Practicing Yoga with a Friend

by Nina

Baxter Bell: One of My Yoga Friends

In Shari’s post for tomorrow about creating a practice for improving balance, she will recommend some partner work. Of course, many of us have done partner work in class, but have you ever practiced yoga at home with a friend?

When I first started practicing yoga at home, I always practiced alone. My very image of “home practice” was so inextricably tied to the idea of being alone that it never occurred to me to practice with someone else. In fact, it wasn’t until I worked on Moving Toward Balance with Rodney Yee that I started practicing once a week with a friend at Rod’s urging. He wanted me to learn first hand about the benefits you can obtain from practicing with someone else. You see, he himself felt that he wouldn't have much of a home practice if it were not for the friends he practiced with.

So what did I learn from my experiments? It became pretty clear almost immediately that benefits of practicing with a friend included much more than simply being able to do partner yoga. Briefly, I  learned through experience that practicing with a friend allows you to:

• inspire and support each other to practice regularly
• teach each other and learn from each other by taking turns leading the practice
• challenge each other (get each other out of ruts and/or encourage each other to practice poses you tend to avoid)
• observe and adjust each other
• talk to each other about yoga

Your practice partner can be anyone you know. He or she could be someone you know from the yoga world, who takes from the same teacher you do or who you met at a workshop or retreat. Or he or she could be someone in your outside life, whether family member, neighbor or friend. Just try asking!

I realized while reading through Shari’s upcoming post that she assumed you would know that you wouldn’t be breaking any rules if you decided to have someone help you with your balance practice. So it seemed like the perfect time to tell you that, no, practicing with a friend is not against the rules. In fact, you’re having trouble beginning a home practice, practicing with a friend is sometimes the very thing that will get you started down the path.

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