‘Stay on your mat’: the art of doing your own thing

I like the idea of having a regular yoga practice, but unfortunately it’s too far down my list of priorities to ever be more than an infrequent and sporadic intention. It’s still in my ‘should’ basket, not my ‘want to’ basket. However, as well as a few helpful hip stretches I learned, the best thing I took away from my last yoga burst was something the yoga teacher said whilst we were all trying to do a tree pose (which is a difficult balancing-on-one-leg- twisting-arms-in-front pose).

What he said was: ‘stay on your mat’.

He didn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t start walking around the room and swapping positions with our classmates; he meant that if we didn’t keep our focus on our own pose but started being aware of what other people were doing, then we would fall over.

(I can guarantee that if you try to balance on one leg without maintaining complete focus on your own pose, then you will have to put your other leg back on the floor. If you’ve ever been to a yoga class, you’ll know that as soon as one person loses their balance, at least half a dozen will quickly follow. Most of us can’t ‘stay on our mat’ for extended periods of time.)

I think ‘staying on your mat’ is a great metaphor for maintaining focus on your own life, and not worrying about what other people are doing.

One of the most disruptive and crippling things we all do to ourselves is compare how well we match up to others. We each have our own mental checklist, and we punish ourselves when we feel that we’re falling short. Our checklist usually includes how attractive we are, how much we weigh, how much money we have, how many possessions we own, how well our career is growing, how good our relationship is. We can always find people who are doing ‘better’ than us in one or more of these areas, which can lead to any degree of discontent, dissatisfaction or even depression.  Conversely, of course, we can find that we compare favourably with others and then we feel better about ourselves in a smug and self-righteous way.

Constantly comparing ourselves to others leads to a constantly discontented life.  Moreover, it leads to us trying to get on someone else’s mat: doing what others are doing in the hope that their ‘success’ in a particular area will rub off on us. We can spend our whole life trying to get on other people’s mat, not realising that our best chance of success and happiness is to focus on our own life, our own pose and our own unique strengths.

Next time you find yourself comparing yourself to others, just remember: ‘stay on your mat’.

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