Category Archives: Yoga

Hybrid Eco-Mat by Barefoot Yoga – A Good Choice for a Light Mat

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IMG_1542aRecently, Barefoot Yoga offered to send me one of their products to review for you. I selected the Hybrid Eco Mat, since I’m always looking for environmentally friendly yoga products. My full review follows, but the bottom line on this mat is that it’s priced right, very light, and would be easy to tote around; however, if you like a really sticky mat or a lot of padding and don’t mind spending quite a bit more for something more hefty, it may not be for you.

The Hybrid Eco-Mat I received is a pretty color purple they called Violet. When I received the mat and took it out of the packaging the first thing that I noticed was a slight plasticky smell. This didn’t surprise me, as the mat is made of a poly resin. After I left the mat laying out for several days, the smell almost entirely dissipated.

I also quickly noted that the map was very light. It is certainly much lighter than the (far more pricey) Manduka black mat that I regularly use. This made the eco-mat more comfortable to tote to class, and I think if I was regularly taking public transportation to my yoga classes I might prefer a mat of this weight.

I’ve now used the mat for several vinyasa practices, including gentle and more vigorous sequences. The first use, I noticed that the mat was rather slippery when compared to the Manduka. My hands were sliding quite a bit in downward dog and I felt like I had to use extra effort just to keep them still. However, I’m sure this was excellent for my core! After a couple of uses, the mat seemed to become less slippery. So, I assume that part of the slipperiness at first was the coating of the new mat, which I didn’t wash off as the site advises (as I cleverly only looked after). After a few uses, while it still is less sticky than my usual mat, it is certainly acceptable.

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Eco-Mat

Another difference between this mat and my standard mat is that the eco-mat is thinner. The Manduka is only about 2.5 mm thicker than the Eco Mat, but I do notice this difference. Because I have rheumatoid arthritis, I need some degree of padding between my hands and feet and the floor. So, I think if I were to use this mat regularly for an active practice, I would probably want to place a rug on top of it, particularly on days when the arthritis is worse.

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Manduka Black Mat

While the reduction in thickness makes the mat somewhat less comfortable on sore joints, it does allow you to feel the floor beneath the mat during practice. This may make balancing poses easier and facilitate a greater connection to the ground.

The Hybrid Eco-Mat is made of Polyolefin, a poly resin. And, it is worth noting that Barefoot Yoga states that this mat is fully biodegradable.

The eco-mat runs at about $30 (currently on sale for $23!) for the standard 68 inch length, so it is very affordable, and shipping speed is quite fast. You can purchase the mat at http://barefootyoga.com.

I hope this review has been helpful and feel free to let me know if you have additional questions about this mat.

Namaste,
Lorin

 

I was not financially compensated for this post. I received a sample for review purposes. The opinions are my own based on my experience with this product.

So Much Bigger Than Me

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fallingstar

“He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”
~Neil Gaiman, Stardust

About a year ago, I started the process of making a “big event” happen at my university. At first, it was about how I could make it work and what I thought that people would get out of it and what I needed to do. As it became a reality, the group of people involved grew and morphed and it changed to a team effort.

Yesterday was the big day for the events. They were magical and wonderful and amazing. And, one of the really cool things about it was that, by the end, it was all so much bigger than me. It was so much bigger than anyone that was there. It was bigger even than the very special guests that were the core of the event.

By the end, it was about the warmth and affection radiating through conversations between people, the sense of inspiration in the air in a class of students, the energy in a concert hall full of 850+ people, and the warmth and intimacy achieved in connection between people, even if they never exchange names.

Sometimes, I admit, I want something to be “about me,” which is, of course, avidya, and not true in any case. But, there is just something so beautiful and awe inspiring when the little germ of an idea turns into a giant (and now I don’t even have the words) coalescence of persons and feelings and ideas and wonder that is so much bigger than me… than anyone.

Beautiful.

