the mat as a waiting room

The mat has been in the same corner of the bedroom for six years. When I roll it out, I am aware that I am performing the beginning of something, which is part of the problem. You step onto a mat and you are already in the posture of a person who is about to practice yoga. Your shoulders have ideas. Your spine is already trying.

What I have learned, slowly, is that the mat is not where the practice begins. The practice began three hours ago when the last patient left and I sat in the chair in my office for four minutes without doing anything. I did not know I was practicing then.

This used to bother me, because the practice is supposed to be deliberate. I was supposed to roll out the mat and decide to begin and then begin. That is the shape of a discipline. That is what a teacher would say. But I am not a teacher, and the mat is not a discipline, and the four minutes in the chair in the office are real whether I label them or not.

So the mat has become, in a way I did not plan, a waiting room for a thing that already happened. I roll it out. I stand on it for a few minutes. I do two or three shapes that feel, in retrospect, like a sentence closing. Then I roll it back up and go find my family. The practice is the full afternoon, bracketed at one end by the chair and at the other by the mat. The mat is not the practice. It is the room where you leave the practice.

I am not sure this is useful to anyone else. It was not useful to me when I was younger, when I believed a mat was a stage. But if you are reading this and your mat has been rolled up for weeks, I want you to know that the mat is very patient. It was not keeping score while you were gone. Whatever you have been doing in the chair in the office, or in the car, or in the kitchen before the kettle boils, is closer to the mat than it looks.