Hi Anita – I think the best dancing happens late in life 🙂

A reflection on this mornings yoga class: “Mats All the Way Down”

The class begins with the unrolling, a rhythmic click-clack of rubber meeting wood. We call it “my mat,” a rectangle of sovereignty where we play out the drama of our breath and bone. We think we are here to move, to sweat, to paint the morning with our effort. But the mat is patient. It does not move. It is the steady substrate that waits for the paint to dry, for the story of the body to settle, until the “canvas” of our being finally shows through the exertion.

But look closer. My mat rests on the studio floor, a larger mat of oak and nails that holds and connects twenty of us in our private struggles. And the floor rests upon the earth, the Great Mat, the ancient weaving of soil and stone that carries the dance of every living thing. It is mats all the way down.

Each one is a reminder. We don’t “use” the mat, the mat holds us. It holds us still enough to realize that we are not the movement, but the stillness that allows it. We bow not to the floor, but to the fact that something is there to catch us.

As it is above, so it is below. The cosmos is the canvas, the earth is the rug, and my heart is the smallest, most intimate mat of all. Each time I step on, I am not starting a workout. I am coming home to the original, unpainted surface. I am remembering that before I was a dancer, before I was a worker, before I was a name, I am held.

….

Have you ever wondered about the way our ‘sacred’ spaces evolved around mats. Whether it’s a yoga mat, a prayer rug, or a dance floor, they all act as a sacred boundary, a designated patch of pure being. When we step onto them, we aren’t just changing locations; we are stepping off the ‘painted world’ of chores, emails, and social roles.

We ‘return to the mat’ because the world is designed to make us forget. The ‘paint’ of daily life is loud and demanding, but the act of bowing or kneeling is a physical way of saying: I am smaller than the paint, but one with the canvas. It is a literal lowering of the ego to touch the substrate.

It’s the Hermetic maxim in action: As Above, So Below. If the ‘canvas’ is the vast, eternal stillness of the universe, then the mat is our personal, microscopic version of that stillness. By touching it, we plug back into the source. Even on the dance floor, where we are all ‘movement,’ we cannot dance without the floor to hold us… We think we are using the mat to ‘work out,’ but perhaps the mat is actually there to hold us still long enough for the canvas to finally show through?

I do not think it a coincidence that so many of our interactions with life and its objects call out to us to remember – with eyes that see and ears the hear…