A Philosophy of Mindful Movement

This novel volume examines Chinese and Indian mindful movements (such as tai chi, qigong, Daoist meditation, and hatha yoga) to demonstrate how the contemplative practices of the body and mind can amount to a form of transformative philosophy through ways of thinking, knowing, and doing.

The book explains how these body practices use kinesthetic imagination, repetition, and slowness to bring about cognitive and epistemic changes in how we experience ourselves and the world. The chapters look in-depth at the details of these practices, drawing analogies with everyday experiences such as singing, hearing musical earworms, reading and re-reading texts, and recalling folk wisdom; the book suggests these body practices can be cognitive, epistemic, and philosophically transformative. The chapters also explore these practices in a first-person, biographical style, drawing on the author’s own experiences as a student and teacher of these practices. The descriptions take on a range of modes, from that of an insider to that of a skeptic, to those that are instructional in nature, and then to those that are more phenomenological. These various, sometimes-conflicting, descriptions raise meta-level questions about how best to understand the practices.

Focused on the study of embodied contemplative practice, this book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the fields of Asian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and the philosophy of religion more widely. Philosophers studying embodiment, embodied cognition, and religion will also find the volume of useful. Practitioners of martial arts, qigong, yoga, and meditation may benefit from the book.