I am thrilled to announce I recently teamed up with Spiritual Revolution to create to 4 different yoga mats. Yoga much like art has always been a grounding practice in my life. It’s an active meditation and a place I go to center myself, calm my mind and get in my body. You can read about my journey into the art of yoga below.

It was the fall of 2001 and wide-eyed, endlessly curious 23 year-old me had just graduated from art school and began looking for my first grown-up job. I moved into a house with my best friend from high school and his older brother and was ready to go meet this infamous “real world” I had heard so much about. Just eleven hopeful and optimistic days into my search, the tragedy of 9-11 unfolded and my life forever changed. The world was uncertain. The economy froze to a fearful halt and I needing to pay rent as the dust still settled, took a healthy dose of humble pie, put my “making it as an artist” dreams down for the moment and became a barista. I was angry, resentful and mostly ashamed that so many of my friends who had graduated just a year earlier had secure, well paying PROFESSIONS and I was stuck slinging coffee. I felt like I had been scammed. That hard work, talent and creativity had no value. I knew I had so much more to serve than overpriced cappuccinos, but no one seemed able to see my value and at the time it felt like a life sentence.

Then one magical day, my friend took me to a Yoga class. I was living in Boston at the time and Baron Baptise had two studios there. It was my my first experience with Yoga aside from hearing it as a word and seeing a growing trend of people carrying around what looked like colorful rolled up tubes in their arms. I LOVED it. I loved every minute of it. It was the best work out I had ever had and I felt like I was in some Navy Seals training for people bettering themselves. Yoga offered the perfect balance of strength and sweat, which provided a healthy conduit for my artistic angst and it also somehow, some magical yogic way ALSO brought an otherworldly sense of tranquility and inner peace. I thought tranquility was reserved for small quiet ponds nestled high upon a mountain somewhere at daybreak. I didn’t know that was possible inside of me. I didn’t even know there WAS an inside of me. Yoga was my first wobbly steps onto a spiritual path and certainly my first intentional standing posture in attempting to become a better human being.

Yoga WAS my new art. An endless practice where mastery wasn’t even the point – presence was. Be Here Now. And Now. And Now. Forever. Yoga showed me that art was not limited to a canvas or brushstrokes, and more fittingly, in perfect Namaste fashion – the beauty of making a life not just a living.

“Yoga” means union, and that is absolutely how it changed my life. It has helped unify my Mind, Body and Spirit and I am in a lifelong child’s pose of gratitude for that.

For those of you looking for a colorful mat to practice upon – Look. Know. Further.

Purchase any of these mats here.