In contact yoga, all things are interdependent, which is why I’m hoping Analin Principe’s tiny legs won’t collapse and send me crashing to the ground. Though I must outweigh her by 30 pounds, she is lying on her back, holding me up with her feet. Balancing on my stomach, I slowly stretch out my arms until I am flying like Superman.
Around us in the cozy studio at the Eight Limbs Yoga Center in Chicago, where instructors Alan M. Wolf and Nicole Ohme recently led a three-hour contact yoga workshop, couples of all yoga abilities attempted the same partner lift, called “the Falcon.” Some got it, then toppled over. Others held the pose indefinitely. Nearly everyone was amazed how quickly trust developed, even between those initially paired with strangers.
“There is nothing like the energy of another person,” Ohme told us before we started. “You can work in yoga with all sorts of props, walls, blocks or belts but it’s not the same as having a live person helping out. It opens your body on a different level.”
Contact yoga, also called partner yoga and yogassage, is one of the latest entries in the ever-burgeoning yoga market, which now includes office yoga, aerobic yoga, 15-minute yoga, 20-minute yoga, Acu-yoga, aqua yoga and baby yoga. Only contact yoga involves working with another person, however, something its supporters say can further stretches, release tension, strengthen relationships and add an element of intimacy that is hard to replicate.
“It’s a way to connect without words,” said Debra Brodsky, 28, who has been practicing yoga for three years and took the workshop with her boyfriend, Adam Natenshon. “It’s very communicative in a non-verbal, non-sexual way and I find that really powerful.”
Contact yoga generally combines techniques and exercises from yoga, dance, massage and martial arts. Much like regular yoga, the poses, or asanas, can help focus the mind and increase strength, stamina and flexibility. But in doing the postures together, partners must rely on each other’s support to keep the body in alignment and to maintain balance and concentration.
The physical support and sense of touch is a key element to the practice.
“Like food and water, touch and intimacy are basic human needs,” Cain Carroll and Lori Kimata wrote in their new book “Partner Yoga” (Rodale Press). “In today’s high tech world, most of us are more comfortable connecting with each other through machines and modems than our own skin. Yet for optimum health, we all need to touch and be touched.”
Done the right way, the additional pressure and pull from another person can have its benefits. Like most people in the class, Brodsky and Natenshon found themselves twisted into seemingly impossible positions.
“It’s a nice thing to do in a relationship,” said Brodsky. “When both individuals have a sense of body awareness it’s great to help each other reach a further place, both as individuals and as couples.”
Wolf and Ohme, who met at a yoga workshop and married last year, started holding regular partner yoga classes more than a year ago, drawing on their backgrounds of yoga, dance and athletics and by borrowing ideas from a dance kinetics class in the 1980s.
Ohme, originally from Goslar, Germany, has a strong background in both yoga and dance. Wolf, a health-fitness consultant, has done everything from bodybuilding to martial arts. After spending years in activities that require intense discipline and structure, he now prefers contact yoga because it allows him to step outside the traditional yoga guidelines.
“Serious yoga practitioners will avoid us,” Wolf said. Contact yoga is “too creative and not rigid enough for them, which is exactly why I’m doing it.”
Wolf also likes the interpersonal contact that inevitably arises when dealing with another person. “I generally don’t like confrontation and I’m a loner, so this forces me to interact with others, and it forces me to stay calm and be at peace,” he said.
At Eight Limbs, the workshop was a mix of beginners and long-time yogis. Although I’d only done a month of yoga at a health club, the woman I was paired with, Analin Principe, was one of the more experienced class members. Massage therapists Leanne Emery and Kristine Gaylord signed up to learn new techniques for clients and to help themselves open up. And Chad Satlow, a yoga teacher, was looking for new ideas.
“To me, it was like finding out all this unwritten knowledge,” said Satlow, 28, who teaches at Yogawerks in Barrington.
For Satlow, though, working with another person was initially a strange phenomenon. “I was uncomfortable in the beginning because you are mixing energies with the other person. It took till the end to really enjoy it,” said Satlow, who got along so well with his partner that they plan to go on a date. “Even if it’s purely friendship, it did feel good to touch another person. It’s a great way to get reconnected with something.”
RULES TO LIVE BY
Partner yoga axioms from the book “Partner Yoga,” by Cain Carroll and Lori Kimata.
– All things are interdependent.
– Touch and intimacy are basic human needs.
– Fear and pain are two of life’s greatest teachers.
– Exercise and rest are essential for vibrant health.
– Laughter and play are life’s fountains of youth.
– Partnership is based on trust and communication.
– Breath is life.
