When I first started taking yoga, I borrowed a mat from the studio. Why invest in a mat if I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it? 

It was one of those extra thick, Pilates-style mats which I now know made the balancing postures even more difficult than the thinner sticky mats. That Christmas, my husband bought me a yoga mat – basic industrial blue, the last one I would have ever chosen. 

But on that ugly mat, I began to fall in love with practicing yoga. Eventually, I bought my own mat, chosen solely for color and a cool hippie design stenciled on it. It was a dark beautiful eggplant color. 

As it wore with use, I kept it rolled in my car “just in case” I’d need it after I bought my new, lighter, spongy lavender mat. Then I began to see physical results from my months of regular yoga, and I realized it might be time to spend a little more money and buy a more serious mat that wouldn’t show wear and tear, wouldn’t send little foam flecks like sparks from under my toes when I rolled over them between urdhva mukha and adho mukha. 

About a hundred bucks later, I had my current salmon-colored mat with a microfiber mat-sized towel for those hot, sweaty practices. I keep my “newer old” lavender mat rolled up in the trunk, too! And now, I even have a super thin travel weight yoga mat to whip out at any hotel, beach, or home visit. 

But none of this is what I mean. Yoga can be done with or without a mat, on almost any surface. But many of us hold onto our yoga mats like a lifeline. 

Why? Because of what our yoga mats are really made of. 

My yoga mat is made of the tentative trepidation with which I first stepped onto it that day when the only other two ladies in class were tan, taut, and physically perfect.