Come to Your Mat

Come to Your mat to honor a teacher.

My teacher is Chris. We now live a distance apart, and I do not have the luxury of attending her classes on a regular basis.

I called her this morning to find out what classes she was offering, in hopes that I may be able to attend and spend time learning with her again.

I come to my mat today to honor my teacher, Chris, who is a most inspirational yogi.

She is old. Tiny. Wiry. Intense.

She enunciates. She inflects. She emphasizes and emotes.

She is a genius, she is water, wood, smoke, and fire.

Playful and emphatic…

She thinks about things and shares them with twists of her hands.

Perhaps she has always been very old.

She does not know it, but she is my guru.

Come to your mat because it has been too long…

It has been

forever

and a day.

Maybe it’s been

since yesterday…

Come to your mat to celebrate your stiffness, your practice, to examine how your body becomes – it becomes every moment of every day… It becomes stiff, it becomes stressed, it becomes loose, it becomes strained, it becomes unbalanced and balanced again. But you come to your mat to balance, to observe, to love, and to nurture. You come to your mat to celebrate the becoming of yoga within you. Steep yourself and soak it in… become pliable, become stretchy, become forgiving, become grateful, become curious. Become wholesome and whole, become yummy and delicious, become energized! Become love!

Today don’t just be… Become!

Come to your mat because you sat in the bleachers… I went to see Greg Mortenson speak. The venue was huge, and the bleachers were unforgiving, and by two hours in, the bleachers were unrelenting. So I came home to my mat where I found peace and stretchiness, freedom, and air. So come to your mat to solidify peace. To let the words sink in. To know that Three Cups of Tea is now required reading for many military personnel.

Three Cups of Tea – the first cup you are strangers, the second cup you are friends, and the third cup you are family…

Come to your mat to think of tea, to pour it on yourself, in a warm tea embrace to wash away the bleachers.

Come to your mat because you want to make a difference in the world, beginning here.

Come to your mat to learn – to be your self – to absorb and reflect your learning.

Come to your mat to love – to cherish – to prosper – to flourish.

Come to your mat because a penny can buy a pencil, and maybe, you will collect pennies, and maybe, you will always look at a penny differently, and then maybe, the way you look at that penny will change your worldview. Maybe the way we look at pennies will create a new paradigm with which to look at the world, and maybe, those pennies are already changing the world…

Maybe you will read Three Cups of Tea, maybe, you already have. But the undeniable truth is that education is the solution. I always come to my mat to learn. Even when I come to my mat to teach I come to learn and to explore. So, come to your mat because you sat in the bleachers to learn and explore, now come to your mat to stretch those words into your own system, your own reality, and your own body.

Come to you mat because you have no choice. You are open, your heart aches, you have to. Your heart is open, your arms, open, your hands, your feet, your eyes, your emotions… all open. You come to your mat to cry, you come to your mat because it is safe and sane and sticky. You grip it with your toes, your palms, as you mountain and swan, as you fold into adho mukha svanasana, as you root your toes and lift your heals and root your fingertips and grow into plank and move on and through… You come to your mat to cry, to grow. You are open.

Come to your mat to root. Come to your mat to breathe. Come to your mat to straighten your spine!

I have a rib out today, and sorely need a bit of chiropractic, but sometimes a bit of yoga (or a lot of yoga) and some breath work can put my little vertebrae back in alignment. Breath work is amazing for this because your ribs and spine flex with every breath. Every breath brings oxygen and blood to nourish your tissues and bones, and every breath has the potential to relax the muscles and ligaments in distress… so today, I will come to my mat to use my breath to straighten my spine.

More on this later.

Come to you mat because you haven’t been here in some time. (Maybe you have but I haven’t.) Come to remember. Come because you can, because it is your choice, at this very moment, at any moment, you may choose to come to your mat and place your feet upon it. I remembered that this morning. (I even said it out loud.) Sometimes inertia takes over, and the more I don’t go to my mat, the more I don’t go to my mat. So this morning, I remembered that I can choose it anytime, and that anytime before, has nothing to do with this moment… or everything to do with this moment… I can choose to come to my mat independent of anything that has come before…

I did sun salutations this morning without the mat. It had been awhile, and it felt simple, non-committal… but, I will take out my mat today, because I want to remember myself.

Sometimes I choose not to come to my mat because it is my secret punishment to not do yoga. Why do we chose to punish ourselves? Or, I look at yoga as my reward. And sometimes, reward for what? I don’t deserve to get to take time for myself to do yoga… this is all very silly, yet these unconscious feelings run my life. They hold me back. Why do we hold ourselves back? Come to your mat to strip away those barriers, to look at them. Come to your mat because it doesn’t mean any of these things. Come to your mat to be you. Only to be you.

Come to Your Mat for just a moment;

because it’s Monday,

because your head is cluttered with thoughts.

Come to Your Mat

to quiet your mind;

just for a moment.

Because it is Monday, I am going to offer you the Three Breath Meditation. You may know it already, so this may be a reminder. Either way, it is my gift to you. Take three moments to do this meditation. Begin to breathe in… slowly, deeply, to the count of eight. Breathe out, slowly, controlled, to the count of eight. Repeat, deepening each time, focusing completely on the breath. Do this for three breaths. Stop. This is the Three Breath Meditation. Short, simple, euphoric. Perfect for a Monday. Enjoy. This is my gift for you.

As I examine my space today I find myself cluttered, but relatively ok. I have had many laughs with my lovely four-month old, who is now sleeping on my lap. I have homegrown gold tomatoes reducing on the stove that smell sweet, and rich, and heavenly. I had quinoa for lunch. I could list all of the chores that need to get done, but somehow, blissfully, I don’t care right now. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what happened between the rage of this morning and my current state. This morning after trudging through the freak snow to put the baby in the car, a minivan drenched me with gobs of slush. My jeans were soaked, my jacket wet, my hands, dripping. The driver got me good; and after the initial shock wore off, I was so upset that I surprised myself by yelling profanity after the careless driver. There was a poor old man shoveling snow a block away who looked up. I was so angry! All I could think of was how careless this driver had been, and how lucky that driver was that I had already put the baby in the car because oh boy, what would I have done if they had slopped all of that on my baby! The ferocious mom came out in me and I roared. After that I went to the bank, and the coffeeshop, and the post office. Research, writing, editing. Interspersed in there with work and baby care, I lit a fire, washed tomatoes, and ate lunch.

The tomatoes I think, are actually pretty funny, but maybe you had to be there. I had twenty six tomato plants of various heirloom varieties growing in the yard (well, I still do but they are buried under a considerable amount of first snow). But on Wednesday, when the temperature here in the Rockies took a nose dive, my husband picked every last fruit. I laid them out on my kitchen table, and proceeded to organize them. So, nearly every inch of my kitchen table is covered in tomatoes in various stages of ripeness and color (heirloom, you know – they aren’t generally red). Well, I guess a table-full of tomatoes isn’t classically comical, but I thought it was funny. Every time I walk into the kitchen they sort of look up at me, in that beautiful garden-produce way, and say, “now what?” I made two giant jars of sauce today and my table is still full, and still funny, I think, although a little less so now. Oh, well, at least it stopped snowing.