Yoga Challenge Preparations

A week from today the Yoga Challenge begins. Yikes!

I’ve been collecting registrations and trying to figure out how many mats will fit, and if I need any more stuff to make the experience better for the participants.

Today I went to the studio and moved all the props into the lounge in “stage one” of Challenge Prep.  It’s making me excited to see the studio space open up again. This year, for the first time,  I am not providing mats. I am making my people bring their own.

I think this is a good idea, not only because it will be way easier for me to clean the space, but I think everyone who commits to doing this much yoga needs to have their own mat, their own piece of spiritual geography.

Lots of things happen to you on a yoga mat: you sweat, you cry, you fall, you rest, you even have little epiphanies on them (if you’re lucky!) So doesn’t it makes sense that this thing be  yours? That you take it home with you? Put it in a bag that you like? Wash it with stuff you like to smell?

Who wants to have an epiphany on a mat, and the next week see some schmo sweating all over it?  Not me, I’ll tell you.

I have also been inventorying my yoga clothes. If I am going to be teaching 3 times a day for the next month,  I need to make sure I have enough clothes so that I don’t have to do laundry every 3 days.

I am cheap when it comes to clothes, though.  I hate spending big bucks on yoga togs, but sometimes I’m forced to. I try as much as possible to shop places like T.J. Maxx where they have overstocks of name brands. But the other day I was cruising the Lululemon site which is the “IT” place among fashion-forward yoga teachers, apparently, but its appeal has always baffled me. Most of their stuff looks boring, style-wise. Big yawn.

The only thing that makes my eyes pop are the prices. Yowza! Ouch. No.

But I have been looking, without success, to replace my fave crop pants which have seen one too many seasons (not yoga crops, just hike, bike, mess around crops) when I saw a cool-looking pair on the Lulu site that got rave reviews. I blanched at the price, (as usual), but ordered them anyway, thinking that I would probably send them back once I was validated in my belief that nothing was worth that price.

Well, they came yesterday, and oh lord. I freakin’ LOVE them. I could (and probably will) live in them all summer. (I wish they came in tan, too.) I got them in “Coal,” and I may have to get them in gray, too. They’re these.

I’m keeping them.

(Shit.)