Amidst a wealth of Western yoginis, who condemned for publishing yoga guidebooks thinly veiled as anecdotal accounts from summer retreats in Rishikesh. Tara Guber's illustrative self-reportage of yoga breathes new life into vain chakras. Call it her bohemian path to defining truth, freedom, beauty, but above all, love. Contact Yoga, a form of yoga with involves exquisite poses and exercises with your significant other, is more about breaking barriers and boundaries between men and women, daring explorations about our inner sensibilities through trial and error, and how we create exciting spontaneity with our significant others than about genteel asanas. In its best form, she argues, "It goes beyond the physical challenge to teach about trust, commitment, love and communication."

Yoga is no longer just about peace of mind and staying fit. It has also become a fashion statement of sorts with strong elements of pop running through omnipresent yoga centers. But, nothing is sexier than beginning a path towards your divine union with your loved one in architecturally amazing positions that evoke memories of your first glance, first kiss and even your first fight as a couple. This yoga introduces the seven points of contact: trust, passion, commitment, love, communication, vision, and union. "These points relate to the way the seven chakras play out in our relationship with individual selves and with others." Through the Contact Yoga points and practices, couples use pathos of postures to classicize the flow of the body's physical, emotional, and spiritual energies while investigating its vulnerabilities.

Contact differs from Tantra in that, "Tantra is taking everything in Contact and putting it into an advanced physical, loving partnership. You can experience with the union a child, with your parents, with your lover. When two become one, we don't give up the 'other' for the totality of the 'one.'"

Deepak Chopra says, "The beautifully illustrated postures in Contact will evoke in you and your partner the trust, passion, and love that come from true union between souls. Human relationship will transform to one that is divine. Contact Yoga will show you the path, evoke the ecstasy of freedom within your own being and nothing will be impossible."

And these energies in relationships are the fundamental ones, sometimes considered best through the prism of humor. "My dog, Archie, get up every morning and does the most beautiful 'down dog.' Yoga is about opening up your energy. So, by this, everybody does yoga. I've actually done contact meditation with Archie. We laid on the floor, looked right into his eyes, and we bonded. Contact is about creating a connection with another."

Tara, along with her husband, Peter Guber (CEO of Mandalay Pictures), have employed informal forms of Contact Yoga since they began taking yoga in the early 80s to help relieve Peter of unanticipated back problems. "Yoga gave us a place and something to do together," she says. "It had a profound impact on me, on my body, on getting in touch with my breath, and on our relationship."

The banalities of yoga exercises are enough to give anyone secluded safe haven. But, for Contact partners that sterile quietus blossoms into full-blown poetic bliss. For Tara, a yogic marriage is a serendipitous combination in which their practice supports their marriage. Tara uses meditative breathing, opening up her feminine, or "goddess" energy-a vital commodity for a woman in partnership with a man who, by virtue of his role in the world, expresses the masculine powers of insight, focus, discipline, and manifestation in all areas of his life. "I breathe deeply from my belly, opening my lower chakras and moving the energy up my spine and into my heart," she says. "By connecting and holding my feminine center, I don't have to compete with Peter in his masculine domain. He can be there and I have no need to 'fix' him."

Tara sees yoga as a metaphor for relationships since, after all, yoga means union. "Yoga makes you more comfortable with compromise and keeps you calm when things are uncertain. Yoga is a powerful tool to serve anyone," she says. Two sides of sense and sensuality just like the Hindu goddess of eternal light and love, Tara.

SOURCE: Tara Guber

PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Seeff. Images from CONTACT: The Yoga of Relationship, (c) 2007 Tara Guber. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. www.insighteditions.com

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