My Personal Space Bubble. Your Personal Space Bubble.

I had a great bunch of new faces in my Beginning class on Saturday. Regular clients giving the weekend a shot. New people stepping out for spring to try something different. It’s great. Good mat etiquette is something you can find oodles of posts about. One yoga gaff I hadn’t counted on, in fact, it never even crossed the darkest recesses of my mind (and they get pretty dark) happened to a couple of my regular clients. A newbie walked across their yoga mat! Twice!

No Touchy The Mat!

Stunned, she couldn’t even respond, especially when the newbie returned the same way. She pulled me aside this morning to tell me about it. It took most of the practice for her to get into her groove, she was so angry. She relayed the double jeopardy saying my other client told him in in no uncertain terms to get off of her mat.

I occasionally step on clients’ mats to help them with alignment, but I’ve never, in all of my years of yoga (and there are plenty) had someone else walk across my mat.

There are a lot of articles out there about good mat etiquette, mostly devoted to keeping it clean, staggering your spacing so more people can find room, not coming in late, not leaving early, blah blah blah. In all of my searching, I found a lone single article stating what seems to be common sense.

Don’t step on someone else’s mat without permission. Feet, people!