You Got Some Candy In There?*: Finding What You’ve Stored Away

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You can buy this cutie postcard on the NationalWildlife page on Zazzle.

You can buy this cutie postcard on the NationalWildlife page on Zazzle.

This is a repost of something I wrote several years ago. I’ve had some of this on my mind lately, so it seemed like a good time to repost it. I don’t get this as much with hips now, but now and then…

I’ve believed in the mind/body connection for a long time. It makes emotional sense to me – when I feel better physically, my mood is better and when I feel better emotionally, my body feels better. It makes philosophical sense to me – the human body/mind is a system; each part of the system affects and is affected by every other part. It makes logical sense to me – the studies on the relationship between feelings of stress, production of Cortisol, and the immune system are pretty astounding.

So, when I heard my yoga teachers connecting the two, I wasn’t particularly resistant. “If you believe you cannot do a pose, you will not be able to.” Ok, yep, gotcha. “Think of yourself in the pose and you can more easily get there.” Okie dokie. “Stop letting your mind get in your way.” RIGHT!

But, when the various instructors I have had mentioned that some yoga poses, by creating an opening in an area of the body where emotions have been stored, can release a wave of emotional reaction, I just wasn’t getting it. It wasn’t so much that I disagreed; I just didn’t feel it, so it wasn’t really making sense to me. The only emotions I felt in yoga were happiness related to being there and doing the poses or frustration that I couldn’t. That was pretty much it.

Then I started yin yoga. The first class of yin that I went to, I pretty much spent the entire hour in a state of annoyance, so I wasn’t really considering how individual poses made me feel. Over the next few sessions, as I found my way into more physical release in the poses, I was able to appreciate the differences in my state of mind.

After a few sessions, I began to notice that some poses made me feel a sense of panic. At first it seemed that this was because they involved folding over, and I thought maybe I just wasn’t getting quite as much air – thus the panic feeling. But, as the repertoire of poses increased along with my awareness of them, it became clear that it wasn’t the amount of folding, it was the extent and type of hip opening that was occurring.

Poses that really open my hips in a way that causes a stretch along the IT band area just make me feel panicked. There is no logical reason for it. I don’t fear that I’m actually going to hurt myself in Shoelace pose. But, as soon as I move into it, I start to feel like I’m out of control. There have been classes where I really was not sure that I could prevent myself from springing out of the pose and leaving the room due to the sense of panic and loss of control that arises. What the heck?

Here is my armchair yogi interpretation of this. I’m a person who likes to be orderly. I don’t need everything to have a perfect logic fit (i.e. I’m ok with knowing that I love physics puzzles and also abstract painting, even though that may seem oppositional). But, I like to have control of what is going on around me.

I’m getting better at dealing with uncertainty, and I would say that I have made some big strides in this over the last few years. My friend Erica, who has seen me go from someone who could not stand camping because my kids might get dirty to someone who barely insists they bathe during several days of camping, would probably agree. But, there are a lot of years in my past of trying to tightly control myself and my life.

Apparently, every time I felt a sense of panic or lack of control, I just “stuffed” it all into my hips. Yep, they are packed full of panic – weird, huh? So, now when I stretch and open them in that way, it seeps out and causes me to feel a little like I’m being deprived of all oxygen.

I would guess that not everyone is stuffing their lack of control into their hips. Perhaps you have been putting your sadness in your abdominal muscles (yeah, unpack that idea!). Maybe you have been putting your anger in your shoulders. Maybe your hips have something else in them – fear or even joy. The next time you feel an emotion arising unexpectedly that seems to be unconnected to what is going on at that moment, take some time to observe whats going on with your body. What are you releasing? Have you got some candy in there?

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This post title refers to a joke between some of my “mom friends” and I. Back when our children were toddlers, and in the phase where they just wouldn’t stop following mommy around for 2 minutes, we used to laugh about the things they would yell through the bathroom door when we were inside . One of those included, “hey! You got some candy in there?”