What the heck are high-vibe fabrics?

It’s all about infusing your practice with love and intention…and the sacred language of yoga and meditation.

One of the most unique things about HUM is the beautiful fabric we use to make our meditation cushions and yoga bolsters.  Not only is it 100% certified organic cotton to uphold our commitment to be as eco-responsible as possible, it’s also 100% custom designed. There’s absolutely nothing like it anywhere else!

In fact, these are not just fabrics…they have been designed specifically to support your yoga and meditation journey, to resonate along with you while you practice.  We call them “high-vibe” fabrics because they are an infusion of love and the highest intentions.

The creation of these fabrics was an 18 month project (and like everything else on this HUM journey required a lot of patience and perseverance!).  It began as a crazy idea and took various attempts to develop the special mandalas and Sanskrit “hum” mantra motifs.  I then discovered what it meant to work with a “surface designer” to integrate the motifs into a beautiful and detailed pattern.  Finally, another big challenge was finding the right fabric printer (I got lucky and found an amazing team in the US) and working with them to test the prints and colours over and over to get them just exactly right.

This past spring I did a reprint of my 14 different fabrics.  And from a colour perspective it was almost like starting all over again…because of the intricacy of my patterns, we needed to switch to a different printing machine and colour system.  Luckily, the fabulous people who print my fabrics have an immense amount of patience with my eagle eye for colour and detail.  They worked really hard, sent over dozens of colour swatches and ensured that my designs were beautifully printed.

True, it would have been so much easier (and immensely cheaper) to pick fabrics off the shelf, but they would never have had the soul and symbolism that the HUM fabrics have, inspired by the ancient sources of yoga and meditation. And this makes all the difference.

The HUM patterns have meaning and purpose, they have been specifically designed to resonate along with you and support you as you practice: Mandala, Mantra, Medallion and Jali.  There is also nothing random here.  There is a definite Purpose Behind the Patterns.  We think about our patterning as resonance—it’s vibrational. It plays out its story as a tiering, layering patterning on pattern, like a message inside a message, a story inside a story.  Resonating along with you as you practice.

The colours I chose also have a purpose. I’ve studied and worked with colour all my life. So when it came to creating the colours for my organic fabrics, I chose with intention, inspired by my dreams of the sources of yoga and meditation...by my travels and my dreams of Tibet.  Red, orange, grey, natural, indigo, turquoise… Each colour has a symbolic meaning, like an offering to you, to support your practice. Each HUM colour has a soul. Learn more about The Stories and Symbolism of the HUM Colours.

Making the yoga bolsters and meditation cushions is another hugely important part of the process.

For this summer’s production, every single piece was hand cut (mostly by perfectionist-me, but with help from friends). That’s a couple of thousand individual pieces! Originally, I had all the fabric cut digitally. But no matter how carefully we plotted it in the cutting program, fabric moves and the motifs were off centre. And to me, that creates disharmony which doesn't support our practice. I’ve found that the only way to make sure that the patterns and motifs are perfectly centred in the finished pieces is to cut the fabric by hand. It’s a lot of work, but I think it’s worth it. It’s a small and subtle thing that makes a big difference to your beautiful, peaceful and harmonious home practice.

 
Each meditation cushion and yoga bolster is mindfully made by a sewing studio here in Canada.  Since we’ve been working together, my sewing ladies have absolutely perfected all the details of each piece, from the signature red top stitching on the handles to the perfectly placement of the golden amulet and the elegance and perfection of the invisible zippers.  

There’s truly NO PLACE LIKE HUM for your home yoga and meditation practice!