How does Principle-Based Partner Yoga support our emotional well-being?

Yoga is a practice for bringing ourselves into greater harmony and balance, for stilling the fluctuations of the mind and realizing our deeper nature.

The understanding that we get hurt in relation to others and we heal in relation to others is why practicing a relational form of Yoga, based in universal principles, can be so transformative.

Most of us were not given permission as children to feel what we feel. These unmet feelings and their associated painful beliefs build up inside us, affecting our health and our capacity to live fulfilling lives.

Principle-Based Partner Yoga provides a safe and supportive container to see ourselves and our relational patterns. These patterns, primarily of resistance and defense, arise out of our innocent attempt to avoid further pain, but in effect, prevent us from living freely and loving fully.

As we are able to see and feel these limiting patterns without judgement, we can then make a conscious choice to surrender what no longer serves us.

Much of this process can happen without words or story attached. It happens directly, in the nervous system, because we are using the body, as the vehicle to release these limiting patterns.

Working directly with the physical and emotional body takes us beyond the conceptual mind and provides a kinesthetic release from the pain of the past. Unlike when working with the story alone, the release of stored painful emotions is experienced in a more whole and integrated way.

This is important point to emphasize as it now generally agreed that emotional pain gets held in the tissues of our body and in the nervous system. Once released, our more elevated emotions such gratitude, awe and peace reveal themselves.

Partner Yoga opens us in so many ways. We use the body to realize we are not the body, we are the Spirit that animates it. Our mind opens in ways that help us to see our essential sameness – how regardless of the story, we all suffer the same.

As I have discovered in my many years of teaching, it is through our willingness to show up and reveal ourselves, honestly and vulnerably, that we fall in love.

Initially, showing up this way can feel like ‘why would I even want to do that and risk being hurt again? It is much more comfortable (however painful) here, in this safe, separate reality I have created.’

The answer is because within each of us, however deeply buried, is the desire to live as love, to offer our gifts to the world through the opening of our hearts and minds. Partner Yoga opens the door to another way of being, to seeing we have a choice in how we relate to ourselves and others.

Most everyone, given the right conditions of safety and support, can easily experience that not only is it safe to feel, it is through our feeling nature that we become fully human – that we are able to integrate our human nature with our our divine nature.

It takes courage to let go of the patterns of defense we have innocently acquired, to choose to connect rather than isolate or divide. And it is, I believe, why we here, to learn it is safe to love and be loved.