I have pretty much tried them all because once I got over my attachment to my first mat, I was happy just to practice on whatever mat I could get and afford. In the 25 years since then, yoga mats have come a long, long way. In the end, the white mat had 2 holes where my feet landed when jumping back and I had turned the mat over and switched it around, so there were 2 holes at the front of it as well. I totally believed that I was pouring my “shakti”/ sacred energy into both and did not want to stop using them. I became firmly attached to both my white mat and my brown cotton mat. Basically you spend 40 minutes to complete a transaction that should take 5 with the shop keeper all the time smiling and wagging his head so that it is hard to get angry with him unless you have been in India too long.

“No, no, that brown one that is a couple up from that one.” The dude pulls out a green one that is 8 down from the top. The dude pulls out a blue one that is 15 down. So it’s like, “that brown one there please” (pointing directly at a brown mat about 12 mats down from the top). This was my first experience of shopping in India and I learned that not matter how desperately you pointed to the mat that you wanted behind the counter, you would be required to look at 20 other mats before the shop attendant was willing to actually pull out the one you wanted. Kardi shop to buy a prison cotton mat to put on top of my white one. I sweated buckets into that mat and it was so slippery when wet, that my first job when I got to Mysore was to go to the Govt. It came with me on my first trip to Mysore. In the excitement of my early passion for my yoga practice, this mat became the most precious of my possessions. My first mat was barely 2mm thick, it was wider than the mats we tend to practice on today and it was white, which in my case, soon turned to a dirty grey colour. People today would recognise my first mat as what it was, but other than understanding it was a “yoga mat” they would see very little in common with the mats we have today. I seem to remember that one of the women who has been doing yoga for a while in Gisborne would buy mats in bulk and we would buy them off her. In those days just as today, the first thing you needed to do when you decided to get serious about yoga was to buy your own yoga mat.

As most of you who regularly read my musings know, I first started practicing yoga in Gisborne, Aotearoa, NZ, in 1992.

Nz yoga mat