If you have been to a yoga class you might have been involved with chanting the sound Om. When a group of people chant this sound and all the voices find a resonance together a beautiful feeling is created. The benefits of chanting come through participation because it is something that has to be experienced to be understood. However, you may be wondering what this word is all about and why it is chanted so often, before you feel comfortable belting it out in a yoga class.
At times, being human in the modern world just doesn’t feel so good. Stress is caused by many different factors yet I believe they all trace back down to one; the mind, which is the sum of our thoughts, attitudes and beliefs. Stress is a reaction to outside events; and our life is a result of our beliefs and our thoughts.
There are many techniques that I have found helpful in dealing with this type of modern day tension.
I never really thought about keeping my yoga mat clean until one day, in cobra pose, my nose revealed the truth of the situation at hand. It was at my yoga teacher training in Thailand. We were there for three months and it was very hot! Not to mention we were doing a very vigorous practice and there was much sweating going on daily. Needless to say the mats got stinky very quickly; lucky for us we had a lot of fresh air moving through the space. Over there learning how to care for our yoga mat was pretty straight forward, we just rinsed them outside with cold water every week or so and then hung them to air dry which happened pretty quickly in the warm open air.
The second time I really thought about yoga mat care and cleanliness was while I was teaching at a community college. I realized that about a hundred different students used those mats each week. Thinking about all those feet with questionable levels of sanitation over and over again and the infrequency in which they were washed I began to think it was kind of gross not only sharing foot funk but putting our faces down on those mats for prone positions like cobra, locust and bow. I started encouraging the school to wash them more and students to bring their own mats or at least a hand towel to put down under their faces if they were sensitive to that sort of thing.
