Whoever said the recession is over isn’t a yoga teacher.

If it weren’t for my Lucy PRO discount (yoga instructor? Become a LucyPRO here), I’d be looking decidedly more ragged. In fact, until a couple months ago I taught (and practiced) in the same two pairs of pants and three shirts for two years. And with proper care, my Jade Yoga Mat is still going strong. It helps, too, if you have a crafty mom who makes you eye pillows.

But it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to outfit yourself or your space with yoga style. I went searching for how-tos, and despite the proliferation of “yoga pants from old t-shirts,” I persevered with these modern, do it yourself yoga craft projects that save some bank.

P.S. Where are all you fabulous yoga crafters and your yoga crafts? These projects, although great, are collecting Internet dust!

1. Marimekko Yoga Mat Bag

This do-it-yourself yoga bag is exactly my aesthetic; now, if only I had inherited my mom’s sewing gene. In 10 steps and with a sewing machine you’ll be crafting your way to a handmade yoga bag that will have everyone asking you where you bought it. This looks simple enough that even I could do it, genetics or not.

2. Antibacterial Yoga Mat Spray

I’m 90% on my way to this simple spray, just need to stock up on some eucalyptus essential oil. For tea tree oil, I prefer the organic kind from Desert Essence. The company is the largest supplier of tea tree oil, which coincidentally, my doctor tells me, is good for treating the eczema on my fingers (too much information).

3. Yoga Mat Strap

So easy. So quick. So cute.

4. Nigella Yoga Mat Bag by Amy Butler [PDF]

Oh, Amy Butler. I’m in love with your “Midwest Modern” fabrics, and not just because I grew up in Ohio, but also because you put them to use in this yoga mat bag pattern. The PDF includes instructions, pattern pieces and measurements. If you sew this, make me an extra?

5. Love and Peace Wall Art [PDF]

I’m a huge fan of fabric wall art, mostly because cutting fabric? Cutting fabric I can do. I’m thinking these panels would look great above my bed, which already is covered by Amy Butler’s water bouquet in midnight fabric duvet.

6. McCall’s, Simplicity and Kwik Sew Yoga Clothing Patterns

Seriously, who knew that back when my mom was sifting through McCall’s patterns for my Halloween costumes, she could have been making yoga clothes instead? The website that rounded up these patterns warns they may be out of print, but it’s nothing a trip to eBay won’t fix. Most all of these patterns look like they could make it in our modern times, except for the last two. Unless you totally want to rock the ’80s.

7. 50 Ways to Reuse Your Yoga Mat

I’ve got my first yoga mat (a Gaiam, coincidentally) rotting in a spare bedroom, but am considering one of the fine options in this list from Gaiam.com. So far, #6 (donate to an animal shelter) is winning out. Definitely not #15 (cut it up to make mouse pads). Do people really do that?

8. Cozy Eye Pillows

Most yoga eye pillows are square-shaped – not this pattern from Better Homes & Gardens. The pillows can also be cooled in the freezer or warmed in the microwave for a luxe relaxation during your savasana.

9. Dog Leash Turned Yoga Tote

That Martha – she’s always finding bizarre uses for seemingly unrelated things – like dog leashes and yoga mats. This is less of a DIY and more of a: grab or buy a cute dog leash and use it to roll up your yoga mat. Clever, especially if you don’t have a dog that goes insane every time she sees her leash.

10. Yoga Cookie Cutters

The amateur baker in me loves this idea, which I am apparently quite behind the times on since thekitchen.com featured these cookie cutters in 2009. The tin cutters include Plow, Tree, Warrior I, Lotus, Down Dog and more. Or you could skip the DIY and buy the Gingerbread Yoga People Cookies from Baked Ideas.

When you meet someone who lives in the now, two things happen. The first is that you, too, get pulled into the now. The second is that you begin plotting how to keep that feeling after they leave. If you’ve met Denver yoga teacher Lisa Schlelein, you know exactly what I mean.

Lisa has an uncanny ability to speak her truth no matter who’s looking and no matter the situation. And the key is simple: trust, completely, that in every moment the Universe is conspiring to bring us everything we need.

Lisa was one of my teachers during my yoga teacher training two years ago, and I continue to frequent her classes today. She’s taught at Om Time, Core Power, Rishi’s Crossing, Samadhi Center for Yoga, Spiral Yoga & Wellness Center, and at one time was teaching 15 classes a week. Now, the full-time yoga teacher calls Karma Yoga Center home.

But 11 years ago, she was just getting started. This is her story—how she came to yoga, found love and met her guru, all by trusting the Universe.

