How goat yoga made the leap across the Atlantic to a field near you
Hands are getting stamped on, ears nibbled and hair pulled. My yoga mat, the place where I usually find calm and balance in my manic day-to-day life has become toxic - invaded by four-legged eating machines hell-bent on destruction. Try a balanced tabletop pose; they butt you over. Sit cross-legged, with hands in the jnana mudra position and they’ll bite your little fingers.
Oh, how I laughed when videos of goat yoga in the US started circulating on the internet back in 2016. Another attention-grabbing novelty trend to file alongside doga (dog yoga, of course) and beer yoga, I thought.
More fool me. Goat yoga has got legs. So much so, that it’s leapt over the Atlantic and ontoCountryfile segments and is even a storyline in theArchers. Only last week, English actress, Kate Beckinsale, spent her 45th birthday doing yoga with a pygmy goat.
The Hollywood star posted a picture of herself on Instagram, performing a perfect downward dog with a pygmy goat balanced on her pelvis - presumably as a reminder to keep drawing her tailbone up. Because I can’t imagine any other serious benefit to trying to practice yoga with the threat of a goat doing its business on your back.
Yoga is, in the words of the 2nd-century BCE sage, Patanjali, “chitta vritti nirodha” - a Sanskrit phrase that roughly translates as “stopping the thoughts of the mind.” By switching off, we can move toward self-realisation. While Patanjali clearly couldn’t have foreseen the goat yoga (or goga) trend, he would probably have agreed it was an obstacle to reaching enlightenment.
Yet, goga teachers believe there are some real benefits to be had.
Lainey Morse, the woman who kick-started the craze on her farm in Oregon, started practicing yoga after being diagnosed with Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that causes extreme fatigue, and affects the lungs and brain. Her goats helped get her through it. “It’s really hard to be sad and depressed when you have baby goats jumping around you,” she has said.
Wanting to share the benefits, she enlisted yoga teacher Heather Davis and, before she knew it, had a 500 person waiting list.
Animal therapy has been recorded as helping to decrease blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as feelings of loneliness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Skylark Farm, near Bawdsey in Suffolk, goat farmer Emma Aldous already knew how comforting goats could be. So when friends kept sending her videos of Morse’s goat yoga, she agreed to give it a go - contacting friend and local yoga teacher, Diana Malone, to teach the class. Now they’re on their second season, with no intention of stopping. For Malone it’s no gimmick, but a valid form of therapy.
The goats, a mixture of Boer and Anglo-Nubian, were born in March and are, by now, a little big to successfully balance on my back. But, says Aldous, “they love human interaction”. Nor are they mere circus animals, as each is destined to either be milked or meat.
Skylark isn’t the only UK goga destination. Mucky Bucket in Hampshire run monthly classes with pygmy goats. While Simply Soulful Yoga offers classes with Dartington Dairy on the Dartington Estate in Devon, where you can get in touch with your “inner kid”.
Arriving for Skylark’s weekly class in deepest Suffolk, the goats are already behaving like boisterous teenagers, butting heads and chewing anything that dangles their way.
I’m one of 15 students, some old hands at yoga, others completely new to the practice and drawn in by the animals.
University student Tigerlily, 21, heard about the class through her mum. “But I’ve also seen it online,” she says. “I wanted to try it because yoga is good for connecting the mind and body.”
I think back to my first yoga class in 2004; 50 of us packed into my university student’s union for a fiver. What I discovered that day - the application of concentration (dharana), withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara), and glorious collapse into final relaxation (shavasana) - has had me hooked ever since.
Might that happen for these newbies tonight?
Malone concedes that the goats are the stars of the show here and “the yoga is secondary”, but she’s a serious practitioner and hopes that, even though people are encouraged to do a lot of petting, they’ll feel some of the benefits of her gentle breath-led movement, too.
Rolling out our mats (by now pre-chewed) in the al fresco paddock, immediately causes the goats to buckeroo and careen into the foam playfully.
After much excitement, on both the goats and attendees part, we settle down.
The brave close their eyes. Malone instructs us to put our hands on the ground, either side of our hips. Meanwhile, the goats roam around in a pack, descending on food that is thrown down near our mats. Despite their bleats and squeals, Malone powers on, quietly guiding us through goat-interrupted movements.
We stay low to the ground, all the better for the goats to get up close and personal. There are shrieks as one relieves itself on a mat. It won’t be the last such instance.
As a somewhat serious yogi, I’m conflicted. Do I sit about petting the goats, or focus on the yoga?
According to the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred yogic text: “Those established in self-realisation control their senses, instead of letting their senses control them.” So as cute as they are, my challenge is to ignore them completely. On cue, a goat sneezes three times, in my face.
When Malone instructs us to flip our downward dogs into wild thing pose, I suddenly find one animal pushing up underneath to give me a bonus hip lift. Others have given up entirely and are just sitting looking at the scene with bemusement.
The class ends seated; lying down is just asking for trouble.
Afterwards, I’m desperate for a shower; not because I’ve worked up any kind of sweat, but because I smell more than a little bit goaty and my hair has been licked wet.
It has been chaos, but fun. Even better, we’ve been outside in the fresh air for more than an hour and not a single person has reached for their phone for more than an hour.
Goga might not be one for purists, but does it matter if everyone is smiling and happy? Including Tigerlily: “I was definitely in a better mood afterwards,” she says. “I’m considering joining a normal yoga class now”.
I hope she does. Because as fun as goga is, it’s definitely acting the goat compared to the real thing.
