. First described by Bharata in the Nātya-Śāstra as a sacred art with reference to Rasa (emotional states), ancient music or Sangīta was a vehicle of liberation (Mokṣa) founded in the worship of deities such as Brahmā, Vishnu, Śiva, and Goddess Sarasvatī. Medieval Tantra and music texts introduced the concept of Nāda-Brahman as the source of sacred music that was understood in terms of Rāgas, melodic formulas, and Tālas, rhythms, forming the basis of Indian music today. Nearly all genres of Indian music, whether the classical Dhrupad and Khayal, or the devotional Bhajan and Kīrtan, share a common theoretical and practical understanding, and are bound together in a mystical spirituality based on the experience of sacred sound. Drawing upon ancient and medieval texts and Bhakti traditions, this article describes how music enables Hindu religious experience in fundamental ways. By citing several examples from the modern Hindustani classical vocal tradition of Khayal, including text and audio/video weblinks, it is revealed how the classical songs contain the wisdom of Hinduism and provide a deeper appreciation of the many musical styles that currently permeate the Hindu and Yoga landscapes of the West.

This paper analyzes the Islam Nusantara program of the Islamic Studies Institute of Nahdlatul Ulama (STAINU) and then of the Nahdlatul Ulama University of Indonesia (UNUSIA) that started in 2013. The largest Islamic social organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) has emphasized the moderateness and tolerance of Islam in Indonesia and conceptualized its Islam as Islam Nusantara and started to disseminate this concept to stem the deepening conservative turn of Islam especially after the democratization in 1998. In order to disseminate Islam Nusantara more effectively, the NU-affiliated college (STAINU), later its university (UNUSIA) started the graduate program for Islam Nusantara. After elucidating the Islamic conservative turn and the propagation of Islam Nusantara both by NU and the state, this paper analyzes the theses and their abstracts and the biodata of authors of theses and sees how Islam Nusantara has been producing the proponents of Islam Nusantara. The paper finds that the authors of the theses are young and many of the theses analyze the harmonious Islamic adaptation to local cultures. The authors are male dominant and Java-born-dominant with the focus on their own birthplace. The paper concludes with the importance of more comparativeand critical analysis on local variations of Islam Nusantara in the future theses and dissertations so that the program can critically and objectively analyze the Islam Nusantara concept itself. Keyword: Islam Nusantara, Nahdlatul Ulama, UNUSIA Jakarta REFERENCE: Abdul Mun’im DZ. Mengukuhkan Jangkar Islam Nusantara, Tashwirul Afkar no.26, 2008. Abdurrahman Wahid. “Pribumisasi Islam.” Dalam Muntaha Azhari and Abdul Mun’im Saleh, eds. Islam Indonesia Menatap Masa Depan. Jakarta: P3M, 1989. Abdurrahman Wahid. “Melindungi dan Menyantuni Semua Paham.” Dalam Yenny Zannuba Wahid, Ahmad Suaedy et al., eds. Ragam Ekspresi Islam Nusantara. Jakarta: The Wahid Institute, 2008: h. xi-xii. Ahmad Najib Burhani. Islam Nusantara as a Promising Response to Religious Intolerance and Radicalism, Trends in Southeast Asia, 2018. No.21. Ahmad Suaedy. Islam, Minorities and Identity in Southeast Asia. Yogyakarta and Jakarta: inklusif and ISAIs UIN Yogya, 2018. Akhmad Sahal. “Prolog: Kenapa Islam Nusantara?” Dalam Akhmad Sahal dan Munawir Aziz eds. Islam Nusantara dari Ushul Fiqh hingga Paham Kebangsaan. Bandung: Mizan Pustaka, 2015. Akhmad Sahal dan Munawir Aziz eds. Islam Nusantara dari Ushul Fiqh hingga Paham Kebangsaan. Bandung: Mizan Pustaka, 2015. Anderson, Benedict. A Life Beyond Boundaries. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2016. Azymardi Azra. Islam Nusantara: Jaringan Global dan Lokal. Bandung: Mizan, 2002. Dawam Multazam. “Islam Nusantara, Dari NU untuk Dunia” (artikel diakses pada 10 January 2015 dari http://www.nu.or.id/post/read/60706/islam-nusantara-dari-nu-untuk-dunia). Fealy, Greg. “Nahdlatul Ulama and the Politics Trap.” New Mandala. (diakses pada 12 November 2019 pada https://www.newmandala.org/nahdlatul-ulama-politics-trap/), 2018. Fogg, Kavin W. “The Fate of Muslim Nationalism in Independent Indonesia.” PhD dissertation (Yale University), 2012. Formichi, Chiara. Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in 20th Century Indonesia. Leiden and Manoa: KITLV and Hawai’i University Press, 2011. Hefner, Robert W. “Islamic Schools, Social Movements, and Democracy in Indonesia.” Dalam Robert W. Hefner ed. Making Modern Muslim: the Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009: h. 55-105. Hefner, Robert. W. What Happened to Civil Islam? Islam and Democratisation in Indonesia, 20 Years On. Asian Studies Review. Vol.43. No.3, 2019: h. 375-396. Hoesterey, James Bourk. Public Diplomacy and the Global Dissemination of “Moderate Islam” Dalam Robert W. Hefner ed. Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia. London: Routledge, 2018: h. 406-416. IPAC (Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict). After Ahok: The Islamist Agenda in Indonesia. IPCA Report No.44, 2018. Jadul Maula. Orientasi “Islam Nusantara”: Melahirkan “Insan (Kamil) Nusantara”. Tashwirul Afkar No. 13, 2006. Laffan, Michael, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011. Menchik, Jeremy. Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Nor Huda. Islam Nusantara: Sejarah Sosial Intelektual Islam di Indonesia. Yogyakarta: Ar-Ruzz Media, 2008. Pepinsky, Thomas B., Liddle, William R. and Saiful Mujani. Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Power, Thomas P. Jokowi’s Authoritarian Turn and Indonesia’s Democratic Decline. Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 53(3), 2018: h. 307-338. Robison, Richard and Hadiz, Vedi R. Reorganizing Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in An Age of Markets．London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004. Yenny Zannuba Wahid, Ahmad Suaedy et al. eds. Ragam Ekspresi Islam Nusantara. Jakarta: The Wahid Institute, 2015. Syafiq Hasyim. Islam Nusantara dalam Konteks: Dari Multikultralisma hingga Radkikalisme. Yogyakarta: Gading, 2018. van Bruinessen, Martin ed. Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the "Conservative Turn". Singapore: ISEAS, 2013. van Bruinessen, Martin. Introduction: Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam and the “Conservative Turn” of the Early Twenty-First Century. Dalam van Bruinessen, Martin ed. Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the "Conservative Turn". Singapore: ISEAS, 2013: h.1-20. van Bruinessen, Martin. Indonesian Muslim in a Globalising World: Westernization, Arabisation, and Indigenising Responses. RSIS Working Paper No. 311. Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 2018. William Putra Utomo and others. Indonesia Millennial Report 2019. Jakarta: IDN Research Institute, 2019. News: 2013/2/25: STAINU Jakarta Kumpulkan Tim Pakar PPM Islam Nusantara. (diakses pada 10 November 2019 pada https://www.nu.or.id/post/read/43199/stainu-jakarta-kumpulkan-tim-pakar-ppm-islam-nusantara) 2013/7/3: STAINU Jakarta Luncurkan Pascasarjana Islam Nusantara. (diakses pada 10 November 2019 pada https://www.nu.or.id/post/read/45577/stainu-jakarta-luncurkan-pascasarjana-islam-nusantara) 2013/7/4: Islam Nusantara Diharapkan Jadi Solusi Kasus Intoleransi. (diakses pada 13 Desember 2019 pada https://www.merdeka.com/peristiwa/islam-nusantara-diharapkan-jadi-solusi-kasus-intoleransi.html) 2013/7/4: Mahasiswa Thailand Minati Studi Islam Nusantara Indonesia. (diakses pada 11 November 2019 pada https://news.okezone.com/read/2013/07/04/373/831915/mahasiswa-thailand-minati-studi-islam-nusantara-indonesia) 2015/4/14: Imam Aziz: Dunia Butuh NU (diakses pada 11 November 2019 pada https://www.nu.or.id/post/read/58831/imam-aziz-dunia-butuh-nu) 2015/10/9: Pascasarjana Islam Nusantara STAINU Jakarta Mulai Kuliah Perdana Hari Ini. (diakses pada 11 November 2019 pada https://www.nu.or.id/post/read/62673/pascasarjana-islam-nusantara-stainu-jakarta-mulai-kuliah-perdana-hari-ini) 2016/9/3: Siapakah Ahlussunnah Wal Jamaah. (diakses pada 11 November 2019 pada https://www.nu.or.id/post/read/70944/siapakah-ahlussunnah-wal-jamaah)

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine how “homefluencers” sponsored posts on millennial consumers' purchase intention in the international marketing sphere can be impacted in the new normal by drawing on source credibility, parasocial interaction (PSI) and persuasion knowledge model (PKM) theory.Design/methodology/approachThis research applies structural equation modeling (SEM) and mediation analysis as the data analysis method using non-probability purposive sampling of a total of 217 local millennial Instagram and Facebook users, who have followed homefluencers sponsored posts in fashion-beauty, yoga-fitness and food sectors.FindingsBased on hypothesis testing, advertising recognition strongly mediates purchase intention with the indirect effects of expertise and trustworthiness than attractiveness.Research limitations/implicationsThis research extends the international marketing literature on source credibility, PSI, PKM and purchase intention theory in the new normal by proposing “Homefluencer's Endorsement Model for Purchase Intention” (HEMPI). Specifically, the mediating role of ad recognition of homefluencers sponsorship disclosure (#paidad, #sponsored), positively affects “change-of-persuasion meaning” on Instagram and Facebook, where research is rare.Practical implicationsThis research provides valuable suggestions for global brand owners, consumers and authorities of Instagram and Facebook to consider post-COVID consumer behavior highlighting homefluencers sponsored collaboration.Originality/valueThe authors have contributed to the use of the source credibility model and PSI to identify the antecedents in determining how the homefluencer's effective sponsorship disclosure can positively activate ad recognition on millennial consumers' purchase intention in a crisis period from an international standpoint with the practical implications in post-COVID.

