What’s the Difference Between Partner Yoga and Couples Yoga?
Most people assume that Partner Yoga is Couples Yoga, that it is something reserved for couples only. This is a major misperception and greatly limits the potentiality of the practice.
Although there is a common belief that being in a longterm, monogamous relationship is the optimal relational status, the reality is that many people are making different choices.
Does this mean that the practice of Partner Yoga is not for them? Absolutely not. People often choose not to be in an intimate partnership for short or long term periods to focus on their own personal growth and development.
Partner Yoga is a practice that provides so much of what we are seeking in relationship, including touch, authentic connection, and non-sexual intimacy. It also reveals so much about our relational dynamics and supports us to understand and work with our habitual tendencies.
Below are the four primary ways we relate to others from a Partner Yoga perspective:
We focus outwardly on the other while losing connection to ourselves and our own experience.
We are completely self-focused and unable to connect or empathize with others.
We vacillate back and forth between unhealthy merging and isolating.
We stay deeply rooted in ourselves while remaining open and empathic towards others.
The top three habitual patterns, when engaged in unconsciously, lead to feelings of loneliness, anger, fear and depression, while the fourth option provides so much of what we are all longing for in relationship.
When we honor our relationship with ourselves as our primary commitment, we no longer sacrifice our own needs to be in relationship with others. We see that it is only from a place of grounded embodiment in ourselves that we can freely and lovingly support others.
One of the reasons I was drawn to develop Partner Yoga was my own relational wounding. I was aware that I often engaged in unhealthy relational patterns which resulted in conflict and emotional suffering.
Partner Yoga has given me and others a very different experience of embodied relating. It is a path for realizing our shared humanity, our essential sameness and for perceiving others as aspects of ourselves. It helps us to trust our own knowing and supports us in softening our resistance to authentic connection.
Whether we are currently in a ‘couple’ relationship or not, Partner Yoga offers valuable tools and practices for every-body. In fact, sometimes we have the most illuminating experience with someone we have just met as we have no stories about who we think they are.
The practice of Partner Yoga evokes our childlike joy and creativity, while supporting our well-being on every level!
If you feel called to experience this practice more deeply, I invite you to explore my upcoming Trainings & Events. You can also connect with me directly through my Contact page to learn more.
