No kidding: it’s time to perform a downward-facing goat
UNITED STATES: For millennia, holy men have taught that yoga can help to liberate the body from suffering and raise the conscious mind towards enlightenment.
In the past few months, American practitioners of this ancient art have made another discovery. You may feel even closer to recognising the mutability of all living things, and achieving transcendence, if you do the exercises while being harassed by a goat.
Goat Yoga is skittering across the heartlands of America. It has arrived in Columbus, Ohio, and a city on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, says Lainey Morse, 45, a goat keeper from Oregon.
Yoga teachers have contacted her from all over the country. In her notebook, she said, ‘‘I have five pages full of people I will be contacting to see if they want to purchase the licensing’’.
Morse is the Siddartha of the goat yoga movement. Last year, during what she said was the worst year of her life, she got divorced and had a chronic illness diagnosed. She worked in marketing and ‘‘would come home from work every day and go out in the field and spend time with my goats’’, she said.
Her home is a farm in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. She had always wanted goats and got Ansel and Adams not long after moving there. ‘‘It was impossible to be sad or depressed when you have baby goats jumping around you,’’ she said. ‘‘I started inviting people round who were stressed from their jobs.’’
One guest asked if she could hold a children’s birthday party there. ‘‘One of the mums at the party was a yoga instructor,’’ Morse said. ‘‘She said, ‘Will you let me do a yoga session here?’. I said, ‘The goats are going to be all over the people, you know that right?’. She was like, ‘Cool’.’’
Morse sent pictures of the first goat yoga session to Modern Farmer magazine. Thus it began.
Practitioners insist it is very relaxing. Though some see goats as curmudgeonly creatures that will eat your sock, and possibly your foot, Morse says they are helpful yoga partners.
A rival practice sprang up in Arizona. A video of a goat trotting across the stomachs of pupils performing backbends helped to spread the craze.
In Texas, David Mote, a public recreation co-ordinator in the city of Grapevine, Texas, thought ‘‘this is something we need to do’’. The first class was heavily oversubscribed, according to the Dallas Star-Telegram.
Morse trademarked the name and now has a clothing line. ‘‘My dream is to create a brand out of it. Kind of like Hello Kitty.’’
The Times.