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Rubber Soul
Melissa Bean - Highland Yoga Student
I once had a serious attachment to my yoga
mat. My faithful yoga partner for many years, my first mat was your
standard blue yoga sticky mat. I think I paid a little over twenty dollars
for it at the Wise Man Bookstore, which has since moved twice and is now, I
believe, no longer owned by the Wise Man. I had made the final decision to
go out and purchase my own mat while I was holding bridge pose for an
extended period of time with the teacher walking around the room reminding
everyone not to let our hips drop. I was pretty sure that my Dad’s
endearing childhood nickname for me, “sweatbox,” meant that I shouldn’t
subject anyone else to sharing a mat with me. I can still recall clearly
taking the mat out of the basket of other rolled up sticky mats. I remember
the way that my hand seamlessly curled around it, its simple weight held up
by the muscles in my arm. I didn’t know or even expect what would happen to
or in my new yoga practice, or how the blue foam would turn to brown in the
places where my feet would root into the floor, or that I would pick off the
flecks of blue rubber that would adhere to my perspiring shins as my mat
gradually wore away.
Over the span of many years, my yoga mat got
thinner and grew more flexible. It became downright floppy, foldable, and
perfectly and lovingly compliant. It could be unresistingly rolled up any
which way, and when you unrolled it out, you couldn’t tell which side was
up. Before driving home from thrilling and rigorous classes, I would
habitually and unceremoniously toss it into the passenger seat of the car,
the backseat, or the trunk. I draped it over the deck’s wooden railing to
air dry in the hot sun after its swooshing around the washing machine and
quick warm tumble in the dryer. Before that, though, I had always hand
washed it in a soapy bathtub with Woolite and a scrub brush, and then rolled
it up inside an old towel, stood on top of it and walked my feet out from
the middle to the edges, thus squeezing out all the water. Then I’d
gingerly pick up and take outside my beautiful freshly cleaned mat, while
casually disregarding, lying slopped over the shower rod, the old towel,
left drenched and dripping.
One terrible day, I lost my mat. I had taken
it to the gentle yoga class I led at school. The class was simple and the
floor carpeted, so I had placed the unnecessary rolled-up mat out of the
way. When class was over, the room emptied out, and I was alone. Against
the back wall was a rolled-up purple mat that a relaxed yogi had forgotten.
But when I turned to retrieve my own mat, it was nowhere in sight in the
suddenly stark light of the gym basement. I began checking behind the long
scuffed wooden table resting on its side against the wall. I peered deeply
into the heavy rolls of extra carpet that lay on the floor. The large
emptiness of the room, its lack of hiding spaces, finally made me accept
that my mat was just not here, that I would have to return home empty
handed. Taking the strange purple mat that someone had left, I got home and
put it where I usually put my old blue mat. The alien purple mat stood
there in the little space between my fridge and the heater like an awkward
and unwelcome visitor in my dorm room. The mat was practically brand new
and still shiny. I detested it. It was so thick! It was too smooth! It
only rolled up in one direction! At least I still had something to practice
on, though, I consoled myself, as my obvious attachment to my particular
shabby blue mat increasingly began to dawn on me.
I sent out a general email: Was anyone missing
a yoga mat, and by the way, had anyone accidentally taken mine? Who would
want my mat, I wondered incredulously, after no had one responded, when
after the next week’s classes my mat still hadn’t turned up. My mat was
disgusting! It was several years old, and any stranger taking child’s pose
on it would probably report back that it smelled. It was dirty, faded,
worn, practically brown-green in places, and so obviously used that I simply
couldn’t imagine someone rolling it out without noticing that it wasn’t
theirs. Still, I couldn’t help but cast suspicious glances at the mats in
the students’ hands as they walked into class. I was disappointed,
saddened, and then jealous as they crisply rolled out their mats on the
floor at the beginning of class, mats that were orange, red, green, and
never mine. No one seemed to be missing a mat, either, and so I went home
at night feeling defeated, and practiced with the anonymous purple mat.
Resigned, I could barely find gratitude for the way its newness held my
elbows securely in forearm balance, or the way my palms pressed into its
thickness in handstand. I just watched quietly as my handprints evaporated
evenly from its spongy foam.
A woman eventually walked into class with a
blue mat that looked pretty dingy and very comfortably rolled. It was
indeed mine, and I imagine now that she was probably a little taken aback at
my excited insistence that she was in possession of my mat. She said that,
no, it was hers, she was sure. She unrolled it, and I immediately knew its
familiar wear and tear, reminiscent of the many times I had stepped or
jumped back, the innumerable times I had turned the front toes forward and
the back heel out. It took a few moments of convincing, but finally we were
laughing and apologizing about the switcheroo. She recalled that her mat
had indeed been purple and, come to think of it, the one time that she had
used my mat, the ground had certainly felt slightly harder. I told her how
I had also practiced a few times on her mat, and hoped she didn’t mind.
When class was over, with my own ratty blue mat poking out of my messenger
bag, I walked home that evening with a smile in my chest, feeling happy, and
whole.
But our story doesn’t end there. You see, I
have since gotten a different yoga mat. It was a gift from my mom, after
she answered my shocked and panicky phone call about how my mat was missing,
and she went out and bought me a new one. It’s red and still fairly new.
It still stubbornly tends to want to roll up in the same direction. For a
time, the red mat lived proudly indoors while the old blue mat humbly
conceded to remain in my car. So, you see, I now had not none, not one, but
two mats—and our story doesn’t end there either.
My dorm neighbor for going on three years now
is a girl who possesses a goodness unrivaled, a long-suffering ear, and an
unusually still soul. At some point, somehow, last year, I introduced her
to yoga, which she advocates is “the only exercise you yawn while doing.”
While she, like many, doesn’t have a “typical yoga body,” every time we
practice together in the dormitory basement and under Rodney Yee’s video
instruction, I always tell her that if she ever came to my class at school,
I would use her as my model to demonstrate the poses. Her yoga is
refreshing. Her fingers might just barely touch the floor at the very last
moment of the final forward bend of our practice, and she is lighthearted
and surprised. Sometimes her seated forward bend is simply staying right
there in staff pose. Her top ribs never stick out in triangle, because she
is never trying to reach the floor, is never worried about where her bottom
hand falls on her leg. She didn’t have a yoga mat.
So now, when we are next to each other in
downward dog, I can gently turn my head to look over at her, as I am
brimming and spilling with joy at our heels reaching back and down, mine
toward my red mat, and her toward her blue one.
Melissa Bean
is currently a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary and will
receive her Master of Divinity degree in May 2006. She has been
practicing yoga for 7 years, and has a pet goldfish named Matsya.
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