In the heady expansion of capital’s productive capacity during the post-war period, E.P. Thompson wondered optimistically at potentials accruing to humanity by accelerating automation. He asked, “If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not ‘how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but ‘what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?’” (Thompson 36). Indeed, linear and economistic variants of Marxian materialism have long emphasised that the socialisation of production by the use of machinery will eventually free us from work. At the very least, the underemployment produced by the automation of pivotal labour roles is supposed to create a political subject capable of agitating successfully against bourgeois and capitalist hegemony. But contrary to these prognostications, the worker of 2019 is caught up in a process of generalising work far beyond what is considered necessary by tradition, or at least the convention of what David Harvey calls “embedded liberalism” (11). As Anne Helen Peterson wrote in a recent Buzzfeed article,even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: you can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work. (Peterson)For the work-martyr, activity in its broadest Aristotelian sense is evaluated by and subordinated to the question of efficiency and productivity. Occupations of time that were once considered external to “work” as matters of “life” (to use Kathi Weeks’s vocabulary) are reconceived as waste when not deployed in the service of value-generation (Weeks 15).The point here, then, is to provide some answers for why the decrease in socially-necessary labour time in an age of automation has not coincided with the Thompsonian expansion of free time. The current dilemma of the neoliberal “work-martyr” is traceable to the political responses generated by crises in production during the depression and the stagflationary disaccumulation of the 1960s-70s, and the major victory in the “battle for ideas” was the transformation of the political subject into human capital. This “intensely constructed and governed” suite of possible values is tasked, according to Wendy Brown, “with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavours and ventures” (Brown 10). Connecting the creation of this subject in relation to personal or free time is important partly because of time’s longstanding importance to philosophies of subjectivity. But more to the point, the focus on time is important because it serves to demonstrate the economic foundations of the incursion of capitalist governance into the most private domains of existence. Against the criticism of Marx’s ‘abstract’ theory of value, one can see that the laws of capitalist accumulation make their mark in all parts of contemporary human being, including temporality. By tracing the emergence of afterwork as the unpaid continuation of the accumulation of value, one can show how each subject increasingly ‘lives’ capital. This marks a turning point in political economy. When work spills over a temporal limit, its relationship to reproduction is finally blurred to the point of indistinction. What this means for value-creation in 2019 is something in urgent need of critique.State ReproductionAccording to the Marxian theory, labour’s minimum cost is abstractly determined by the price of the labourer’s necessities. Once they have produced enough objects of value to cover these costs, the rest of their work is surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The capitalist’s aim, then, is to extend the overall working-day for as long beyond the minimum as possible. Theoretically, the full 24 hours of the day may be used. The rise of machine production in the 19th century allowed the owners to make this theory a reality. The only thing that governed the extension of work-time was the physical minimum of labour-power’s reproduction (Marx 161). But this was on the provision that all the labourer’s “free” time was to be spent regrouping their energies. Anything in excess of this was a privilege: time wasted that could have been spent in the factory. “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself”, says Marx, “he robs the capitalist” (162).This began to change with the socialisation of the work process and the increase in technical proficiency that labour demanded in early 20th-century industry. With the changes in the sophistication of the manufacture process, the labourer came to be factored in the production process less as an “appendage of the machine” and more as a collection of decisive skills. Fordism based itself around the recognition that capital itself was “dependent on a family-based reproduction” (Weeks 27). In Ford’s America, the sense that work’s intensity might supplant losses in the working day propelled owners of production to recognise the economic need of ensuring a robust culture of social reproduction. In capital’s original New Deal, Ford provided an increase in wages (the Five Dollar Day) in exchange for a rise in productivity (Dalla Costa v). To preserve the increased rhythm of industrial production required more than a robust wage, however. It required “the formation of a physically efficient and psychologically disciplined working class” (Dalla Costa 2). Companies began to hire sociologists to investigate how workers spent their spare time (Dalla Costa 8). They led the charge in a what we might call the first “anthropological revolution” of the American 20th century, whereby the improved wage of the worker was underpinned by the economisation of their reproduction. This was enabled by the cheapening of social necessities (and thus a reduction in socially-necessary labour time) in profound connection to the development of household economy on the backs of unpaid female labour (Weeks 25).This arrangement between capital and labour persisted until 1929. When the inevitable crisis came, however, wages faltered, and many workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Unable to afford even the basics of their own reproduction, the working-class looked to the state. They created political and social pressure through marches, demonstrations, attacks on shops and the looting of supply trucks (Dalla Costa 40). The state held out against them, but the crisis in production eventually reached such a point of intensity that the government was forced to intervene. Hoover instituted the Emergency Relief Act and Financial Reconstruction Corporation in 1932. This was expanded the following year by FDR’s New Deal, transforming Emergency Relief into a federal institution and creating the Civil Works Association to stimulate the job market (Dalla Costa 63). The security of the working class was decisively linked to the state through the wage guarantees, welfare measures and even the legal guarantee of collective bargaining.For the most part, the state’s intervention in social reproduction took the pressure off industry by ensuring that the workforce would remain able to handle its burdens and that the unemployed would remain employable. It guaranteed a minimum wage for the employed to ensure that demand didn’t collapse, and provided care outside the workforce to women, children and the elderly.Once the state took responsibility for reproduction, however, it immediately became interested in how free time could be made efficient and cost effective. Abroad, they noted the example of European statist and corporativist approaches. Roosevelt sent a delegation to Europe to study the various measures taken by fascist and United Front governments to curb the effects of economic crisis (Dogliani 247). Among these was Mussolini’s OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) which sought to accumulate the free time of workers to the ends of production. Part of this required the responsibilisation of the broader community not only for regeneration of labour-power but the formation of a truly fascist political subject.FDR’s social reform program was able to reproduce this at home by following the example of workers’ community organisation during the depression years. Throughout the early ‘30s, self-help cooperatives, complete with “their own systems of payment in goods or currency” emerged among the unemployed (Dalla Costa 61). Black markets in consumer goods and informal labour structures developed in all major cities (Dalla Costa 34). Subsistence goods were self-produced in a cottage industry of unpaid domestic labour by both men and women (Dalla Costa 71). The paragon of self-reproducing communities was urbanised black Americans, whose internal solidarity had saved lives throughout the depression. The state took notice of these informal economies of production and reproduction, and started to incorporate the possibility of community engineering into their national plan. Roosevelt convened the Civilian Conservation Corps to absorb underemployed elements of the American workforce and recover consumer demand through direct state sponsorship (wages) (Dogliani, 247). The Committee of Industrial Organisation