THE BODY AND THE YOGA: PHENOMENOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Yoga; Body; Health; Integrative and complementary practices; Physical Education.
The integrative and complementary practices became policy of the Brazilian Ministry of Health in 2006 contemplating five practices in its origin. However, only in the year of 2017 yoga was included in this policy. This research discusses historical aspects of integrative and complementary practices by interweaving it with yoga. Despite the recent insertion, yoga is a millennial and widespread practice by the West presenting the need to understand the Western practitioners of yoga. In this sense, the research aims to understand the construction of the body of yogis of the Núcleo de Yoga Professor Hermógenes da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte with a view to identifying contributions to physical education. In addition, this study aims to identifying and discuss: The perceptions and understandings of practitioners about body, as well as the effects of bodily practices for their users. The research was based on the phenomenological method of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, based on the strategy of the phenomenon located, so there was the displacement of the researcher to the experienced yoga world of fifteen interviewees based on the dialogue from interviews Semi-structured. The interviewees pointed out their perceptions and understandings related to the body. We understand the body as the subject in its entirety. In this perspective, we discussed the motivations and perceptions of respondents who point out their transformations, care, and stimuli to continue experiencing yoga. Therefore, we discerned that this study contributes to the area of physical education by emerging a new perspective on this body practice, presenting results of the importance of yoga for its practitioner. By virtue of expanding the look of the yogi to the comprehension of who is yourself, transmutating to a perception that values the being, the relationships, the meanings, and the symbols of the experiences performed in the context investigated.