*

It’s 2000 and Lisa is living in San Francisco when a coworker suggests she attend a Bikram yoga class. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my entire life,” she says. “I’d always worked out, but I was sore in places I didn’t know existed!” The instructor told her to make sure she came back the next day to work out the soreness. Lisa did. And she was hooked.

“I started getting up at 6 a.m. to practice. I wanted to eat all the things that were good for me. It was a huge shift. My body changed and my mentality changed. I felt wrung out from the inside out,” she tells me on a couch at Gypsy House on 13th in Capitol Hill.

After a solo European trek and a surfing stint on the shores of Santa Cruz, Lisa landed in Denver and began cleaning the Core Power on Grant studio in exchange for yoga. By day she worked at a doctor’s office, where she was often told she’d done something wrong; at night, she’d hop on her mat and be told that everything she was doing was right.

And then she took a class with Denver-teacher Angelique de Silva, who, unlike other teachers Lisa had previously practiced with, spoke in Sanskrit. “I’ve always been someone who enjoys challenges and the challenge of the heat in yoga class was what I thought it was, but once I heard her talk about Sanskrit I thought, ‘What is that?’” Lisa soon followed Angelique’s classes to Samadhi.

It was 2005. Within two years, after cleaning Samadhi in exchange for yoga and eavesdropping on countless teacher trainings, Lisa applied to be a yoga teacher.

*

There are 10 of us piled into a big white van that we littered with prayer flags and magnets that read “Peace” and “Save the world.” We’re coming back from Enchanted Tadasana, a yoga, hiking and music retreat in Wyoming that Lisa and Katrina Gustafson, owner of Karma Yoga Center, put together last August. As yogis do, we got to talking about love – romantic love or lack thereof.

Lisa was at the wheel, headed down I-25 in northern Colorado, when she matter-of-factly stated that she’d meditated for 40 days to bring love into her life. After spending years comfortable being by herself and not in a relationship, she decided she wanted to experience herself in a relationship. “I wrote down everything I wanted in a partner, and then, no matter what I was doing, I made time every day to chant Aham Prema [ah-hum pray-mah]” which means I am divine love.

She did this for 40 days. Three months later, Aaron, her boyfriend, came into her life.

When Lisa tells this story, you get the sense that she doesn’t feel like she’s a miracle worker for having called love into her life. Instead, you see a glimpse of the dedication she brings to any endeavor, and an utterly disarming and complete trust that the universe will indeed provide, as long as you intend it.

“You put out intentions and you have to wait for them to be fulfilled,” she says. “It gives me more reason to love what I’m doing now, until it changes, because I know it will. If [yoga] is really done to the heart of what it’s intended to be, it can transform everything.”

*

Between bites of egg sandwich at Gypsy House, Lisa tells me how she determines who to adjust in her classes.

“There’s a fine line between helping people along their path, giving them guidance and letting them guide themselves,” she says. “I’ll look at somebody and if they’re following what I say, I’ll go over and help them. If they resist right away, I’ll just hold their leg or touch the back of their heart. So much gets said in all that, the gesture. Words can mess a lot of things up, people can hear a lot of things in words, but gestures are easier to understand.”

When Lisa speaks, her hands are always involved, even now as she extends her palm to me to demonstrate. It’s something that I’ve had to work at since becoming a yoga teacher. As a writer, I fall easily into words and continually remind myself to be more hands on. And then Lisa reminds me “sometimes we look to others and want to do ‘that thing,’ but ‘that thing’ may not be what’s yours,” and I feel like myself again.

She makes teaching yoga look effortless and it’s because she’s put in the time. After graduating from Samadhi’s teacher training, she was offered a 7:30 p.m. Thursday class right away. “The universe just opened up. Things started falling in my lap.  I started subbing like crazy and teaching as much as I could to the point where I was working full time and teaching full time,” she says. “It went full on from day one because I just kept saying yes.” She pauses, “I have a tendency to take on too much and burn myself out.”

Nearly a decade after her first Bikram class and a year after her teacher training, Lisa opened up to her own self-adjustment. “I remember distinctly the night I was sitting at an intersection on my way to class and all of a sudden I wasn’t stoked about being in my class. I was worn out from my schedule. I was sitting at a red light and something has to give, and it’s not gonna be yoga.

“And so I put in my notice.”

*

When the student is ready for the teacher, the teacher will appear, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Until this year, Lisa’s teachers were found in the library and on the mat – her yoga books and her students.

“Everybody around me was finding teachers, going to Shiva Rea, Baron Baptiste, Seane Corn, Saul David Raye… I would go to Yoga Journal conferences and study with these teachers, and they’re great, but I would usually leave feeling like a round peg trying to fit into a square hole,” she says. “I was kinda lost for a while – I thought, who’s going to inspire me and be my guru?”

