“Imagine you go into a Catholic Church and there’s something called genuflection, where you go down on one knee,” he said. “What if a person comes out of the ceremony — which is supposed to be about their relationship with God — and they say, wow, my legs feel a little sore! And they go home and open up a shop and have people do genuflection for an hour to disco music. And partner genuflection, at that! It’s completely taking it out of context.”

No one seems to know the origins of partner yoga, but its popularity probably has something to do with two of American yoga’s most influential figures — Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, who popularized Ashtanga yoga (which led to Vinyasa, also known as “flow”), and B.K.S. Iyengar, who developed the Iyengar system. Both trained in India, but, according to Dharmanidhi, they focused most of their energy on asana practice rather than pranayama (breathing) or meditation, and the popularity of their systems cemented American yoga’s emphasis on physical poses.

What’s more, many of the current wave of American yoga adopters are athletic types who also gravitate toward activities like dancing, martial arts and gymnastics, which all involve frequent work with partners. It’s unsurprising, then, that when these people started teaching yoga, they incorporated partner work into their classes. This confluence of factors — a culture that emphasized the physical aspects of yoga, teachers with backgrounds in other partner-based athletics, and the American desire to always be doing something new — eventually led to the development of partner yoga. Toss in a healthy dose of New Age”body awareness” and pushing of “comfort zones,” and you’ve got a bona fide fitness fad.

Indeed, there are entire movements devoted to partner yoga — from Contact Yoga to Trust Yoga, Danskinetics and Yogassage, to name just a few. (That’s not even mentioning other non-partner-based atrocities, like disco yoga, reggae yoga, punk yoga and, not kidding, naked yoga.)

At the moment, the trendiest of the partner-based versions seems to be Acroyoga, a San Francisco-based movement that combines “the spiritual wisdom of yoga, the loving kindness of Thai massage, and the dynamic power of Acrobatics.” In other words, you do some yoga moves with a partner and then spend an hour or so climbing on top of one another. It sounded like my own personal hell. But when Thomas jokingly invited me to come with him to an Acroyoga class, I decided to say yes.

Partly, I went out of guilt. My conversation with Dharmanidhi had left me feeling self-righteous about my dislike of partnering — but also dishonest. I mean, I care about the definition of my shoulder muscles. I’m far more likely to sign up for a California yoga class than for a year in an Indian cave getting in touch with my essence. It seemed hypocritical to base my aversion to partnering on traditional yoga and Hinduism, since I don’t practice either. Also, I wondered if experiencing such an extreme might help me get over my aversion to partnering in normal yoga classes. After all, according to the Web site: : “Through practicing AcroYoga, we experience a deepening trust in ourselves and others, and realize that by working in a partnership, we manifest more than we ever could alone.”

Thomas and I met on a rainy night. I was ready to manifest.

Things started off poorly when the AcroYoga teacher instructed us to sit back-to-back with our partner and attempt to match each other’s inhalations and exhalations. “Try to find something you enjoy about this,” he said. He made it sound like the challenge was to pick just one.

Next was the “circle ceremony,” which consists of standing in a circle with your classmates, putting your hands on each others’ shoulders, and staring purposefully and intensely into their eyes. I couldn’t do this without laughing, so instead, I visually bonded with several people’s ears and, in the case of one woman, armpit hair. After some brief hand holding and shoulder rubbing, we went back to our mats with our partners, flowed through some sun salutations and moved on to the meat of AcroYoga — helping your partner to “fly.” Basically, it’s a gymnastic version of the children’s game “airplane.”

One of the more memorable poses was the “bat”: me dangling upside down above Thomas’ head in a cross-legged position with his feet wedged into my hip creases to support my body weight. I felt like I was in the Cirque du Soleil. Unfortunately, the teacher had a habit of helping us get into weird positions (”Great! Now extend your legs forward into an upside-down pike!”) and then walking away before explaining how to get out of them. When Thomas’ legs began to cramp while I was suspended above his skull, I realized, with sudden clarity, why I’d had to sign a waiver.

By the end of the night — which concluded with some silent bonding and a massage circle — I’d been in positions with Thomas that I’ve not shared with any other man. It brought us closer (how many people have pressed their ass bones with yours?) and parts of it were actually fun — it helped that Thomas wasn’t a stranger. But it definitely wasn’t what I would describe as yoga. I might have had fewer objections if it had been called, as Dharmanidhi suggests most Americanized yoga should be, “yoga-based exercise.” But trying to turn it into something spiritual made me defensive of a religious tradition that I don’t even practice. “Why not just call a sweaty acrobatics class a sweaty acrobatics class?” I wanted to ask. By any other name, it would still smell just as bad.

As I drove home from the class, I thought back on something my favorite teacher from Brooklyn told me. She explained that, according to some yogic philosophies, the physical poses are preparation for meditation (that is, a way to get the body ready to sit still); in others, the movement itself is the meditation. In either case, she thinks partner exercises interrupt students’ concentration and thrust them back into what Buddhists call the “monkey mind” — where your thoughts jump around like a monkey hopping from branch to branch.

That was it: I didn’t like the forced intimacy with strangers, but mostly, the partner exercises took me out of whatever fragile moment of internal calm I might have cultivated and pushed me back into my normal, hyperactive mind. Maybe other people have better attention spans; my brain, however, is as frisky as a chimpanzee, and will take any excuse it can get to run away. When I go to yoga, it’s because I crave solitude. I do not want to think about other people and their potential foot fungus. I do not want small talk. I want to be left alone.

So I decided to take a different approach to partnering, and I think both Thomas and Laura will approve. Now, if a teacher asks me to do a partner exercise that I don’t want to do, I — respectfully, of course — am just not going to participate. Instead, I’ll stretch my hips, imagine that I’m back in Brooklyn and practice yoga the way that makes me happiest: silently, peacefully, and with no one’s fist between my thighs.

FROM:http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/01/23/partner_yoga/index1.html

       

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