Aligning Our Practice With What We Preach

Yoga isn’t about how I look to the person behind me. It isn’t about who can touch their toes and who can’t. And it isn’t a race to the finish line.

Yoga is about balancing the body, calming the mind, and bringing greater awareness to your life. And greater awareness naturally brings a sense of responsibility for the energy and actions we carry into the physical world.

But in today’s yoga community, things are not necessarily in harmony with this ethos, whether it’s drinking from “disposable” water bottles or relying on props and mats of questionable origins.

At the very least, yoga is a system of health maintenance, so it would seem…counterproductive to work on purifying your internal organs while sitting on a mat that polluted your air and water during manufacturing.

Now, originally, yogis were sitting in caves or doing yoga in the jungle. Nobody needed a perfectly flat wood floor or a perfectly squishy yoga mat. They’d lean on a rock, hang from a jungle vine, or use said vine to strap and bind themselves into deeper stretches.

Obviously, the practice of yoga has dramatically changed, and the props have been adjusted to meet the demands of a burgeoning yoga market (though a rope-wall with jungle vines sounds pretty fun).

In a rush to meet the demand of a growing yoga movement (or yoga market), manufacturers became more interested in mass production, the bottom line, and didn’t always care to align their materials with the spirit of yoga practice. Driven by profit, power, or ego, they chose to use toxic materials that pollute our planet…and ultimately our health.

It became a corporate game of who can touch their toes, never mind the alignment.

Fortunately, some companies in the yoga market are actually run by yogis, who see their work (or dharma) as an extension of their practice (or sadhana), and they follow the yogic principle of non-violence (or ahimsa). Over at Manduka, they’ve developed a whole line of sustainable, low-impact yoga gear and props.

The yoga mat is probably the one thing that every yogi uses, and it’s frequently mass-produced from toxic materials. Multiplied by the 30 million yogis and aspiring yogis in the U.S., and that’s a TON of toxic material in our air, water and landfills (especially once those mats get tossed in the dumpster after a year of use).

Enter the Black Mat PRO, a yoga mat manufactured through a process that ensures no toxic emissions are released into the atmosphere. SuperLite Travel Mat (natural rubber)And just as it makes a difference to switch from disposable water bottles to re-usable bottles, Black Mat Pro’s are designed to last a lifetime so they cut down on resource use and pollution.

There are a million ways to skin a sustainable yoga mat. Another approach is using natural materials, like the sustainably-harvested rubber in Manduka’s SuperLite Travel Mat.

Next, consider the humble block – another key yoga tool, helping to support proper alignment in those hard to hold poses. Blocks are usually made of the same petroleum-based, chemically-foamed materials as mats. But Manduka’s Renewable Cork Yoga block is the perfect alternative. Sustainable Cork Yoga BlockCork is a renewable, sustainable material, which comes from the bark of a Cork Oak Tree. There are no toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing process.

Manduka’s Yoga Straps help us stretch without stretching our integrity. Each strap is made from unbleached natural cotton, reducing chemicals and toxins released into the environment during the manufacturing process.

When we unite our practice and the tools we use, we bring all that good energy into the world with us. Because sustainable isn’t one choice, it is a series of choices that flow into a lifestyle (or a yoga pose!), and we should chose to support our spirits, vitality, and our planet every time we unroll our yoga mat.