The grass mat
On giving up the yoga mat for the summer — and doing the entire morning practice directly on the grass behind the cottage.
We have a small back garden, mostly grass, with a flat stretch about three metres by three metres that catches the morning sun by seven thirty. Last summer, on a whim, I tried doing my whole morning yoga practice there without a mat. I had been doing the indoor mat-based version for years. The outdoor grass version was supposed to be a one-day experiment. It became the entire summer.
Grass is not a soft surface for yoga. The texture is uneven. The damp comes through. Small stones make themselves known under the heel of a hand or the side of a foot. None of these are problems exactly. They are inputs. The body, asked to do a downward dog on grass, has to organise itself differently. The hands grip the soil. The toes press into the earth. The body knows it is outside.
What changes when you take the practice off the mat
Everything subtle. The poses are the same but they land differently. A standing pose on grass involves the small intrinsic foot muscles in a way no studio pose ever does. A long seated stretch on slightly damp earth grounds the body in a way a foam mat does not. A savasana on grass — bird sounds, occasional small breeze, the smell of the lawn — is a savasana the body remembers afterwards.
The practice, on the grass, also gets quieter. The studio version, even when done alone, has a small performance element to it — the precision of the alignment, the desire for the pose to look right. The grass version has no audience and no expectation, and the body, no longer being looked at, settles into shapes that are slightly less correct and more honest.
On the small practical limitations
Wet grass after rain does not work — the practice would become uncomfortable rather than pleasant. Cold mornings under ten degrees are also not great. Dew is fine, light damp is fine, slightly cool air is fine. The summer window is shorter than I would like — perhaps eight or nine weeks of really good outdoor practice — but the weeks are enough to recalibrate what I want the rest of the year's practice to feel like.
By September the grass is too cold and damp, and the mat goes back down on the bedroom floor. But I bring something of the grass-mat practice indoors. The poses are a little less precise now. The performance has gone. The studio version, which used to be the standard, now feels slightly artificial — and the indoor mat is, after the summer, just a less interesting version of what the grass has been.