My kitchen is small. There is one window, a wooden table that is too low, and an old gas stove that I have to talk to before it agrees to light. Most mornings, before anyone else is awake, this is where I practise.
People are sometimes surprised when I tell them this. They imagine a teacher of yoga must have a room, with bolsters and candles and a view of something tasteful. I have those things, in another part of the house, for when I teach. But the practice that matters most to me happens in the kitchen, in a long cotton dress, with my hands wet from washing the same teapot I have been washing for fifteen years.
What is actually happening
I am not doing postures. I am cutting fruit. I am waiting for the kettle. I am rinsing rice three times because that is what my mother taught me, and her mother taught her, and there is something in the third rinse that is a kind of meditation that I do not have a better word for.
The yoga is not the postures. The yoga is the willingness to be slow, in places where slowness is not rewarded.
I have a hand on the edge of the counter. I am breathing. I notice when my shoulders rise, and I let them fall. I notice when my jaw is tight, and I unclench it. I notice the small tasks I have been postponing, and I write them down on a piece of paper, in pencil, and put the paper in a drawer. I do not act on them today.
This is not a productivity practice. It is the opposite. It is the practice of not being productive for the first hour of the day, while still doing the small useful things that a kitchen asks for.
Why the kitchen
There is a reason I have come to love the kitchen as a practice space, and it is not romantic.
The kitchen is the room where my grandmother spent most of her life. Where my mother cried about my father. Where I learned to fold briouates, and to taste a soup without burning my tongue. Where I have, in different decades, argued, hidden, eaten standing up, and eaten on the floor. It is a room that knows me. It is a room that has held the whole arc of my femaleness — from a child being fed to a woman feeding others.
To stand in this room, in the early morning, with a hand on the counter and a cup of tea cooling, is to be received by the room. The yoga of the kitchen is the yoga of being in the place where you have always been.
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A small invitation
If you have been pushing yourself to get to the mat — to the studio, to the early class, to the formal practice — and feeling like the day always wins before you do, I would offer this:
Try, for a week, taking the first ten minutes in your kitchen, slowly. Make tea badly. Stand at the window. Wash the cup. Do not narrate the experience. Do not call it a practice. Just be in the room, and breathe, and notice what arrives.
The kitchen is a sacred room, even if you have never decorated it.
— Ghizlan