Make-Believe: Spiritual Practice, Embodiment, and Sacred Space

Abstract

In this paper I examine different forms of spiritual practice which seek to (re)enchant the everyday and the ordinary. By considering the duality of sacred and profane as the relational outcome of both embodied action and the action of other objects or things that are nominally valued as profane, an account is sought which acknowledges the corporeal enacting and sensing of the sacred both in and of the everyday. Taking empirical examples from New Age spiritual seekers, I trace the ways in which profane spatialities and temporalities are reconfigured into sacred topologies and how these seekers realise spiritual enlightenment through a reinhabited appropriation or articulation of the world. The source of signification of this spiritual comportment lies in embodied practices of the everyday that are sensed as the spiritually ‘correct’ or ‘true’ way of doing things. New ways of thinking everyday spiritual practice are thus sought and elaborated upon.