was transformed into a “congress” linking workers directly to the state (Dalla Costa 74). Minium wages were secured in the supreme court in 1937, then hiked in 1938 (78). In all, the state emerged at this time as a truly corporativist entity- the guarantor of employment and of class stability. From Social Reproduction to Human Capital InvestmentSo how do we get from New Deal social engineering to yoga pants? The answer is deceptively simple. The state transformed social reproduction into a necessary part of the production process. But this also meant that it was instrumentalised. The state only had to fund its workforce’s reproduction so long as this guaranteed productivity. After the war, this was maintained by a form of “embedded liberalism” which sought to provide full employment, economic growth and welfare for its citizens while anchoring the international economy in the Dollar’s gold-value. However, by providing stable increases in “relative value” (wages), this form of state investment incentivised capital flight and its spectacular consequent: deindustrialisation. The “embedded liberalism” of the state-capital-labour compromise began to breakdown with a new crisis of accumulation (Harvey 11-12). The relocation of production to non-union states and decolonised globally-southern sites of hyper-exploitation led to an ‘urban crisis’ in the job market. But as capitalist expansion carried on abroad, inflation kept dangerous pace with the rate of unemployment. This “stagflation” put irresistible pressure on the post-war order. The Bretton-Woods policy of maintaining fixed interest rates while pinning the dollar to gold was abandoned in 1971 and exchange rates were floated all over the world (Harvey 12). The spectre of a new crisis loomed, but one which couldn’t be resolved by the simple state sponsorship of production and reproduction.While many solutions were offered in place of this, one political vision singled out the state’s intervention into reproduction as the cause of the crisis. The ‘neoliberal’ political revolution began at the level of individual groups of capitalist agitants seeking governmental influence in a crusade against communism. It was given its first run on the historical pitch in Chile as part of the CIA-sponsored Pinochet revanchism, and then imported to NYC to deal with the worsening urban crisis of the 1970s. Instead of focusing on production (which required state intervention to proceed without crisis), neoliberal theory promulgated a turn to monetisation and financialisation. The rule of the New York banks after they forced the City into near-bankruptcy in 1975 prescribed total austerity in order to make good on its debts. The government was forced by capital itself to withdraw from investment in the reproduction of its citizens and workers. This was generalised to a federal policy as Reagan sought to address the decades-long deficit during the early years of his presidential term. Facilitating the global flow of finance and the hegemony of supranational institutions like the IMF, the domestic labour force now became beholden to an international minimum of socially-necessary labour time. At the level of domestic labour, the reduction of labour’s possible cost to this minimum had dramatic consequences. International competition allowed the physical limitations of labour to, once again, vanish from sight. Removed from the discourse of reproduction rights, the capitalist edifice was able to focus on changing the ratio of socially necessary labour to surplus. The mechanism that enabled them to do so was competition among the workforce. With the opening of the world market, capital no longer had to worry about the maintenance of domestic demand.But competition was not sufficient to pull off so grand a feat. What was required was a broader “battle of ideas”; the second anthropological revolution of the American century. The protections that workers had relied upon since the Fordist compromise and the corporativist solution eroded as the new “class-power” of the bourgeoisie levelled neoliberal assaults against associated labour (Harvey 23). While unions were gradually disempowered to fight the inevitable tide of deindustrialisation and capital flight, individual workers were coddled by a stream of neoliberal propaganda promising “Freedom” to those who would leave the stifling atmosphere of collective association. The success of this double enervation crippled union power, and the capitalist could rely increasingly on internal workplace wage stratification to regulate labour at an enterprise level (Dalla Costa 25). Incentive structures transformed labour rights into privileges; imagining old entitlements as concessions from above. In the last thirty years, the foundation of worker protections at large has, according to Brown, become illegible (Brown 38).Time and ValueThe reduction of time needed to produce has not coincided with an expansion of free time. The neoliberal anthropological revolution has wormed its way into the depth of the individual subject’s temporalising through a dual assault on labour conditions and propaganda. The privatisation of reproduction means that its necessary minimum is once again the subject of class struggle. Time spent unproductively outside the workplace now not only robs the capitalist, but the worker. If an activity isn’t a means to increase one’s “experience” (the vector of employability), it is time poorly spent. The likelihood of being hired for a job, in professional industries especially, is dependent on your ability to outperform others not only in your talents and skills, but in your own exploitability. Brown points out that the groups traditionally defined by the “middle strata … works more hours for less pay, fewer benefits, less security, and less promise of retirement or upward mobility than at any time in the past century” (Brown 28-29).This is what is meant by the transformation of workers into ‘human capital’. As far as the worker is concerned, the capitalist no longer purchases their labour-power: they purchase the sum of their experiences and behaviours. A competitive market has emerged for these personality markers. As a piece of human capital, one must expend one’s time not only in reproduction, but the production of their own surplus value. Going to a play adds culture points to your brand; speaking a second language gives you a competitive edge; a robust Instagram following is the difference between getting or missing out on a job. For Jess Whyte, this means that the market is now able to govern in place of the state. It exercises a command over people’s lives in and out of the workplace “which many an old tyrannical state would have envied” (Whyte 20).There is a question here of change and continuity. A survey of the 20th century shows that the reduction of ‘socially necessary labour time’ does not necessarily mean a reduction in time spent at work. In fact, the minimum around which capitalist production circulates is not worktime but wages. It is only at the political level that the working class prevented capital from pursuing this minimum. With the political victory of neoliberalism as a “restoration of class power” to the bourgeoisie, however, this minimum becomes a factor at the heart of all negotiations between capital and labour. The individual labourer lying at the heart of the productive process is reduced to his most naked form: human capital. This capital must spend all its time productively for its own benefit. Mundane tasks are avoidable, as stipulated by the piece of human capital sometimes known as Anne Helen Peterson, if they “wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better”. People are never really after-work under neoliberalism; their spare time is structurally adjusted into auxiliary labour. Competition has achieved what the state could never have dreamed of: a total governance of spare hours. This governance unites journalists tweeting from bed with Amazon workers living where they work, not to mention early-career academics working over a weekend to publish an article in an online journal that is not even paying them. These are all ways in which the privatisation of social reproduction transforms afterwork into unpaid overtime.ReferencesBrown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.Dalla Costa, Maria. Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2015.Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. R.C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1 and 2. Trans. E. Aveling and E. Untermann. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013.Peterson, Anne Helen. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Buzzfeed. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work>.Postone, Moishe. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” In Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts, eds., Class: The Anthology. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Whyte, Jessica. “The Invisible Hand of Friedrich Hayek: Submission and Spontaneous Order.” Political Theory (2017): 1-29.

