As parts of the country begin permitting practitioners to return to their beloved yoga studios, we, Bay Area yogis are looking forward to a stepping stone toward in-studio practice. Next week, businesses and individuals in some counties in the Bay Area and San Francisco will be permitted to host outdoor yoga classes! While this may seem like a band-aid, this is how yoga was practiced for hundreds (or maybe thousands) of years. Yogis practiced in the grass or on the soil; they put their hands on the Earth. There was nary a yoga mat in sight!
With all the mats on the market now, it’s hard to imagine the world before sticky mats. My inquiry into the best yoga mats led me to Angela Farmer, a pioneer in the yoga industry. Before diving deeper into the vastness of yoga mat materials (a conversation more relevant than ever), let’s take this moment to honor the history of the yoga mat and Angela’s incredible discovery.
The first foreshadowing of yoga mats wasn’t until the late 1800s, when yogis started using animal skins and, later, cloth rugs to support their sitting postures during meditation and pranayama. We know this based on historical texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the works of Swami Vivekananda that provide suggestions for sitting practice. We can gather that, at some point, a very entrepreneurial yogi or yogini unfolded the rug they were sitting on and did a down-dog on it.
During the 1960s, when the story of the sticky mat really began, yoga was still very niche in the West. Although Indra Devi and the Baptiste family had both opened studios on the West Coast in the 1950s, the ’60s were really a turning point for yoga in America. Swami Sivananda’s disciples began laying the groundwork for Integral Yoga. Ram Dass went on his now-legendary pilgrimage to India. The great B.K.S. Iyengar released Light on Yoga, a book many of us still revere as the “Yoga Bible.” But through it all, there is nary a sticky mat to be found!
Then, in the early 70s, a yogini named Angela Farmer came upon the item of her dreams…sort of. While on a yoga assignment in Germany, Angela was perusing Hertie, a large department store in Munich opposite Hauptbahnhof. She ventured into the basement of the store and was intrigued by a thin roll of white carpet underlay in the household utilities section. She felt an instant euphoria! Angela unrolled the carpet underlay to test its density and stickiness, and with the birth of the sticky mat, the yoga world was forever changed. But wait – why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?
“I was looking for a new set of feet!” Angela recalled. “It was like finding gold.”
Angela Farmer spent her younger years enjoying a great many physical activities, including cycling and acrobatics. After enjoying athletics throughout her childhood, it came as a great devastation to Angela when she started experiencing circulatory issues in her early teens. She started losing blood flow to her extremities. The doctors indicated her condition was most likely the result of the three and a half hours she spent each day on the train commuting to and from school in London from the countryside where she lived. Angela was surrounded by chain-smoking businessmen on the train rides, and the secondhand smoke was causing her great harm. The doctors recommended she undergo a surgery called sympathectomy, which in this case was performed to increase blood flow and decrease any long-term pain from her narrowing blood vessels.
“I was supposed to go on and be normal,” Angela explained. “I was literally cut open to the bone on both sides of my cervical spine, and the following year the same for my lumbar spine.”
If you google sympathectomy (go ahead), you’ll notice that, these days, it’s a procedure most often used to cure hyperhidrosis or excessive sweating, particularly of the hands. One of the most frequently reported side effects is a condition called anhidrosis, which is the inability to produce sweat.
By the time Angela was in her 20s, she had the great fortune of becoming one of B.K.S Iyengar’s early students. “I remember when it would just be four or five of us in the room. We would practice on the floors of school halls or church halls. Iyengar was a fierce and dynamic teacher,” Angela remembers. “We never knew what to expect.” While Angela found the experience of Iyengar’s great passion to be a blessing, she struggled greatly during asana practice. “My hands and feet would slide apart and I had to tense my muscles to keep from falling. I didn’t have the courage to tell him [about my surgeries]; he was the guru.”
Angela tried everything. She brought a glass of water to class to routinely wet her feet. She purchased a mattress pad at a flea market to use as a makeshift yoga rug. She even tried spitting on her own hands and feet when Iyengar wasn’t looking! “But he had eyes in the back of his head,” Angela said. “He became very angry with me.” But even then, Angela didn’t stop seeking something to keep her hands and feet stuck to the floor during yoga practice.
As she began showing her students the carpet underlay that she purchased, they of course wanted one too. The next time Angela went to Germany, she came back to London with 10 times as much of the sticky material – as much as she could carry! It wasn’t long before Angela’s father, Richard Farmer, became very interested in the company producing this matting, Wanderlich
“He was a very creative type,” Angela said of her father. “I was the warrior type. Something inside me said ‘no,’ that I mustn’t touch the [mat] business.” Richard contacted the family who ran the small business producing the carpet underlay and made friends with them. He began ordering rolls of the matting regularly and began a small business of his own – the first sticky mat business in the U.K.! He called this first yoga mat “The Molivos Mat” in honor of Angela, who was leading retreats and yoga courses in Molivos, a small town on the island of Lesvos, where Angela still teaches yoga. The mat was created with a specially-treated plastic and was 24” wide and 66” long. In the United States, the mat retailed for approximately $17 to $22, plus the cost of shipping.
When Richard and his wife fell on hard financial times, they moved to Canada to live with Angela’s brother and sister-in-law. Even after the move, Richard maintained the yoga mat business, and it eventually blossomed. Growing the business out of his laundry room in Saanichton, B.C., Canada, Richard began shipping the “Original Molivos Mat” all over the world.
By the end of the 80s, Richard was no longer the only one who sold the yoga mats made in Germany. A woman in San Francisco began importing and selling the exact same mats from the exact same factory. “She listed the cost of shipping separately, so her mats appeared to cost less than the price my father was asking,” Angela mentioned. Richard kept the business until his health began to deteriorate. He eventually gave the business to a young woman in Vancouver.
Over time, these specific sticky mats lost favor among more serious yogis, as they were not made to withstand human body chemistry and lots of movement. The surfaces began peeling very quickly, and the international shipping costs made these mats expensive to replace.
Enter Sara Chambers of Hugger Mugger and Peter Sterios of Manduka to save the day. In the 1990s, these two both achieved an upgraded PVC mat, and both of their mats are still on sale today, 30 years later. Stay tuned for the next column, in which we’ll take a closer look at PVC yoga mats and learn why they are still one of the most successful types of yoga mats available in the marketplace.
