New Car Smell
Any other yoga mat hoarders out there?
I won a yoga mat yesterday. I won it in a raffle to benefit the Africa Yoga Project. It’s very exciting: a Jade mat, so it’s way better (and about 5 times more expensive!) than the Gaiam-from-Target one I’ve been using. Grippy, plush, all natural materials–the bells and whistles of the yoga mat world, such as there are. So I can just heave my old cheap one into the trash!
Except I kind of can’t?
I’ve never been bad at throwing things away, but this one seems possessed of the energy of an entire year of my life. This rectangle of pvc is where I worked out so many of the things that were bothering me, consciously or not. This is the section of space where I finally began to feel in control of my own body. This is the 2-by-6 corner of the Universe that was the only place I felt safe for a very, very long time.
-I could recycle it,via the Recycle Your Mat project. You can send them your old yoga mats, or drop them off if there’s a location in your area–you should definitely do this if you don’t have a weird emotional attachment to yours! It would be kept out of the landfill and reused for materials, and, I don’t know, become a tree or something? Destroying it seems weird to me, that it wouldn’t exist anymore. Guess I’ve still got a ways to go to embrace impermanence.
-I could donate it to a Yoga charity. This would pay-it-forward and give someone else a chance to experience everything that finding yoga has done for me. Although this feels like handing someone my diary and telling them to finish the story.
-I might keep it to lend to friends. That feels really intimate, but at least it might get some people who have been hemming and hawing about actually coming with me to finally jump off that fence. Come with me, I even have a mat you can borrow.
-I can turn it into something else that’s still a part of my life. I really liked the “50 Ways to Reuse Your Old Yoga or Fitness Mat” article from Gaiam. Tons of ideas for things to do with a mat when it isn’t being used for yoga anymore. I don’t think I’d do any of the craft/DIY things that involve cutting it up, but I like the idea of using it as soundproofing because as a freelance voiceover artist/singer, soundproofing is something I may need in the near future.
My teacher yesterday said she keeps her mats, too, because they represent memories and times of her life. I think I might keep it, to remember.
