From the studio, a piece on the practice.
The first yoga mat, in any recognizable form, was made in 1982. This surprises most people.
Before then, if you practiced yoga, you practiced it on the floor. On a rug. On a folded blanket. On packed earth. On a tiger skin, in some of the older traditions, though it's fair to say most modern practitioners have gone in a different direction on that one. The point is that yoga for most of its history did not require a mat, because it did not require a specific surface at all. It required a place to sit and stand, and the willingness to sit and stand there.
The story of how we got from that to the twenty-dollar PVC mat at every gym in America is worth telling, because it explains a lot about the version of yoga we have inherited.
The word yoga is from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means to yoke or to join. The earliest written references to yoga are in the Rigveda, a set of Sanskrit hymns from roughly 1500 BCE, which is to say the practice is at least three thousand five hundred years old. Yoga in its original form was not primarily physical. It was a spiritual and philosophical discipline aimed at joining the individual self with something larger. The postures we now think of as yoga were a small part of a much larger system that included meditation, breath control, ethical practices, and specific approaches to living.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, written sometime between 200 BCE and 400 CE, are the foundational text of the tradition. They describe eight limbs of yoga. Only one of the eight limbs is postures. The others include things like right speech, right conduct, sense withdrawal, concentration, and absorption. If you had been a yoga practitioner in ancient India, you would have spent most of your practice sitting still and paying attention to your breath. You would not have been in downward dog.
The physical, posture-heavy version of yoga we practice now is much more recent. It largely comes from a man named Krishnamacharya, who taught in Mysore, India, in the early twentieth century. He was hired to teach yoga to boys at the palace of the Maharaja of Mysore, and he needed to hold their attention. Boys do not want to sit still for two hours. So he began developing a version of yoga that involved a lot of movement, transitioning from posture to posture in sequence, with the breath tied to the movement. This became what we now call vinyasa. His students went on to teach much of the West. One of them was B.K.S. Iyengar. Another was Pattabhi Jois, who founded Ashtanga. Their students, in turn, founded most of the yoga you see today.
Yoga arrived in the West in waves. The first wave was in the late nineteenth century, when Swami Vivekananda gave a talk about Hindu philosophy at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He was a hit. Americans became interested in Indian spirituality, though most of them did not practice yoga in any embodied way. The second wave was in the 1960s and 70s, when American and European practitioners began traveling to India in earnest. The third wave was in the 1990s and 2000s, when yoga became a mainstream form of exercise, largely stripped of its philosophical roots.
The mat entered the story at the tail end of the second wave. A woman named Angela Farmer, in Munich, was teaching yoga and getting frustrated that her students kept slipping on the wood floor. In 1982, she cut up a piece of carpet underlay, a foam material used under carpeting, and started standing on it during her practice. It gripped. She could hold poses. Her students noticed. They wanted their own. Her father owned a rubber factory and began producing the first commercial yoga mats.
That's it. That's the whole story. The yoga mat is younger than most of us. It was invented by one woman forty-four years ago.
There is nothing wrong with using a mat. I use one every morning. But it is worth knowing that yoga does not require it, has never required it, and predates it by roughly three thousand five hundred years. The practice is not the equipment. The equipment is a recent convenience. If you don't have a mat, or if you're traveling, or if you're on grass, or on a wood floor, or on a folded rug on the floor of a hotel room, you are still practicing yoga. You are practicing it in the older way.
I like knowing this because it takes some of the pressure off. It reminds me that the practice does not require any particular thing to be present. It does not require a specific hour, a specific outfit, a specific surface, a specific instructor. It only requires that you show up, in your body, and pay attention to what happens next.
That is what everyone has been doing, all along.