Introduction Online influencers play an increasingly important role in political communication – they serve as both intermediaries and producers of political messages. As established opinion leaders in areas such fashion and lifestyle consumption, many influencers recently turned towards more political content (Riedl et al.). For influencers who built their personal brands around aspirational domestic and lifestyle content, the COVID-19 global pandemic created an opportunity (and sometimes even a necessity) to engage in political discourse. The most basic everyday acts and decisions – such as where to shop for food, how to organise playdates for children, if and where to go on holiday – suddenly turned into political discussions and the influencers found themselves either promoting or challenging anti-pandemic restrictions imposed by national governments as they were forced to actively defend their decisions on such matters to their followers. Within this process that I call politicisation of the domestic (Heřmanová), many influencers explored new ways to build authority and leadership within their communities and positioning themselves as experts or “lifestyle gurus” (Baker and Rojek). While the proliferation of political content, including disinformation and conspiracy narratives, on digital communication platforms has been the focus of both public and academic attention in recent years, the focus has mostly been on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (Finlayson). Instagram, the traditional “home” of lifestyle influencers, only recently became the focus of political communication research (Larsson). This article builds on recent scholarship that focusses on the intersection of lifestyle, spiritual, and wellness content on Instagram and the proliferation of political conspiracy narratives on the platform (Remski, Argentino). I use the example of a prominent Czech spiritual influencer Helena Houdová to illustrate the blending of spiritual, aspirational and conspiracy content among Instagram influencers and argue that the specific aesthetics of Instagram conspiracies needs to be understood in the context of gendered, predominantly female “third spaces” (Wright) in the male-coded global digital space. Case Study – Helena When you look at Helena’s Instagram profile, all you see at first is the usual aspirational influencer content – pictures of ocean, beaches, sunsets, and Helena herself in white dresses or swimsuits. Sometimes she’s alone in the pictures, sometimes with her children, and sometimes with a group of similarly serene-looking women with sun-kissed skin and flowers in their hair. In the captions under her Instagram posts, Helena often talks about self-acceptance, self-love, and womanhood, and gives her followers advice how they can, in her own words, “create their own reality” (@helenahoudova, 8 Aug. 2021). Her recipe for the creation of one’s own reality sounds very simple – open your heart, accept the love that the Universe is giving you, accept that you are love. Helena is 41 years old, a divorced mother of 3 children, and a former model and philanthropist. Born in the Czech Republic, Helena won the title of Czech Miss in 1999, when she was 20 years old. She competed in the Miss World competition and started a successful modelling career. After a complicated marriage and divorce, she struggled to obtain an Australian visa and finally found a home in Bali. Over the past few years, Helena managed to build a successful business out of her online presence – she markets online courses and Webinars to her 50,000 followers and offers personal coaching. In this regard, she is a representative example of an “spiritual influencer” (Schwartz), an emerging group of (mostly) female influencers who focus their content on New Age type spirituality, personal healing, and teach their followers the practice of “manifesting”, based on the belief that “the world we perceive, either positively or negatively, is a projection of our own consciousness and that we can transform our reality for the better by transforming ourselves internally” (Urban 226). Helena’s Instagram account is bilingual, and she posts both in Czech and English, though her audience seems to be mostly Czech – most comments left under her posts are also in Czech. Within the Czech influencer community, she is one of the most famous spiritual influencers. Influencers, (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 Spiritual influencers like Helena are part of a global phenomenon (Chia et al.) that has generated lot of media attention over the past year (Schwartz). With their focus on wellbeing and health, they overlap with wellness influencers (O’Neill), but the content they produce also explores various types of New Age spirituality and references to different religious traditions as well as neo-pagan spiritual movements. From this perspective, spiritual influencers often position themselves in opposition to a Western lifestyle (interpreted as materialistic and based on consumption). In this aspect they fit into the category of ‘lifestyle gurus’ as defined by Baker and Rojek: “Lifestyle gurus define themselves in opposition to professional cultures. Selectively and instrumentally, they mix elements from positive thinking, esoteric systems of knowledge and mediate them through folk culture” (390). While prominent figures of the wellness spirituality movement such as Gwyneth Paltrow would be more likely defined as celebrities rather than influencers (see Abidin), spiritual influencers are native to the Internet, and the path to spiritual awakening they showcase on their Instagram profiles is also their source of income. It is this commodified aspect of their online personas that generated a significant backlash from the media as well as from the influencer community itself over the past year. What provoked many critical reactions is the way spiritual influencers became involved in the debate around the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-COVID vaccination all around the world. As I argued elsewhere (Heřmanová), the pandemic impacted on the way influencers build boundaries between ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ within their content and inside the communities of their followers. For women who build their brands around aspirational domesticity (Duffy), the pandemic lockdowns presented a significant challenge in terms of the content they could post. Within the spiritual influencer culture, the discussion around vaccines intersected with influencers’ focus on spiritual and physical health, natural remedies, and so-called ‘natural immunity’. The pandemic thus accelerated the above-mentioned process of the “politicization of the domestic” (Heřmanová). The increasing engagement of