Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks on Relationships, Breath, and Movement

Gay and Katie Hendricks have spent decades working where the body, the mind, and spiritual practice meet. Between them they've authored more than 30 books, trained thousands of coaches, appeared on Oprah, and led seminars in a lot of different countries. In this conversation with Eric Lenderman, they described how their partnership began and what pulled their separate interests into one shared body of work.

For Gay, the starting point was breath. As a PhD student at Stanford he became absorbed in biofeedback and breathing techniques, and he watched breath work do something concrete: it helped people settle down, relax, and work through what was stuck inside them. He kept building on that. Around the same time he kept hearing stories about a movement therapist out in California who was apparently getting remarkable results with people. He wanted to meet her. One day he found himself in a large room there, and it turned out she was in the same room. He maneuvered his way over to introduce himself, and that was that.

Katie came at the same questions from movement rather than breath. Her focus was on people finding the meaning inside their own movement, learning that they had choices, and discovering a sense of pleasure and ease in simply inhabiting their bodies. Movement, for her, was also a doorway into a person's inner life. When she and Gay paired her work with his, the combination felt natural.

There was a third thread, and that was the relationship itself. The two of them fell for each other, and that drew them toward studying couples. Part of what motivated the study was a strange gap in their own experience. When they got together, they knew exactly one couple who seemed genuinely happy together and genuinely awake to each other. That couple was their single working model of what a conscious partnership could look like. Then the couple divorced.