Lost and Found

For six years, I’ve been taking yoga once or twice a week at the community center near my house. The center is an old elementary school, and we have class in the “stage room.” My instructor, Paula, and I and a few of the other long-term attendees are great friends. When it’s just us, we talk and laugh the whole time. I’m often distracted by our conversations while leaving, so it’s pretty amazing that I’d never left anything behind.

Before my first yoga class of 2014, I went to the coat closet to grab my yoga mat, and it wasn’t there. Huh. I don’t often misplace things, so this really threw me for a loop. I looked in other closets, under beds, in my car. No luck. At the center, it wasn’t in the lost and found, or in the stage room closet. Thankfully, Paula had an extra yoga mat in her trunk which she told me I could keep. But the missing purple dragonfly mat has continued to haunt me for over a month. I’ve looked everywhere multiple times. I really liked it, and it was the only one I’d used all these years. More frustrating than the loss of the mat was the unsolved mystery of what happened to it. I couldn’t figure it out. I guessed I never would.

Last night we had a lot of new people at class. During the last ten minutes, we do a guided relaxation, and I lay with my legs propped flat against the wall (it provides a lot of health benefits!). Due to all the doors, chalkboards, and floor vents, there aren’t many good places in the stage room for this pose. So I broke habit and used a wall on the stage, next to a little half-door at the top of the stage stairs. At the end of relaxation, you’re supposed to roll onto your right side and then up to a seated position. Well, when I rolled over, my foot hit something. I opened my eyes and was totally stunned to see… MY YOGA MAT! There it was, in its purple glory, wedged between the half-door and the wall. I definitely didn’t put it there, but I must have left it behind and someone tossed it back there for some reason, or it fell.

In life, we often lose things and never find out why. So I wanted to share this happy story of my unexpected reunion with something I thought I had lost forever. :) Namaste!