spiritual influencers in political debates around COVID-19 and vaccines can be interpreted within the broader context of the conspirituality phenomenon. The term, first coined by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in 2011, describes a “web movement expressing an ideology fuelled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldview“ (103). The conspirituality phenomenon is native to the Internet and appears at the intersection of New Age-inspired spirituality and distrust towards established authorities. The conspirituality approach successfully bridges the gap between the spiritual focus on the self and the conspiratorial focus on broader political processes. For spiritual influencers and other types of lifestyle gurus, conspirituality thus offers a way to accommodate the hyper-individualistic, commodified nature of global influencer culture with their message of collective awakening and responsibility to educate wider audiences, because it enables them to present their personal spiritual path as a political act. For the predominantly female wellness/spirituality influencers of Instagram, the term conspirituality has been widely used in the public and media debate, with reference to the involvement of influencers in the QAnon movement (Tiffany, Petersen, and Wang). Argentino coined the term “pastel QAnon” to refer to the community of female influencers initially found on Instagram, but who are increasingly present on various dark platforms, such as Parler or Gab (Zeng and Schäfer), or, in the Czech context, the messaging platform Telegram (Šlerka). “Pastel” refers “to the unique aesthetic and branding these influencers provided to their pages and in turn QAnon by using social media templates like Canva” (Argentino) that is used to soften and aesthetically adapt QAnon messages to Instagram visuality. Many adherents to the pastel version of QAnon are members of the spiritual, yoga, and wellness community of Instagram and were “recruited” to the movement through concerns about COVID-19 vaccines (Remski). This was also the case for Helena. Before the pandemic, her content mostly focussed on her family life and promoting her Webinars and retreats. She rarely commented on political events beyond general proclamations about the materialistic nature of our culture, in which we are losing connection to our true selves. As the pandemic advanced, Helena started to make more and more explicit references to the current global situation. For a long time, however, she resisted openly political, critical proclamations. Then on 12 July 2021 Helena posted a picture of herself standing at the beach in a flowy dress, holding a big golden cup in her hand and accompanied it with the caption: There are barricades on the streets. There are tanks on the streets. We cannot move freely. We must identify ourselves with designated signs. And we must wear a yellow star to sign we’re not against it. But they say it’s for our own protection. The year 1941. There are barricades on the streets. There are tanks on the streets. (THIS AFTERNOON). We cannot move freely. We must identify ourselves, we have to cover our face as a sign we’re not against it. But they say it’s for our own protection. The year 2021. She continues with a call to action and praises her followers, the people who have “woken up” and realised that the pandemic is a global conspiracy meant to enslave people and the vaccination at attempt at “genocide” (@helenahoudova, translated from Czech by author). Fig. 1: Helena's post about COVID-19. This post can be interpreted as a symbolic transgression from spiritual to conspiritual content on Helena’s profile. In the past year, the narrative explaining COVID-19 as an orchestrated political event organised by the global elites to curb the civic and personal freedoms of all citizens has become central in her communication towards her followers. Interestingly, in some of her videos and Instagram stories, she addresses the Czech audience specifically when she compares the anti-pandemic restrictions implemented by the Czech government as an attempt to return the country to its authoritarian, pre-1989 past. Within post-socialist media spaces, the symbolic references to the former totalitarian regime became an important feature of pandemic conspiracies, creating interesting instances of online context collapse. For example, when influencers (including Helena) post content originating from US-based QAnon-related Websites, they tend to frame it as “the return of communism as it we have experienced it before 1989” (Heřmanová). While Helena dedicates her profile almost exclusively to her own content, other Czech spiritual influencers use also other Instagram features such as sharing posts in Stories or sharing content from various Websites, both Czech- and English-speaking, with links to calls for direct actions and petitions against the anti-COVID restrictions and/or vaccination. A few other well-known Czech influencers interact with Helena’s posts by liking them or leaving comments. In this way, the whole community interlinks via different types of political content that is then on the individual profiles blended with lifestyle, wellness, and other ‘typical’, less overtly political, influencer content. Conclusion: Gendered Third Spaces of Instagram Helena’s Instagram presence, along with that of many other women who post similar content, presents an interesting conundrum when we try to decipher how conspiracy theories proliferate in digital spaces. She has, since her ‘coming-out’ as anti-vax adherent and COVID-denialist, branched out her business activities. She now also offers Webinars to teach women how to operate their business in 5D reality that includes intuition as a tool to establish ‘extrasensory’ perception and enables connection to other dimensions of reality (as opposed to the limited 3D perception we typically apply to the world around us). Her journey is representative of a wider trend of politicisation of formerly non-political online spaces in at least two aspects: her prominent focus on women, womanhood, and “sisterhood” as a unit of political organisation, and her successful blend of Instagram-friendly, aspirational, ‘pastel’ aesthetics with overtly political messaging. Both the aesthetics and content of the conspirituality movement on Instagram are significantly gendered. The gendered character of influencers’ work on social media often leads to the assumption that politics has no place in the feminised space of influencer communities on Instagram because it is seen as a male domain (Duffy; Duffy and Hund). Social media, nonetheless, has offered women a tool of political expression, where dedication to domestic affairs may be seen as a political act in itself (Stern). Conspiritual