Lavender Towels

“I want lavender towels to be a Yogamour signature!” says Geni Donnelly.

I could feel my body tense. This is not how I teach.

Geni has always handed out towels to her students at the end of her classes. When Tiffany came on, she adopted the responsibility as well. I didn’t have any kind of attachment to it, but it wasn’t in my repertoire. We also had a lot of issues with the workflow with the towels. They often would be thrown in the washer, ran and left to mildew. Of course that cause complaints. It was about two years ago when I was sitting in the rain, under a tent at an event that a lightbulb went off. I stopped by Walmart to buy a second bin. I printed out instructions. “Please place used towels in bin and leave on bottom shelf in fridge.” You see bacteria doesn’t grow until it hits a room temperature. As long as towels stayed cold, they wouldn’t mildew. I would make it my mission to wash and roll them everyday I came in.

I still had no interest or intention in handing them out. Geni would bring up to me occasionally. She never outright told me to hand them out. I would say “if I open the barn door (studio door) it’ll break the seal of the container of the class.” She bought me a mini fridge to store in the teacher closet. It was too small and was sent back. She even went so far as to show up to my class and would hand them out herself. She really wanted this. I really did not want this.

At this time I was dealing with a lot of back issues. My classes tend to have 30 - 35 people regularly and the idea of bending over to hand each student a towel wasn’t appealing. I know what you’re thinking, “just toss it to them!” Can’t do that either. When I was waitressing and extremely busy with a very large party, I slide a pile of straws on the table. I’m only five feet tall and can’t reach that far. The customer scolded me. To him, sliding the straws instead of handing them to him felt disrespectful. It stuck with me for decades, and ever since then I've associated serving people that way with not giving them the dignity they deserve.

These towels really tore me apart. I’m a people pleaser but I also don’t want to be told how to teach my class. Someone suggested I have someone from Seva Squad hand them out. Absolutely not! “Asteya” otherwise known as non stealing. It’s the third Yama of the Eight Limbs of Yoga. There’s no reason a student should be pulled out of their practice regardless if they’re a volunteer or even a teacher at the studio.

I even had a student tell me “the practice would have been perfect if we would have had a lavender towel.” Are you kidding me?! Ugh!!!!!

I texted Geni one night crying over how the towels made me feel. How it pulled me out of my teaching. How it impacted my back. How leaving the room broke the seal of the practice. She didn’t respond.

Why was this such a big deal to me? Why did I keep coming back to it?

As I sat with those questions, I realized it had very little to do with towels.

Somewhere deep down, handing them out made me feel like I had gone from being a respected teacher to feeling like a waitress again. Whether that story was true didn't really matter. It was the story I was telling myself.

I traveled to Bethesda for a class at Purefire. It’s a hot studio and it must have been 105 degrees. When I was in savasana all I could think was “I wish I had a fucking lavender towel!”

Now everyone of my students gets a lavender towel. I no longer feel like a waitress. I feel like their teacher serving them.