DETROIT - Yoga helps you improve your strength, balance, and flexibility. But can it get you a date, too?
That's the idea behind the occasional Yoga for Singles workshops at the Center for Yoga in Birmingham, Mich. Taught by Raina Nemeth, who met her boyfriend in a yoga class, the workshop takes the format of speed-dating and moves it to the mat.
The idea started when Nemeth noticed many of her single friends looking for love online or asking for help finding partners so they could attend her couples' yoga classes.
So she decided to take the concept of partner yoga - two people work together in poses that require lifting and leaning - and use it as a more natural way to make romantic connections.
"All these people . . . spend a lot of time on the Internet, looking for someone who is perfect on paper," said Nemeth, 39. "But when they meet, the connection is just not there. This way, you can feel organically if there is a connection with someone, without words getting in the way."
The workshops run 90 minutes on a Saturday night and typically draw about 30 participants, half men and half women. Nemeth dims the lights, adds candlelight, cranks up the heat, and plays nontypical yoga music like Marvin Gaye. Eventually, participants are sharing mats and poses - like, sitting-in-someone-else's-lap kind of poses.
Although a number of Philadelphia-area studios offer partner yoga, it seems rare to hold classes that promote physical interaction to gauge chemistry.
Still, there are variations.
In Feasterville, chiropractor Dan Lavanga created a program five years ago that marries yoga postures with a goals workshop. Having noticed class participants bonding after the daylong self-improvement course, he recently started planning a spring session with Rita Roley of Philadelphia-based SinglesNetworkEvents.com to target those looking for love.
PDYoga (that's personal development yoga) is "yoga with intention," Lavanga said, in which participants meditate on a personal goal - financial, spiritual, physical - while holding a specific posture. The course also involves discussion groups, and the experience typically fosters an intimate atmosphere, Lavanga said.
"What people do is they will find like-minded people because it's an exercise in exposing your values," Lavanga said. Maybe one person discovers another person has the same attraction to skydiving, or two participants realize they both want to open a vegan bakery.
That's the best-kept secret about yoga classes, said Deborah Metzger, director of the Princeton Center for Yoga & Health in Skillman, N.J., where Yoga for Singles classes have been held periodically for seven years. The mindful meditation class attracts people with similar interests: Most value their health, plus they get to check out everyone at the same time. The shared desire to take yoga already acts as an icebreaker.
The same is true for PDYoga. A $777 eight-hour course with take-home videos and manuals, the event tends to attract not just yoga devotees but also "go-getter folks," said Lavanga, so the playing field is seemingly narrowed to the fit and ambitious.
Nonetheless, Yoga for Singles at the Princeton center never involved touching strangers, Metzger said. After a gentle yoga class, students were invited to mingle, eat light snacks, and sometimes listen to music. Still, in two workshops on March 28 and April 25, the center will be offering "contact yoga" - it's not exclusive to those looking for a match, but "it's a good opportunity for singles," Metzger said. After a warmup, participants pair off for postures, then join together in groups of three and four, and eventually perform poses as one group.
For Karen Schultz, 45, a single mother of two boys who said she's very picky when it comes to finding a mate, a Yoga for Singles class was intriguing. But the thought of sharing poses with a bunch of men had her feeling anxious when she arrived at the Birmingham studio.
"At first, it's totally awkward," yoga instructor Nemeth said. "Like a junior-high dance."
The participants lay their mats in a circle facing one another, and introductions are made. Then the men roll up their mats and join a woman on her mat.
Every three minutes or so, the men rotate to the next woman's mat, where they work together. "It's sensual, not sexual," Nemeth said. "It's nonthreatening in a safe environment. You're touched and touching someone and being vulnerable."
Within 15 minutes, Nemeth said, people are transformed, laughing and sweating and getting into compromising positions with people they've just met.
"She makes you OK with it," Schultz said. "In one position, she had a guy put his feet right on top of my thighs. . . . Then you fly up in the air, like you do when you're little kids. You don't know the person, and it's a little intimate."
In another move, she sat face-to-face in a man's lap with her arms around him.
Nemeth said these close encounters help show whether participants have chemistry with someone - much more than a typical conversation over dinner can.
"I think yoga focuses you to be in the moment," Nemeth said. "You really have to pay attention to what you're doing instead of trying to impress someone by watching your words. In most dating situations, you're concentrating on putting out this image of yourself. Yoga encourages you to be your authentic self. Your conversation is limited, so you have to be in the moment. People start to be themselves, they're not worrying about what everyone is thinking."
After the last class, Nemeth said one attendee contacted her to ask for another's number. But it's not always about making an immediate love connection.
"Sometimes there are love connections," she said. "But some people come to yoga every day and never talk to each other. This is a good way to get to know the community you're in every day. So friendships can be made, and you can learn some new postures."
Schultz said for her, the classes didn't result in a date. But she's willing to try it again.
"The chemistry is either there or it's not," Schultz said. "With one man, I think it was there."