Your yoga mat is a magic carpet

How you view your yoga mat can completely transform your yoga practice.

Photo by The Nix Company on Unsplash

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Have you ever read something so compelling you had to jump out of your cozy repose to track down a highlighter and paint the page? I recently came across such a passage in Women Who Run with the Wolves. The importance, meaning, and truth of the words struck me so deeply, I couldn’t shake it.

The passage:

“In fairy tales, as in mythos, the carpet signifies a form of locomotion, but of a certain kind—the kind that enables us to see into the world and into the underlife as well. In the Middle Eastern stories, it is the vehicle for spirit flight of the shamans. The body is no dumb thing from which we struggle to free ourselves. In proper perspective, it is a rocket ship, a series of atomic cloverleafs, a tangle of neurological umbilici to other worlds and experiences…

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling—that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.”

Yoga mat meet magic carpet

I can’t help but think about the yoga mat as a symbolic magic carpet. The unfurled yoga mat beckons my body to move, connect, touch, feel, notice. On the mat I pay attention to what is inside the confines of the four edges, what is contained within the boundaries of my skin.

The yoga mat is a magic carpet to our inner world. To step onto the magic carpet is like taking a Sunday drive—I observe what is happening, reflect, sit, get bored, sometimes excited, and sometimes I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps I even feel sad, angry, or afraid.

You don’t need a yoga mat to practice yoga, but when navigating the hills and streams of your inner world it can be helpful to have a steady vehicle, a space for respite, a home-base. Eventually, once you get a feel for the lay of the land you won’t need the protection of the mat to help you explore. But in the beginning, it’s indispensable.

How do you treat your yoga mat?

How you store your mat says something about how you view your journey. Do you lay it out as a perpetual invitation, the frequent sight of it a constant reminder to sit a while? Or does it become another floor carpet, a multi-use tool trampled on by all members of the household with no respect?

Do you roll it up and store it someplace special? Perhaps the unfurling becomes a necessary initiatory process of the practice itself. Or does it gather dust in the corner, soon forgotten, blending into the decor of detritus around your home?

Do you care what kind of mat you have? Do you buy the cheapest one you can find? Maybe you don’t even own one due to lack of space or the tedium of having to carry it with you everywhere you go. You can always rent one at the studio—this, of course, dependent upon your preferred place of practice. There is no rental option at home, unless you count borrowing a family member's or friend’s mat as “renting.”

Do you clean your mat with witch hazel or ultraviolet light? Soap and water or special wipes? Or do you prefer to let your personal oils blend with the material to create a patina, a visual representation of the toil of practice?

Does the material matter? Do you practice in heated environments necessitating a material that prevents slippage? Perhaps you place a towel over your mat to enhance grip. If you practice at home sometimes the carpet suffices.

Your body is the driver, but your soul is the place to be

There are two competing narratives in yoga around the role of the body. Classical Yoga sees the body as an impediment to spiritual liberation, the idea of liberation itself suggesting that the body and earthly pursuits are a kind of prison holding our souls back from ultimate knowing. Tantric schools believe enlightenment is found by experiencing the mundanity of life through feelings, emotions, and bodily experience. This school argues that to experience the body is to experience spirituality.

Yoga in the West has undoubtedly been commodified and contorted into a physical fitness practice. It has become about the body in the most superficial of ways, elevating aesthetics over feeling, posture (which is just a form of control) over exploration. While the body serves an important purpose in Yoga, the way the West prioritizes the body is not the way Tantra, or even Hatha lineages, originally intended.

Interestingly, Tantra lineages promote a bodily exploration that is too scary for most Western souls to attempt. Such experience is directly antithetical to the puritanical Christian values that seek to uphold a tradition of hierarchy held in the hands of a few powerful men. Traditional Hatha lineages are too extreme and restrictive for the the modern ideal of freedom most Western minds seek. This leaves a void somewhere in the middle that many teachers, men and women alike, have capitalized on under the guise of “bringing yoga to the West.”

While I don’t believe there is anything wrong with adaptation, and it’s important to meet the student where he or she is, I do think we are now at a crossroads. We are at a point in Western yoga history where we can see the error of our ways, where we have strayed, and what is not working. Focusing on rigid alignment often results in injury over time. Offering only hot, physical yoga eventually alienates most of the population (especially women) at some point in their life. In a time of deep political divide and national anxiety, the lessons and practice of yoga can offer deep solace and peace. But only if we’re willing to engage in an authentic yoga practice that takes into consideration all aspects of the Self.

A new ride

Yes, the yoga mat has become a ridiculous symbol of capitalistic excess. It is as an accoutrement, an accessory, and it is wholly unnecessary. However, we also have an opportunity to appreciate the yoga mat for what it can offer—a portal, an invitation, a magic carpet into our inner worlds, a new frontier to explore¹.

It is time for yoga to become more about the inner world and less about what the body looks like. More about feelings, emotions, and energy and less about arm balances, inversions, and heart openers. More about dreams, ancestors, and ancient myth and less about earthly accumulations, fraudulent yoga gurus, and the venture-capital backed yoga studio. More about   personal experience as truth for you and only you, grays of every shade, and acceptance of all as divine and less about “there is only one right way and it’s my way,” black-and-white thinking, and one path to divine experience.

The yoga mat is your magic carpet, your vehicle, your rocket launcher. Your body is the passenger. Your soul is waiting to be (re)discovered.

Unbuckle your seatbelts and prepare to unlearn. This is undoubtedly going to be a bumpy ride. Will you come with me?

Let’s chat in the comments

• What kind of yoga mat do you have?

• What’s your relationship to your yoga mat?

• How has your yoga mat served as a magic carpet to you?

1. Traditionally there was no such thing as yoga mats like we have today. Sometimes practitioners used animal skins but just as often yogis used the most potent surface for practice: the earth. The Sanskrit word asana means to take a seat. What you sit on doesn’t matter as much as the intent behind why you’re sitting in the first place—to go within. The Sanskrit word vinyasa means to place in a particular way. It refers to how you place your attention in practice, but could also mean how you place your voice in mantra recitation, how you place your fingers in mudra, how you place your body in posture, how you place your mind in meditation, how you place your breath in pranayama. What you are sitting or standing on while you’re placing all of these parts of yourself with intention is superfluous. WIth that said, you could extend this idea of vinyasa out to how you place your mat with intention as a ritual greeting the commencement of practice. At the end of the day, the mat itself doesn’t matter, but the intention behind it does.