“But there are teachers, I believe, everywhere, which is why I hadn’t found anybody like Rod until recently.” Lisa discovered Rod Stryker through his Aspen, Colo., Energetics of Sequencing workshop. Rod Stryker teaches ParaYoga, “para” meaning “supreme, ancient, highest, the culmination of all effort.”

After Lisa realized Rod’s teacher started the Himalayan Institute (all her favorite books are published by them) she got the feeling that this may be her teacher. “Just the minute I saw him… well I was coming out of the bathroom and he was going into the classroom. It felt natural and meant to be. He said he could tell I was happy to be there because he could see my glow.”

Which just goes to show that finding a teacher doesn’t have to be glamorous. And that, yes, you’ll still know when it’s right.

I attended Lisa’s Sunday class after she returned from the workshop. There was something different in her guidance – it was electric, right from the start. I felt the energy of each pose. I was the energy of each pose. And I didn’t need to be soaked in sweat to do it. “The whole idea behind the workshop was to figure out the energy behind the postures rather than doing them to do them,” Lisa tells me now. “Some yoga teachers think, ‘Let’s make it as hard as possible and when the people fall down we’ve done our job.’ I’d never heard anyone [Rod] talk about asana like this, to make the class as effective as it can be and as transforming as it can be.”

*

It’s only after our get together at Gypsy House, after I get home and begin poring over our chat, that the quote surfaces in my mind:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us… As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others!” —Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love

We are all timid, sometimes, when it comes to sharing our gifts. Lisa readily admits she often needed a nudge in order to take the next step in her yoga journey, or encouragement to play her flute or chant during savasana (staples, now, of her teaching).

“I was always doing [these things] in my world but scared to share them with my students,” she says. “Now, in my public classes, I don’t know if that’s up to me to decide. I want to give it and you decide whether you want to take it or not. If you don’t want to chant to Kali, it shouldn’t stop me from chanting to Kali.”

Self doubt is at the root of withholding. But, as yoga teachers, we withhold because we’re worried that those things that mean so much to us may not mean as much to our students. So we trap them inside until someone gives us permission to shine, or until passion forces them to the surface.

Then, when we do open up and continue to live our lives with open-hearted trust — oh, how the universe provides.

“My dad always said to me, ‘Find what you love and do that,’” says Lisa. “It blows my mind that teaching yoga supports my lifestyle. I am so very grateful.”

At a glimpse

Favorite Sanskrit word: ananda
I became a yoga teacher because I… felt it in my heart.
5 adjectives to describe your class: (I hope it comes across this way!) informative, challenging, fun, cleansing, full
5 adjectives to describe you: focused, fun loving, laidback, interested, adventurous
Pose that makes you feel free: Handstand
Pose that’s challenging: Hanumansana
3 teachers who are important to you: my dad Bill, Rod Stryker, Dr. Lester Miller, the rheumatologist in Santa Cruz I once worked for (Hm, they’re all guys!)
Favorite music to play in class: Anymore it’s ambient music. Music that sets a mood and a tone but that isn’t overpowering or doesn’t become the mood.

Note: This is the first in a series highlighting Denver’s talented yoga teachers who have also inspired my own practice.

About an hour before I taught my Meditation Flow class tonight at Karma Yoga Center, I learned, along with the rest of the world, that Steve Jobs had passed away.

I pulled up my Twitter feed and there it all was. A collective display of digital grief, making all non-Steve Jobs related tweets seem woefully out of place. I couldn’t remember what I had planned for my class theme anymore. The news was too encompassing to shelve it for an hour and 15 minutes.

So I took it with me to class. My students had already heard. And I talked about this quote of his:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Although it was couched in the terms of Mastin Kipp from The Daily Love:

“Steve said once that it is by living with the awareness of our own death that frees us to be ourselves and give our gift to the world.”

And that’s when I did it. I brought up the fact that the rest of us will all meet the same end.

There it was. The raw, naked truth that our beautiful, life-giving prana will one day cease. I paused and the silence was thick.

The yoga class must go on

But here were my students, still looking back at me. Waiting for the hope to come.

We spent the majority of class celebrating the breath and life, and acknowledging that the work we do on our mats is the body’s alchemy for continual healing. For a chance at new life and infinite possibilities that come with living in your genius, as Steve Jobs had done. The word death never made its way back into the practice.

I think that’s why it struck me only after class, after I had driven home and after I had walked in the door and let my dog outside, that it might not have been appropriate to bring up death. After all, I don’t know what my students are going through. Perhaps someone in their life has pancreatic cancer. Perhaps something has recently passed away. Perhaps they, themselves, faced a brush with death.

