I first noticed it when I nicked my finger making dinner. My blood had a pink undertone instead of the usual rusty one. Maybe this is due to drinking some three litres of liquid a day for months and months now. Or maybe it is the sweating, removing all those vague metabolic end products. In any case, it may explain the pale yoga-lily pink of my skin.

My sweat is cleaner too. I know this many ways. When it drips into my mouth during the various inversions, I taste no salt. When I responsibly air out my mat right after class, it dries with no stink.

Of course, this is my new mat, purchased after more than two years of nearly daily practice. My mat from those years reeked, no matter how many rounds in the washing machine and wipe-downs with vinegar and rosemary oil. During those first two years on that mat, I schvitzed out a lifetime’s worth of biochemical trash from my skin, fat, and blood. That backlog gone, my sweat is fairly clean. “Distilled,” is the adjective one teacher used to describe the fresh sweat of people who practice intensively, as if the yoga practice purifies the body, refining it, like an extract from a lush flower, or moonshine whiskey.

The very texture of my skin has changed. A Jamaican friend of mine attributes that to the coconut water I drink endlessly, which may be so. All I know is that my skin is less papery, more plush, as if cashmere has been woven into my cells. It is more dense somehow, and yet I can see into the density, just the same way you can see into a good pearl.

Namaste,
Yoga Lily