One Mat One Chick

What drives true yogis to practice daily on their mats? Is it not lonely? The aching and quietude experienced by the self so painful? Or maybe it is the physical ambitions, the fancy mats, the comrades acquired, or the cool Lulu Lemon second-skins.

There is nothing more challenging than knowing myself. On the mat, I experience every emotion through the asanas that I would experience in the realities of constructed society.

There are times that I question the practice and my choice to embark on the path of yoga while bruising my triceps for the umpteenth time in Kakasana and still falling on my face. Yet other times I look at my mat lying against the wall and then my dirty floors from dog drool and fur, the piles of laundry in their different processes of completion, the grimy toilets, think about the inexhaustible miscellaneous tasks griping for my energy and I feel the hope of a fair morning’s practice fade away like the last sands in an hour glass. Other times I get on the mat and then stare at the grooves on the surface and feel all resolve to practice slip inexplicably into nothing. My challenges may or may not be more than the average Jane’s who has baggage, but they are my challenges nonetheless.

I have come to acknowledge and watch in awareness the thoughts that enable me and the ones that disempower me when it comes to my practice of yoga. How true that so much of yoga is a union of the breath, mind and body.

Who can control for me any of these three aspects of myself, even for the power that I would willingly cede them? Zilch, but yours truly.

So back to just one mat, and this one chick.

Ever evolving.

A.T.