Who am I, as a yoga teacher, to talk about the yoga mat as a place where “mini deaths” can happen? As a place where the skin sheds and layers unpeel to reveal the person that you always were, and the person you are recreating yourself to be?

Anything goes in yoga class?

But then again, yoga is the essence of life itself. It’s yin and yang. Effort and yield. Dark and light.

Alive and dead.

Yoga is also about connecting in with the collective to understand that in life and death, we really aren’t alone. So being in a yoga class, breathing with everyone else’s breath and settling into Warrior Pose on a night when you feel anything but a Warrior, is revitalizing.

Before class one of my students was telling me how she finds herself being healed by yoga, and that at first she was digging in the topsoil, but now she’s digging down into all the grubs and the roots. Life is messy, as is death. But death seems tidy because many don’t witness it happen. Of those who do witness it, many don’t talk about it.

After class, my student told me she was invigorated. It was the ultimate compliment for a class that mentioned the “d” word. So maybe talking about death wasn’t so inappropriate after all.

What would you have done, or how have you addressed death in yoga class (if at all)? If we can’t accept death while on our yoga mats, then where can we?

Photo: Pete Birkinshaw

From Oct.1 until the 24, I’m participating in The 24 Things, a project by Marylee of Chakras Yoga which I discovered online through my Twitter chat, @omchat. The goal is to practice conscious consumerism by purging one item a day from your home while abstaining from purchasing anything other than the necessities.

Marylee writes, “Consciously letting go and making room for the new creates a sacred space. In that space you can create anything you want for your future.”

This phrase inspired my yoga class theme tonight. Instead of letting go of physical things, I had my students identify something emotional or mental they could clear out. During the practice we focused on hip openers (Warrior II, Pigeon, Malasana, Baddha Konasana) and created some heat with Ujjayi breath to ignite and burn away inner baggage. The hips are like a baggage carousel for unclaimed luggage. If you don’t identify and pluck out the problem, it keeps going round and round.

I’m no stranger to this kind of emotional off-loading now, but I wasn’t always this way when it came to things.

My journey from packrat to purger

I’m the daughter of two Baby Boomers who still have the Depression-era “if it still works, let’s keep it” mentality. This includes such things as tax files from 10 years ago, all of my baby toys and an entire bucket of nails I once collected when our family’s home was under construction. (I still love you, mom and dad.)

Following in their footsteps, as each school year ended and another began, I’d stack my notebooks and homework in a corner of my closet, because, you know, I didn’t know when those math quizzes from 3rd grade would ever come in handy again. Soon, schoolwork overtook my entire closet. Even as a kid the stuff weighed me down.

Sometime during my high school years I trashed the whole pile, keeping only a file folder full of mementos. It felt totally unnatural and counterintuitive, but I did it and I’ve never looked back.

Ultimately, I became a spartan by necessity. I’ve moved 11 times in the past 10 years. That means packing, unpacking and cramming everything I own into less-than 800 square feet apartments sorely lacking in closet space. I learned, quickly, that what I brought in was what I had to eventually take out.

But it wasn’t until earlier this year when I started a real war on clutter. I downloaded Man vs. Debt’s Sell Your Crap and embarked on a 3-month long Craigslist and Amazon.com selling spree, which so far has yielded nearly $800 in cash. That’s some serious space creation.

What creating space is really about

Money’s nice, but it’s not why I keep giving away my things. I’m a chronic organizer. I love streamlined closets and things all lined up in a row. I love the act of gathering up to give away.

When I found out about The 24 Things, I was all, “I’m gonna nail this!” So far, here’s what my roster looks like:

• Oct. 1 – old ski boots, recycled
• Oct. 2 – six pairs of shoes, donated, and a bunch of papers in my junk drawer recycled
• Oct. 3 – huge pile of clothes, some shoes and purses for consignment

As you can see, I’m kind of cheating on the “one thing a day” requirement. My inner overachiever is feeling pretty smug right about now.

Until I realized that the project’s not about what I’m going to gain by giving things away. It’s about the giving itself – the mindfulness of choosing something every day to gift, donate or sell. And the pause button on bringing things back in, so that the space you’ve created can sit and expand and affect everything around it with its absence.

It’s not unlike every time we come to our yoga mats.

It’s one thing to create space and then refill it immediately with something shinier or newer. It’s another to create space and be content with the emptiness. Whether we create space in our bodies or in our homes, the void holds potential. For what? For whatever you want it to be.

How’s that for giving away a pair of shoes? Or, for that matter, spending three minutes in pigeon pose.

Feeling inspired? It’s not too late to start The 24 Things.

Photo: asteegabo