Seeing Lights: Healing in a Meditation Class in Beirut

Healing in a Meditation Class in Beirut

Abstract

This article links “sensorially engaged anthropology” (NICHTER 2008) to the research of contemporary spiritual practices in the Middle East by exploring the notion of healing among practitioners of a meditation class in Beirut. Based on ten months of ethnographic research, participants’ sensory processes during the meditation class are analysed. The author shows how the central aspect of the practice, the sensation of seeing lights, can be understood as a bodily mediated attempt to learn and experience love for oneself. This attitude was the basis for healing, as from the practitioners’ perspective only a self-loving individual could possess the ability to build a life according to one’s wishes and thus heal from difficult life situations. In this way, the practice proposed a notion of healing as the acquisition of individual agency that reflected the aspirations of the primarily female and middle-class practitioners. Particularly against the backdrop of the recent economic crisis in Lebanon, efforts to build a self-determined life—one that balanced the drive for autonomy and individuality with the need for embeddedness in the social environment—played a central role in the practitioners’ lives. More broadly, the article demonstrates that focusing on the sensory experiences of those involved in healing practices not only enables a better understanding of how people manage to become better, but also draws attention to the fact that repetitive learning and experience of sensations are the means by which contemporary spiritual practices (re)produce and reaffirm distinctive values centred around the question of how to live one’s life.