Before I actually met my husband in person, we emailed and spoke on the phone a few times. We are a match.com success story if you can believe it. My profile picture was blurry (strike one), I told him I had a personal trainer (apparently that was strike two as he said that’s what girls who are horribly out of shape say), and as if I just callously flirt with disaster I told him I had a long torso. Not realizing how close to strike three my upper half description brought me, he was afraid he was making a July 4th date with some sort of carnival freak escapee. Being a bit of a freak himself (and that’s why I love him) he agreed to the date, apparently was pleasantly surprised at my normal human proportions, and the rest is almost 16 years of fantastic history. Looking back, when describing my physical attributes to the online world I wonder if “open hips” would have been a more appealing description.
Whenever I start talking about my open hips, hubby loves to chime in with jokes about having “a box lunch at the Y” and while I appreciate his cunning linguist skills this story is actually about Yoga. Not the little green guy from Star Wars and not the bear who was filthy for picnic baskets, I’m talking about the ancient art of health and relaxation with such wholesome poses as “downward dog”, “camel pose” (I said pose) and the “easy plow pose”.
When I first started yoga I learned that I have very wide, open hips (ugh, I can already hear him laughing). My level of previous-life sexual philanthropy aside, I don’t mean that in a slutty way – I was born this way and can literally sit in a butterfly position (that’s when you sit on the floor, bend your knees, bring your feet towards your baby hole and the soles of your feet should touch each other). With my knees touching the floor I can still lean forward and lay flat on the ground in front of me. Go ahead…it sounds easy but try it. You’ll be lucky if you can lean forward enough to decide if it’s a “Summer’s Eve” kind of day, much less fold yourself like you’re being shipped out by Amazon.
Freshness aside, let’s get back to my open hips. Last week I was in yoga class doing the Pigeon Pose and I’m literally laying face down on the ground. This is something that usually amazes my instructors and I even had one announce to the class not to look at me as an example because it’s just not normal. So here I am with one leg straight, one leg tucked under me and I’m staring at the ground (wow, that brings back college memories). As I’m doing my deep breathing and letting my mind wander I obviously start thinking about…you guessed it, Subway sandwiches. To be fair this isn’t the weirdest place my mind has gone during yoga.
- Was Snow White having sex with any of those dwarfs? Is there hidden meaning to them singing “Hi Ho”?
- If a smurf couldn’t breathe, what color would he turn?
- Every hand I’ve shaken has held a penis.
- Why is W called double U, shouldn’t it be called double V?
- If I fart in the shower before I turn the water on will it still smell as bad?
- Is a hotdog technically a sandwich?
…and speaking of sandwiches, I love the veggie sandwich at Subway (see what I did there), I had been eating them long before I became a vegetarian. I’ve tried desperately to recreate them myself but they never taste the same. Now as far as PR nightmares go it’s hard to top Jared as a sandwich spokesman (let’s hope he’s in the middle of a couple of footlongs right now). But I think we all remember the “Yoga Mat” controversy that came up about what nasty shit was being put in the bread. The word on the street is that the offending ingredients have been removed. That’s obviously great news, but for this health-conscious open-hipped mama the question still remains “What nasty shit is still in my yoga mats?” I lay on them, face down, occasionally drooling, breathing in/out god only knows what. When I roll my mat up it’s not around a heaping helping of spinach, cucumbers, olives and sriracha sauce, but if I was going to be practicing on my mat 3-5 times a week it needed to be as “clean” as possible. The only un-healthy downward dogging I like to be doing is when I’m wearing most of my Wonder-Woman outfit and hubby is playing a deranged Batman who’s trying to relieve himself of his sperm-retention madness (yeah, that’s pretty specific). I’ve looked to the sky and seen someone shining the LCAD signal, so I’m here to answer the call with my top 3 choices on yoga mats:
(1) Jade Harmony Yoga Mat: Made in the USA with natural rubber in a sustainable manner. Contain no PVC, EVA or other synthetic rubber and BONUS…for every mat sold they plant a tree. This was one of the more expensive mats I bought but I reasoned that I can use it for a long time and it was so highly recommended that I splurged on myself.
(2) Manduka Welcome Yoga Mat: Eco-friendly manufacturing, free of solvents and toxic glues. Made with energy efficient manufacturing as the company strives to minimize environmental waste and make products that last. This is the mat I bought my pre-teen daughter and it was perfect. She was starting to go to yoga and I wasn’t sure if she’d like it so I didn’t want to buy her a more expensive Jade YET I wanted her to have a safe and “clean” yoga mat too. This was a perfect choice for her. After we started going together we got confused on whose mat belonged to whom and would switch off. I found myself using this one more than my Jade.
(3) Gaiam Yoga Mat: This one I don’t personally own…yet but tons of yogis in my studio use it. Both my mats are a plain-Jane blue color but these come in all sorts of fun colors and designs on them so you can be eco-friendly, safe and stylish all at the same time. These are made without the six most harmful phthalates (DEHP, DBP, BBP, DINP, DIDP and DNOP – it’s like the alphabet soup of toxins), latex free and they even sell mats just for kids. They’re reasonably priced and this is definitely going to be my next birthday gift to myself.
Hubby still isn’t convinced about yoga, he thinks it’s more like if Twister was a one player game. After showing him some of the latest poses I’ve been working on I’m pretty sure I hear him upstairs shopping online for “2-person yoga mat, washable”.
