‘I’ve drawn, like, someone who was the world’: drawings as embodied gestures of lived yoga experience

There have been strong calls to develop the study of sensory embodied scholarship in sport and physical culture that is open for all academic fields to consider. Work so far relies largely upon the sensory intelligence of the researcher in auto/ethnographic approaches and drawing as a traditional arts-based visual methods approach is rare. This paper seeks to address this situation by offering an original example of a participant-generated drawing methodology to explore lived experience of yoga. To do so we utilise phenomenology to frame our position on the mind-body-world relationship as it relates to the goals and practice of yoga and of drawing as an embodied gesture. We offer visual-led interpretations of drawings produced by participants after yoga practice, of composition strategies and the verbal explanations they invite. The drawings created new empirical and methodological insights into how the environment or world is attended to by yoga practitioners as part of a sensory emplaced experience, and opened up new dialogues and exchanges of data between the fields of physical culture and art and of the challenges of investigating lived sensory experience in this way. Our findings provide an original example of how drawings and arts-based knowledge might be incorporated into a sensory embodied research agenda in sport and physical culture. More bridging work between the arts and physical culture is needed to develop methodologies for use with novice drawer participants.