Conspirituality in the Finnish yoga scene

In recent years, yoga communities across the world have been increasingly implicated in the circulation of conspiracy narratives and many kinds of contested views. This has been characterised through the concept ‘conspirituality' that combines spirituality with conspiracy thinking and distrust in official authorities. Such a rise of conspiracist ideas has been recognized in the Nordic context too, where public trust on science institutions and state authorities generally have been on a specifically high level. This presentation examines how conspiracist and contested views and discourses are perceived in Finland by drawing on two sets of research material collected in 2024-2025: 1) survey regarding Finnish yoga practitioners' values, worldviews and political attitudes and 2) thematic interviews concerned with their perceptions and experiences of conspiracy narratives and contested truth claims in social media. This study is part of the research project ‘In the Middle and in the Margins: Yoga Practitioners in Finland' (YOFI) that aims to understand the variety of worldviews and spiritual outlooks among practitioners, and how these are interacting with values and identities related to e.g. voting preferences, gender and race. I will present some quantitative findings regarding the connection between the aforementioned factors and acceptance of conspiracist ideas among the respondents, as well as preliminary findings based on qualitative analysis focusing on the practitioners' own perspectives, experiences and negotiation of conspiracist and contested views, discourses and forms of knowledge.