Keep it Simple

A few weeks ago while in class I looked down at my wonderful yoga mat and noticed, to my dismay, that there were several little black spots on it. My mat is a lovely blue color that I reminds me of a beautiful clear ocean. I have never seen another yoga mat that is quite as lovely in color as mine. As I bent down to inspect these strange spots more closely, I realized that they weren’t ON the mat, but PART OF the mat. As I desperately tried to remove the offending material, I noticed that I was actually making small craters in the mat!!!!! WHAT?!?!

After realizing that my mat was in fact degrading, I counted up the years that I have been using my wonderful mat and figured that it may in fact be time to replace my yoga mat. Now, to be fair let me just say that my yoga mat was hastily purchased in a discount store (Ross, I think) on a whim after I decided that using the mats at my studio is terribly unhygenic. It was certainly not an expensive mat, as my college student budget was somewhat limited. And although it wasn’t state of the art, I was happy. My mat never let me down, never let me fall and is a perfectly sufficient tool for my practice of yoga. And now it was time to replace it. I knew that I would never be able to find another mat that was as beautiful in color (other students have more than once remarked on the color of my mat). So off to the internets I went in search of another perfect yoga mat. I searched high and low from the standard www.amazon.com to the yoga-centric www.manduka.com. I read reviews of different mats and tried to decide what the most important component of my yoga mat is. Then it hit me like a bolt of lighting. My first yoga mat was purchased, as I mentioned above, on a whim. For less than $15 I had grabbed my yoga mat and used it for years. Why was the process so different now? I don’t know what had convinced me that my new yoga mat purchase had to involve hours of research at the computer, looking for that illusive “perfect” mat. From that moment, I took a step back from my research and appreciated the fact that I can simply buy a new mat.

And so I did. And although I am grieving a little because my new mat is not the same gorgeous blue as my old one, I am really excited to see where my new (purple) mat will take me on this incredible journey of yoga.

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