Dear Lifebort (I mean, Lifeboard, as this post is too public for pet names):

I want to thank you for reminding what it is like to be in love. Drunk in Love (not the Beyonce version, but the Ed Sheeran, i.e., ginger-haired British boy version. Thank me later):

So LifeBoard, I’ve been known as home yoga practitioner for a while. I thought I had it down. I thought I knew the ins and the outs, as we beginners are apt to think just because we have done something for the tiniest fraction of our lives: I know everything! I’ve been through it all! So we’re moving to a ski town with no humidity, into a little rental place that has rugs? no biggie! 

Oh, the innocence. The naivete! My options for practicing were: practice on the hard floor in the main open room (aka grand central station area of the house), with full view of messy kitchen, toddler toys, roaming hair shedding dogs, husband and kid (unless I kicked them out) and by the way, the most dry, f00king freezing part of the house. In the late winter when I landed here in Utah, this was quickly a no-go. Sweat-free practices offend me.

Lifeboard, can I tell you how much I detest practicing in Wide Open Spaces. I’m a lot like my dog Charles. We like caves, caverns, tucked away restaurants. When I’m in a mysore room I splash my mat down right between two people who probably thought they would never get a neighbor. Sorry.

So I became Goldilocks. One day I’d try this room: too cold. My daughter’s room: too much rug. My room: way too much rug. The I’d go back to the main hardwood floor: too much too cold space. Rinse and repeat. I couldn’t find my groove.

“How the hell did this sh*t happen?”

Oh sure, I know there are rugs in mysore, in Bikram rooms, hotels, in Norman Allen’s secret Hawaii hideaway. I’m not talking about flooring like that, No,

I’m talking a Persian Cat bonanza. Chewbacca’s pelt aplenty. Chia pet multiplicity. Spiked hair of the eighties ad infinitum. Sea Urchin superabundance. Ted 2. An Angora rabbit, fluffy cow, “Komondor” the mop dog. Just imagine laying your hands into some of that as your “foundation.” Go ahead. Lay your mental mat down and try to practice.

It was like snowboarding, or surfing, or whatever doing a yoga practice on top of a moving fluffy dog

must be like. And by the way, I don’t know how to snowboard, or surf. Based on my Chewbacca practice experience, I imagine those sports must be f–king hard.

Fluffy dog practice was also taking a toll on my wrists, or so I imagined, so maybe the real loser here was my mental health.

The greatest loves are sometimes born out of the most annoying shitty little things. So in blows April, along with visiting family and a typhoon of kids under the age of 5. How was I going to practice during their conquest of every inch of house? My only option: drown in the yarn-y sea of my bedroom floor.

Sh8t was getting real.

I sought advice from an online group of home yogis. Suggestions ranged from getting a hunk of wood the size of a door from Home Depot, sanding it and transporting it myself (as if!), to purchasing your special self online– that’s you, Lifeboard! designed to allow a stable foundation for yoga anywhere.

Being lazy, I went with option numero dos. Oh – no offense, Lifeboard. Your convenience doesn’t mean what we got ain’t real.

Then you arrived with Mr UPS all decked out in a brown cardboard box. I confess to questioning whether I’d ever actually been in a gifted program as I struggled to put your two halves together. I raced to your website and found the error of my ways. SO EASY. Jeez. Anyway–

Lifeboard, you are everything I never knew I needed. Sthira Sukham Asanam. (Aw, look that that, you’ve got me quoting the Yoga Sutas!) You gave me a floor out of a hairy unappetizing punk algae mane (click the link and check out #6- I’m not making this up). You can be taken apart and put together easily, stored to the side or fully away easily (do you think a 5ft and small change size girl can lug around a huge slab of door-sized floor?) Thanks to you, Lifeboard, I don’t have to. No complaints from my body, well, maybe one–because you are so dark you absorb oodles of heat from the space heater. But this is just nitpicking. This is just finding that tiny flaw in your otherwise perfect soulmate. It aint a deal breaker, specially since it isn’t your fault I practice with the heater practically on top of us.

I’m sorry I brought it up. I love you Lifeboard. Cause of you, I’m drunk in love with practice again.

oh baby, drunk in love we be allright.

We be all night morning. Love, Love.

XO, jean marie

PS -did you watch the Ed Sheeran video? I hope I made you giggle like a little girl.

PPS- Sorry I smell.