How to clean a stinky yoga mat

One of the biggest issues with living alone for several months is the complacency. It's easy for me to get way too casual and comfortable with myself, with all my weirdnesses, quirks, and habits. Plus, as anybody who has left their home for a long period of time and then returned has noticed, your habitat has a smell that you're comfortable with and end up not noticing once you've lived there for a while. (Travelling usually somewhat resets my nose and gives me a chance to smell what newcomers smell when they visit!)

When my husband returned after a long absence, his nose had been seriously reset. One day recently, he was in our bedroom changing clothes. He stopped dead in his tracks.

"What is that smell? It smells like FEET." He began sniffing his way around the bedroom and didn't stop until he'd tracked down the source of the stinky-foot odor. Horror of horrors, it was my yoga mat, rolled up and stored in the corner by my bed.

To be fair, I occasionally clean it with rubbing alcohol, but the smell had totally permeated into the rubber/plastic/I'm really not sure what kind of synthetic stuff they make it out of. He unrolled it and gaped at the dark spots at the head and foot of the mat.

"Dude. That is not ok."

If you read a lot of yoga blogs or natural house-cleaning blogs (and I hope you do!), there are about 40 million recipes for mat cleaning sprays. They all involve mixing a lot of stuff into spray bottles, including expensive and sometimes hard to find essential oils. I'm here to tell you that you don't need to do that. In fact, you can clean your yoga mat for as cheaply as free (or whatever water costs you in your area). This is how my husband got my mat to an almost-new condition.

1. Spray off the yoga mat with water. My husband took my mat out to our backyard and sprayed it off with the jet setting on our hose. If you don't have a hose with a good nozzle, I'd suggest putting it in your shower and spraying it off.

2. Let it dry in the sunshine. This is (in my opinion) the most important step, and if you can only do one thing to clean your mat, I'd pick this! Sunlight is a great disinfectant, and can help bleach out dark spots. Lay it out in your backyard, drape it over the rail of your balcony, or take it to a park and let it hang out on the grass while you read a book for an hour.

Voila! Your mat won't be a biohazard anymore! I'm planning on doing this much more regularly, before it gets so bad that we smell feet.

The belly and me

As you might have guessed from the name of the blog, I am not a flexible person. The cool thing is that everybody and their mom likes to talk about yoga being for everybody, not just for super-bendy people who post awesome photos of their impeccably-dressed, death-defying poses on Instagram. So I'm totally in with the cool self-acceptance crowd! When I started doing yoga several years ago, I liked the idea of a non-competitive activity that I could do that would keep me calm and in shape. Plus, I could do it no matter what the weather was like. Yoga made me feel awesome in my own skin, and I continued on my merry way doing YouTube videos and flows I found on fitness websites.

And then I got pregnant.

It was all fun and games until my belly literally started getting in my way. It's bad enough that I'm constantly bumping it against tables, chairs, and other random "I forgot to account for that" obstacles. It's in my way in yoga too. In Child's Pose, it presses into the floor; same in Pigeon. When I'm trying to take a forward fold, I have to adopt a fairly wide straddle just to keep my stomach from squishing against my legs (which the baby has informed me does not feel good and he doesn't appreciate it).

Of course, having something like 19 pounds sitting directly on my front does lovely things to my balance too. I used to at least be good at balancing: now, I have days where I legitimately feel much more comfortable with my toes on the ground in Tree Pose:

(That's my backyard, by the way: I love it back there!)

Tell me about you: are you a devoted yogi who knows Sanskrit and goes on cool yoga retreats? Do you try to fit in a couple Sun Salutations next to your bed before your morning coffee? Or are you scratching your head wondering how on earth you salute the sun? (No judgement here, just wanting to know who's out there :-)