Why I hate partner yoga

Jan. 23, 2008 | My dislike of partner yoga started with a stranger's sweaty thighs. I had just moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I was working my way through a Sunday morning Vinyasa class with the same discipline, determination and Type A drive I bring to most attempts at relaxation. But I kept getting distracted by the young man next to me.

To be specific, I was distracted by the moisture he was producing. No sooner had we started sun salutations than the man began to sweat, energetically and abundantly. By the time the class was halfway through, drops of perspiration rolled off his nose with the regularity of a leaking faucet, and a puddle had formed on the floor in front of his mat. Instead of wiping off his face with a towel, he removed his shirt. Now sweat began to drip from a new spot: his nipples.

I, too, was disgusting. Perspiration comes easily to me; I like to say I have a gift. So I was caught off-guard when, after a lovely series of hip openers, the instructor asked us to pair up with a partner. First, I was confused. (A partner? For what?) Then indignant. (I hate group work.) Then anxious. (What if no one wants to be my partner?) By the time I had worked through my emotional process, everyone else was paired up. The young man was mine.

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It turned out the teacher wanted us to do a "partner exercise" -- a playful five-minute break in which you assist someone with a difficult move, use your weight to deepen each other's stretches or, in extreme cases, do balancing poses on top of one another's bodies. I watched in horror as the room, formerly quiet and calm, burst into an excited buzz. It was like my yoga class had morphed into a cocktail party.

I had done yoga before -- many times, in fact. By the time I moved to California, I was used to chanting to gods and goddesses I didn't believe in; I had learned to endure the smell of patchouli. I loved it when the teacher touched me to adjust my position or deepen my stretch -- it was the equivalent of a free massage from a trained professional. But in all my East Coast yoga experiences I had never, ever had to touch anyone else.

In this particular move, I was supposed to help my partner work on a handstand by putting my fist between his legs so he could squeeze it for support. The young man looked at me with excitement: Was I ready? I nodded and braced myself as he popped his legs into the air with such force that I had to catch them against my shoulder to keep him from toppling over. The impact sent a drop of sweat onto my cheek. Instinctively, I grabbed onto his calves, and slipped my hand into position, using his leg hair to provide traction against his slick skin. Standing on the man's moist yoga mat, my fist wedged between his upper thighs, I kept coming back to one thought: This would never have happened in New York.

I've since found out that partner exercises have spread, like a contagious disease, to the East Coast as well. And if you ask my instructor Thomas about my thigh incident, he will tell you that I did the exercise wrong. ("In my defense, I said knees," he insists. "Knees!") But, although I tried to accept partner yoga, something in me snapped when a different teacher, a likable and energetic woman named Laura, demonstrated a move where your partner does a downward-facing dog while you attempt a backbend over their body. I felt a knot of dread in my stomach -- a dread that proved justified as I threw myself backward over my partner, shimmied myself up over her bottom, and got stuck. Belly up, arms and legs dangling, I felt like a human sacrifice.

That's when I decided to find out what was going on.

First, I asked friends. Was I the only person who abhorred partnering? Apparently not. "I hate it," wrote one friend in an e-mail. "Hate holding sweaty hands and pressing together mutually filthy bare soles. Have no interest in smelling my partner's groin from a short distance, or having anyone besides a loved one grapple with my sloppy midsection while I bend awkwardly forward." Another told me about a partner yoga exercise sprung on her in Dallas. It involved a stranger's head between her legs -- on the first day of her period.

But when my classes explode into partner exercises, most of the other students don't join me on emergency trips to the bathroom. Was I missing something? And why were my instructors using partnering in the first place? I decided to ask them.

"I've noticed that when students have to engage with each other, it can immediately wake up the room," explained Laura. "People have to pay attention and take care of each other, and I like that it helps people share their practice."

Thomas -- a former offensive lineman who plays Madonna songs between his classes -- reassured me when he said he wasn't always a fan of partner exercises, either. "I'm a big, sweaty guy," he admitted. "I was like, ugh, people have to touch me? I'm sweating my brains out." Since he started teaching, though, Thomas' attitude has changed. "It's a great way to figure out the mood of a class," he said. "It's almost a foolproof way of getting people to lighten up, because it gets people out of their minds. It makes them interact."

This was exactly what I hated about partner yoga -- the interaction. But I also wanted to know how partner yoga fit into traditional yoga. Does it exist in India? Was having my face in dangerous proximity to a stranger's crotch helpful for my meditative state?

Thomas suggested I talk to his own teacher, Dharmanidhi Sarasvati Tantracarya, a yogi and guru who founded Yoga Mandala, the studio where Thomas teaches. (It's one of the few yoga studios in the United States that is also a functioning Hindu temple.)

"He might tell you that partner yoga is bullshit," Thomas said. "But maybe that's what you want to hear."

Thomas was correct on both counts. (I believe Dharmanidhi referred to partner yoga as "a joke," rather than "bullshit," but the sentiment seemed the same.) Dharmanidhi, who is a recognized guru and Hindu priest, told me he thinks teachers who use partnering exercises to help their students gain more sensation and awareness "might have their hearts in the right place," but what they're doing isn't yoga. As Dharmanidhi explained it to me, the goal of yoga is to "achieve union with your essence" through a combination of physical and metaphysical means, including postures (asanas), breathing exercises and meditation. (Unlike the impression given by most American yoga classes, physical postures make up a very small part of this package.)

Traditionally, yoga is taught one-on-one, takes years to master and has nothing to do with improving the definition of your shoulder muscles. It also emphasizes emotional detachment, which is difficult to achieve if your head is in someone's junk. But Dharmanidhi's biggest point was this: Yoga is an integral part of Hinduism, and Americanized yoga -- whether it's called Ashtanga, Iyengar, Bikram, Vinyasa or anything in between -- is a bastardization of a spiritual practice.

Next page: I realized, with sudden clarity, why I'd had to sign a waiver