communities on Instagram, such as the one Helena has managed to build, could also be seen as an example of what Scott Wright calls “third spaces” – neutral, inclusive, and accessible virtual spaces where political talk happens (11). A significant body of research has shown that global digital spaces for political discussion tend to be male-coded and women are actively discouraged from participating in them. If they do participate, they are at much higher risk of being exposed to hate-speech and gender-based online violence (Poletta and Chen). The same trend has been analysed within Czech-speaking online communities as well (Vochocová and Rosenfeldová). The COVID-19 pandemic on the other hand opened the opportunity and sometimes necessity (as mentioned above) to engage in political discussion to many women who previously never expressed an interest in political matters. Profiles of conspiritual influencers are perceived both by supportive influencers and by their followers as safe spaces where political opinions can be explicitly discussed precisely because these spaces are not typically designed as political arenas. Helena herself quite often uses the notion of “sisterhood” as a reference to a safe, strong, female community and praises her followers for being awake, being political, and being open to what she calls ‘inner truths’. In a very recent 16-minute video that was originally livestreamed and then saved on her profile, she reflects on current geopolitical developments and makes a direct connection to “liberating sisterhood” as a tool for solving world problems such as wars. The video was posted on 7 March 2022, a week after Russia invaded Ukraine and thus brought war to the near proximity of Helena’s home country. In the video, Helena addresses her followers in Czech and talks about “dark and fragile times”, praises “the incredible energy of sisterhood” that she wants to bring to her followers, and urges them to sign up for her course, because the world needs this energy more than ever (@helenahoudova). Her followers often reflect these sentiments in the comments. They talk about the experience of being judged for embracing their femininity and speaking up against evil (war, vaccination) and mention that they feel encouraged by the community they found. Helena connects with them via liking their comments or leaving responses such as “I stand with you, my love.” The originally non-political character of the third spaces of conspiritual communities on Instagram also partly explains their success in bringing fringe political narratives towards the aspirational mainstream. Helena’s Instagram profile was not originally created, and neither is it run now by her as an openly political/conspiracy account. She does not use hashtags related to QAnon, anti-vax, or any other openly ‘conspiracy-branded’ content. The overall tone of her account and her communication towards her followers has not changed after her ‘coming-out’: she still focusses on highly feminised spiritual aesthetics. She uses light colours, beach photos, and flowy white dresses as a visual frame to her content, and while the content gets politicised, the form still conforms to the standards of Instagram as a platform with its focus on first-person storytelling via selfies and pictures documenting everyday life (Leaver, Highfield, and Abidin). In this respect, Helena’s content can also be seen as an example of what Crystal Abidin calls “subversive frivolity”. Abidin shows how influencers use highly gendered and often mocked and marginalised tools (such as the selfie) and turn them into a productive and powerful means to achieve both economic and social capital (Abidin). In this aspect, the proliferation of conspiracy narratives on Instagram differs significantly from the mechanisms of Twitter and YouTube (Finlayson). While it would be unwise to underestimate the role of recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles (Pariser) in spreading COVID-19-related conspiracies on Instagram, it is also true that the content often circulates despite these mechanisms, as Forberg demonstrated in the example of QAnon communities in the U.S. He proposes to look closely at the “routines” that individual members of these communities employ to make their content visible in mainstream spaces (Forberg). In the case of Helena and members of her community, these routines of engaging with COVID-related content in a way that becomes more and more overtly political form the process of the politicisation of the domestic. While it could be argued that ‘personal is always political’ especially for women (Hanish), Helena and her peers and followers are actively making personal matters political both by naming them as such and by directly connecting themselves, via the notion of sisterhood, to geopolitical developments. In this way, conspirituality influencers are successfully bridging the gap between the individualist ethos of influencer cultures and the collective identity-building of conspiracy movements. Helena’s case enables us to identify and understand these narratives as they emerge at the intersection of Instagram aesthetics (easily reproducible), content (aspirational and highly individualised), and spiritual teaching that zooms out of individual perspectives towards wider societal issues. Acknowledgment The article was supported by the programme “International mobility of researchers of the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences II“, reg. n. CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/18_053/0016983. References Abidin, Crystal. “‘Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?’: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity.” Social Media + Society (Apr. 2016). DOI: 10.1177/2056305116641342. ———. Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. London: Emerald Publishing, 2018. Argentino, Marc D. “Pastel QAnon.” Global Network on Extremism and Technology 17 Mar. 2021. <https://gnet-research.org/2021/03/17/pastel-qanon/>. Baker, Stephanie Alice, and Chris Rojek. “The Belle Gibson Scandal: The Rise of Lifestyle Gurus as Micro-Celebrities in Low-Trust Societies.” Journal of Sociology 56. 3. (2020): 388–404. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783319846188>. Bail, Chris. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021. Chia, Aleena, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Hugh Davies, and Mack Hagood. “Everything Is Connected.” Selected Papers of Internet Research (2021). Duffy, Brooke Erin. “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19.4 (2016): 441–57. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186>. Duffy, Brooke Erin, and Emily Hund. “Gendered Visibility on Social Media: Navigating Instagram’s Authenticity Bind.” