Can Yoga Deepen Your Relationships?
by Carol Hendershot
When I asked people what made their lives happy and fulfilling, the answers invariably had to do with their relationships. When I asked what made those relationships rich and meaningful, I heard things like trust, communication, respect and love.
We are all interdependent beings and our relationships are often the most important parts of our lives and I believe that yoga is one way to strengthen those relationships.
Can yoga, an activity that most of us do pretty much on our own, help to strengthen and deepen our relationships with others? And if so, how?
I guess the first and most obvious answer is that yoga helps us to become our own friend. The inner work of yoga is all about cultivating those loving, trusting qualities in our relationship with the person we spend the most time of all with, ourselves.
In Yoga we are cultivating self-awareness and self-love. As we breathe through each yoga pose bringing attention to our bodies and our reactions, we begin to understand ourselves more fully and if we can stay with it, we begin to cultivate non-judgment. We begin to have the understanding that perfection isn't possible or even desirable. We see that our challenges are not something to be avoided but to be worked with. We may even begin to communicate with our inner critic. We might say "Thank you for your opinion, Joe, but I know better." We begin to find our center, warts and all and it feels good.
In yoga we are encouraged to remain in the moment, fully present to our experience. As we get better at this, we begin to see that we can maintain some of this mindful attention in other parts of our lives, not just on our yoga mats. When we begin to put that into action, all of our interactions become richer and more meaningful. We actually really have dinner with our wife or husband rather than being a million miles away with some project at work. We remember with the immediacy of this moment why we chose this person to love.
When we develop a consistent yoga practice we see changes in our bodies and our minds and as we see results, it reinforces our willingness to do the work. Yes, yoga can be work, just like our relationships can be work, but it is an endeavor that has immense rewards. This undertaking can bring us to a place where we can truly say, I like myself, I respect myself and I am finding more and more ways to be kind and loving to myself.
Our yoga practice becomes a labor of love that brings us to a place of balance at our center. When we begin to really live in our center, knowing ourselves fully and being comfortable with who we really are, then we won't be blown apart by the inevitable winds that come into a relationship. As we are honest with ourselves and begin to trust ourselves more, we will have much more to give to another human being. We will want to fully share the person we are with another and that can't help but to deepen the most important relationships in our lives.