Couples Yoga Benefits And Techniques

Despite its reputation as a solitary activity, yoga offers surprising benefits to couples who practice it together. Yoga’s traditional postures and breathing techniques bring strength, flexibility and a sense of serenity. Now, experts are adding another dimension to yoga’s benefits: When practiced as a twosome, yoga provides couples with an emotional and spiritual bonding experience.

 

“Yoga is an excellent medium of expression and growth,” says Gillian Kapteyn Comstock, a certified Kripalu yoga instructor in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, who has been teaching couples yoga for almost a decade. Yoga asks your body to move in new and challenging ways, she explains, and this “increases the language of intimacy for couples by giving them nonverbal ways of expressing their feelings.” Even if those feelings are not always perfectly comfortable, yoga can prove helpful as a method of opening lines of communication. Engaging in postures together creates “a dynamic tension that is a great channel for conflict release,” she says.

Many of the poses used in couple’s yoga are taken from traditional yoga poses, or asanas, and are modified to work interactively. For example, standing poses such as the Triangle and Warrior I and II can be done as a twosome, as can twists and inversions, such as shoulder stands. Even the meditative aspects of yoga can be shared: In one exercise, the couple sits cross-legged, back to back, which allows each person to feel the other’s heart beat and breathing patterns while engaging in their own meditation.

Everything in couple’s yoga, however, isn’t always deeply New Age. Cyndy Lee, director of OM Yoga Center in New York City, suggests yoga for couples because it gives people a chance to “relate to each other in a new way that is noncompetitive and often funny and sweet.”

 

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