For my birthday, my oldest daughter, Sherri, signed me up for a Goat Yoga class. At first, I thought she said she had signed me up for “boat yoga”. I told her that I had taken yoga classes a couple of times on a ship, once in Alaska and once in Mexico with UnCruise Adventures. “Yoga is quite challenging for someone my age – even more so on a moving boat,” I said. “ Let’s do it! Where’s the lake?”
She laughed, “I said GOAT yoga – not boat yoga.”
I didn’t know there was such a thing. But seeing as I like animals and I need exercise, I agreed to give it a try. I didn’t really know what to expect but after going through the class, I came away a big fan. Have you ever heard of Goat Yoga? Add it to your Bucket List. Here are five reasons why you should experience goat yoga if you ever get the chance.
1. Goats are a metaphor for life
While you participate in the class, the goats are free to do whatever they want to do. They may climb on your back, lay down beside you, or pay no attention to you whatsoever. They make the yoga a bit more challenging. Our goat yoga instructor and owner of Goat Yoga Texas, Kimberly Brooke, explained that the goats are a metaphor for life’s obstacles. While doing yoga, we can’t know or help what the goats decide to do and we just work around them as best as we can. The same is true for the various obstacles we all face in our everyday lives.
With Goat Yoga Texas owner and instructor, Kimberly Brooke
2. Goats give great massages
The particular breeds of goats used in my goat yoga class are Nigerian Dwarves and Nigerian Pygmy mixes. They only weigh between 25 and 50 lbs and feel really good when they walk on your back. It’s like getting a massage!
3. Your level of expertise doesn’t matter
Being the oldest person in my class and the only male, I admit to being a bit self-conscious and apprehensive. There was no way I would be able to perform as well as the girls who wore official looking yoga gear and brought their own yoga mats. I felt like I do whenever I go bowling with someone who brings their own bowling ball or play pool with someone who has a case with their own pool cue. I just knew that I’d stick out like a sore thumb. Fortunately, no one paid any attention to me as the goats got all of the attention.
4. Goats are helpful
To me, yoga is about stretching, meditating, controlled breathing, and focusing. As someone with ADD, I’ve always had extra difficulty with focus and meditation whenever I’d participate in yoga. Oddly enough I found the goats to be extremely helpful in those areas as I could focus on whatever they were doing without my mind racing in 100 different directions as it normally would.
5. Goat poop won’t hurt you
Goats are animals. Animals poop. One girl in our class had two different goats poop on her. She survived. Goat poop won’t hurt you if you don’t eat it. Since goat poop is very similar to rabbit pellets – small, round, and dry, she was able to simply brush it off her shirt. You couldn’t even tell she had been pooped on either time. Kimberly says that poop happens and refers to it as being blessed by the goats. Blessing or not, I was still hoping that the goat on my back would trade places with one of the goats that pooped on the girl’s back since it would be more likely that they wouldn’t need to go again.
Now that I’ve experienced goat yoga, I may find it difficult to do yoga any other way! Here are a few other photos from the class including a bonus shot of my granddaughter, Julianne, who loved playing with the goats after the class.
