Minding your mat
Recently, I came across a photo of myself that was taken almost 10 years ago, before I began my dedicated yoga practice. In the picture, I’m smiling. But, looking at it now, I can see so many things that I couldn’t see at the time.
During this period of my life, I held myself to an unattainable standard, believing that I needed to have a flat stomach and small arms to be worthy. I was going to the gym every morning before work and sometimes again in the evening. If I missed a few days of exercise, I went into a mental panic. Beyond this, I alternated between setting unrealistic eating rules and only allowing myself to have “good food” (think: six-day juice cleanse), followed by binging on “bad food” and alcohol. Then, I would subsequently shame myself for messing up and enter another period of deprivation. No matter what I did or how much I weighed, I hated my body.
My first yoga mentor, Charleen, often spoke about minding your mat — in other words, bringing your attention inward. At the time, I understood this in the physical sense. When we move through the asanas, it doesn’t do us any good to compare ourselves to the person on the mat in front of us. This is because when we focus on the external instead of the internal, it causes us to lose our balance or miss an important cue. We end up stagnant, never able to move into the next phase of our practice, because our mental energy is channeled into what someone else is doing instead of where we are in that moment and what our individual bodies are capable of.
Today, I know that yoga is practiced both on and off the mat. We can carry the important concept of minding our mat into our day-to-day lives and into our relationships with ourselves and others.
So, what does this mean? It means appreciating our bodies for what they do for us every day instead of holding ourselves to the external standards of what a “good body” looks like. It means celebrating where we are in our careers instead of feeling intimidated by the successes of our peers. It means setting goals for ourselves based on the dreams that get us excited, not what we think is expected from us. It means knowing that where we are today is beautiful and where we want to go is authentic to our own paths.
When we mind our mat, we can enjoy the journey that is a yoga practice. And the journey is the part that matters.