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 4983–5002. Finlayson, Alan. “YouTube and Political Ideologies: Technology, Populism and Rhetorical Form.” Political Studies (2020). <https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720934630>. Forberg, Peter L. “From the Fringe to the Fore: An Algorithmic Ethnography of the Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2021). <https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211040560>. Hanish, Carol. “The Personal Is Political.” Carolhanisch.org. March 2022 <http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html>. Heřmanová, Marie. “Do Your Research: COVID-19 and The Narrative of Information Independence among Czech Instagram Influencers.” Selected Papers of Internet Research (2021). <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2729>. ———. “Politicization of the Domestic: The Proliferation of Populist Narratives among Czech influencers.” Paper presented at the 6th Prague Populism conference, Charles University, Prague. 19 May 2021. Larsson, Anders Olof. “The Rise of Instagram as a Tool for Political Communication: A Longitudinal Study of European Political Parties and Their Followers.” New Media and Society (2021). <https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211034158>. Leaver, Tama, Tim Highfield, and Crystal Abidin. Instagram. London: Polity Press, 2020. O’Neill, Rachel. “Pursuing ‘Wellness’: Considerations for Media Studies.” Television and New Media 21.6 (2020): 628–34. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420919703>. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: How The Internet Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Polletta, Francesca, and Ping Bobby Chen. “Gender and Public Talk: Accounting for Women’s Variable Participation in the Public Sphere.” Sociological Theory 31.4 (2014): 291–317. Petersen, Anne H. “The Real Housewives of QAnon.” Elle. Nov. 2021 <https://www.elle.com/culture/a34485099/qanon-conspiracy-suburban-women/>. Remski, Matthew. The Conspirituality Report. Medium.com. Nov. 2021 <https://matthewremski.medium.com/the-conspirituality-report-home-5b6006b4543d>. Riedl, Magdalena, et al. “The Rise of Political Influencers—Perspectives on a Trend Towards Meaningful Content.” Frontiers in Communication 6 (2021). <https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.752656>. Rocksdale, Sarah. “Spiritual Influencers Are Scam Artists.” YouTube.com. Nov. 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fabvj_A0_sY>. Stern, Alexandra Mina. “Living the TradLife: Babies, Butter, and the Vanishing of Bre Faucheux.” In Alexandra Mina Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2020. 93-110. Schwartz, Oscar. “My Journey into the Dark, Hypnotic World of a Millennial Guru.” The Guardian 9 Jan. 2020. Nov. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/09/strange-hypnotic-world-millennial-guru-bentinho-massaro-youtube>. Šlerka, Josef. “Český a Slovenský Telegram – Konspirační a Extremistická Bažina.” [Czech and Slovak Telegram – A Swarm of Conspiracies and Extremism.] Investigace.cz. Feb. 2022 <https://www.investigace.cz/cesky-a-slovensky-telegram-konspiracni-a-extremisticka-bazina/>. Tiffany, Kaitlin. “The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful.” The Atlantic. Nov. 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/how-instagram-aesthetics-repackage-qanon/615364/>. Urban, Hugh B. “New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America.” Berkeley: U of California P, 2015. Ward, Charlotte, and David Voas. “The Emergence of Conspirituality.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26.1 (2011): 103–21. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846>. Wright, Scott. “From ‘Third Place’ to ‘Third Space’: Everyday Political Talk in Non-Political Online Spaces.” Javnost 19.3 (2012): 5–20. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2012.11009088>. Zeng, Jing, and Mike S. Schäfer. “Conceptualizing ‘Dark Platforms’: Covid-19-Related Conspiracy Theories on 8kun and Gab.” Digital Journalism (2021): 1–23. <https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1938165>.

This chapter explores what triggers international millennials moods in relation to India and its cultural attributes. The theoretical undertaking related to nation branding and soft power study was used as a basis for this research. In the light of the discussion carried out in the chapter, key Indian cultural attributes were briefly discussed. The major cultural attributes extensively discussed during this research were related to Indian cinema, Indian cuisine, religion, spirituality, and yoga. Twenty-two international millennials belonging to four different cultural groups were selected for the focus group research. Their perceptions about India brought out interesting insights in understanding how to promote India among different cultures.

The Indic Traditions have a rich two and a half millennia long variegated history of meditational and contemplative practices. Patañjali’s systematization of these techniques, as expressed in the Yoga Sūtras, eventually emerged as the recognized and generic model of meditative praxis for the Yoga traditions, and it was accommodated within the theologies and metaphysics of the heterogeneous sects. The basic principle of yoga practice lies in stilling the mind. From there, the yogī goes through various states of consciousness that lie beyond everyday experience. Patañjali presents a highly schematized version of this development, gradually moving from gross to subtle awareness, and eventually to a state in which consciousness is detached from all objects, including the mind itself, and becomes purely self-aware. This essay examines the seven ultimate states of consciousness that culminate from progressive stages of meditative focus outlined in this text.

In India physical methods have been used for religious ends since at least 1000 bce. For two millennia these methods were simple techniques of privation in which the body was mortified, usually by holding a particular posture for long periods, in order to acquire tapas, ascetic power. The details of their performance were not transmitted in texts but, we must assume, passed on orally within lineages of renouncer ascetics. In the early part of the second millennium ce, a somatic soteriology whose physical methods are body-affirming appears in textual sources; some of its practices are depicted soon after in the material record. In certain Sanskrit texts these methods of yoga were classified as haṭha, which means “force”; haṭhayoga means “yoga by means of force”. In this chapter I shall analyse the history of the codification of haṭhayoga techniques up to the composition of the c. 1400 ce Haṭhapradīpikā, which became haṭhayoga’s locus classicus.