Meghan Daum
The Blessings of the Goat Yoga Revolution
I tried it and I kinda loved it
The first rule of goat yoga is you do not talk about goat yoga. It’s too embarrassing. What does it say about you that you paid $30 to take a one-hour vinyasa flow class in which small goats climb on your back and run through your legs? What does it say about our world that on a Sunday morning you can drive to an acting studio on a Hollywood side street and pack in with dozens of other people doing sun salutations while farm animals dart — and occasionally defecate — between your legs and on your feet?
Is it that contemporary urbanites long for a connection with nature? Is it that the viral video genre known as “ interspecies interactions” (think of a puppy and a piglet cavorting in an animal sanctuary or of Koko the Gorilla caring for kittens) is even better in real life? Or is it that yoga has become so commonplace that it takes livestock to spice things up?
For me, it’s all of the above, especially the last one, since I’m in that apparently tiny minority of people who actively dislike yoga. I find even a warrior pose so difficult as to be actually stress-inducing. (I’ve been told that the difficulty is a result of being hyperflexible, which suggests that maybe I don’t need it at all.) In any case, during a recent trip to…
