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one: my yoga mat is a home within my home

As an experienced yoga practitioner, my body knows exactly what to do when I step onto my 10+-year-old Manduka mat; how to engage with its familiar and ever-softening surface, how I fit in relation to its never-changing proportions, and what movements make sense in what order. It has supported me through many stages of life, and carries memories of the happiest and the saddest of days. I taught my first class on that mat, and I still use it when I teach. It has travelled with me to California, Spain, Bali, India, and wherever else I’ve gone to stay more than a couple of days. It has rested on cool terracotta tiles, on freshly cut lawns, sun-bathed rooftops, and old hardwood floors. It has been covered in sand, soaked in rain and soapy water. My cat — a lover of squares — likes to roll around on it, and when she comes home from a walk on a rainy day, she will leave a trail of wet footprints on it as she strolls over to the food bowl. It’s basically a living, breathing thing at this point, infused with layers upon layers of meaning (and sweat and dust): a place of continuity, a place to land, a place to gather myself and get on with it.

two: yoga mats are useful, but they have some affordances that limit your possibilities

As my practice has changed and evolved to incorporate floorwork and somatics, I find myself resonating with what Beverley Nolan describes as a feeling of being somewhat boxed in and restricted by this rubbery rectangle. In UNBOXING: freeing your movement mindset she writes about ditching the mat in favour of a more frictionless interaction with the floor. When your goal is to explore more organic, spiraling, and spatially expansive ways of being, that makes more sense. As Nolan points out, your standard yoga mat shapes your experience and your sense of possibility in a very real and physical way. Its sticky nature makes it so that the surfaces of your body can’t really slide, and its narrow angularity tends to guide you towards a fairly restricted and linear way of taking up space.

This is especially true in light of the fact that you’re not typically encouraged to venture beyond the confines of your designated space in most yoga classes — and even more so when the practice itself is framed by the aesthetic preferences of the yoga community at large, which tends to value balance, symmetry, straight lines, and visual uniformity in its approach to movement and “proper technique”. In any case, the mat and its physical qualities direct your body towards a certain way of moving — no words or instructions needed. Sometimes, that is exactly what you want, of course (I don’t want to slide around when that’s not my intention), but sometimes it’s more interesting to step off the mat and onto the naked floor to explore your options.

three: if your yoga teacher is not there to micromanage and fearmonger movement, the “alignment mat” is happy to do that for you

The aforementioned values of uniformity, linearity, balance and symmetry that has dominated the yoga community for quite some time are articulated in the invention of the “alignment mat”. You know, the kind that has extra lines on it that show you where and how your feet and hands should be placed and angled. These mats are often marketed with appeals to safety and injury prevention, suggesting more or less explicitly that there is one right way to place the joints in relation to one another that is true for everyone, and that any deviation from this rule sets you up for injury and other scary-sounding issues. According to the producers of the AlignForMe® mat, for example, improper foot placement can “throw off your hips and shoulders, leading to imbalance, poor posture and overcompensation elsewhere”. Therefore, your and everyone else’s back foot needs to be placed on a 45-degree angle in Warrior 1. What happens at 50 degrees remains to be seen, but I bet it’s not pretty, so you better get in line, sister — literally!

In my view, these universalising alignment claims are more often than not rooted in aesthetics and dogma rather than a sound understanding of how the body actually works and responds to load. But, as we know, fear is a very effective sales tool. In fact, that seems to be a lucrative career path for yoga teachers and other movement professionals: if you can convince people that you (or your yoga mat with drawings on it) have figured out the one and only way to move safely and avoid pain forever, you are potentially set for life. The alignment mat, then, is a material expression of some very specific ways of thinking about and working with the body that circulate in the wider context of yoga and adjacent worlds of movement. It assumes a body of standardised proportions, and aims to further discipline and standardise its postural organisation. As Nolan puts it: “I can almost hear them taunting me to relinquish any ideas of a nuanced, personal experience, and to get in line and square things up like every other body in the room regardless of the individual anatomy, body-type, and capacity for movement of each of us.”

four: keep your filthy hands off of my Virabhadrasana?

The teacher-student relationship is inherently asymmetrical. The role of the teacher is to teach others how to do or know something that she is assumed to have some level of expert knowledge of (at least relative to the average student), and the role of the student is to follow her instructions. This asymmetry is expressed in the physical placement of yoga mats in relation to one another, and in the socially regulated ways in which different bodies are allowed and encouraged to move and act in that space. In a class setting, the students’ mats are typically lined up in a neat and orderly fashion, forming an already disciplined student body that stays within the boundaries of its designated space unless instructed otherwise. The teacher will have her own mat, but in most cases it will be placed in a particular orientation and in a particular spot that spatially separates her from the others; she is a special One, they are one of many.

From this position, the teacher is free to roam around the room to evaluate and intervene according to some culturally informed understanding of how bodies should move and be positioned — and she is often assumed to know what is happening in the student’s body by observing it from the outside. Furthermore, she has the authority to decide what is “good” and what is “bad”, what counts as “misalignments”, and who is ready for a deeper (which is assumed to be better) expression of the pose. Some teachers will step onto your mat to push and pull on your body to correct and assist — not just verbally, but physically inscribing the norms and values of the practice into the skin and bone and flesh of you. While there are certainly ways to de-centre the teacher in favour of student autonomy and exploration if that is more aligned with one’s values, the arrangement of the mats — and the rules that regulate the actions of bodies within this arrangement — can be said to provide a basic infrastructure for the assertion of power and authority that is open for those who wish to harness it.

five: show me your yoga mat and I’ll tell you who you are

When I walk into a shala or a gym to practice or teach, I like to think that I can see who is who based on their choice of mat and how they place and orient them and roll them up at the end of class. Beginners will often use the mats provided by the studio, but seasoned practitioners typically bring their own. Depending on the brand and the level and nature of ornamentation, you can tell approximately where they belong within the yoga landscape. When I bought my mat, I was deeply invested in Ashtanga yoga. At the time, the Manduka was hugely popular in that neck of the woods: durable, heavy, no-nonsense, expensive — much like the practice itself. It was not just a practical tool; it positioned me within that particular cultural field, solidifying my identity as a serious practitioner. My critique of the alignment mat similarly works to locate me within the conflicted world of movement. It is an expression of a set of ideas about how to engage with the moving body — and how I would rather not engage with it. The mat that I chose, and the mat that I would never choose, tells you something about my values and practice history, and about the frameworks that guide my practice. I guess what I’m saying is that your body is not the only thing that sticks to a yoga mat. It carries shared and personal meaning, and has a material, symbolic and social life that often goes unnoticed and unrecognised. Stepping onto a yoga mat — or choosing to step off it — is not a neutral act.