Mental Health

Latest Yoga Trend: Yoga With Goats

By BC Olvido | Update Date: Dec 28, 2016 02:43 PM EST

Yogis have done some bizarre things in the past while practicing yoga. This practice, which involves goats, may be the most bizarre practice to date.

Albany, Oregon. Yoga involves focusing on breathing, setting an "intention" before every class, and letting the pose come to you instead of the other way around. Doing all of this is said to bring around a feeling of inner peace and relaxation.

In Oregon, yoga practitioners recently decided to take it up a notch. They decided to include live goats roaming around in between their sequences.

Goat Yoga. The idea behind goat yoga first started in Portland in the backyard of yogini Lainey Morse. Some children were partying around with some goats that were used as pets as a kind of self-administered therapy after divorce or illness.

One of the other moms there, yoga instructor Heather Davis, suggested the idea to Morse that maybe they could also use goats as a similar form of self-therapy. They decided to try having a yoga class with goats for both the experience and to see if its benefits were real.

After their story was reported in The Oregonian newspaper, it went viral on the Internet and quickly spread all across the world. Immediately, over 600 people had joined their waiting list to get a slot in their goat yoga classes.

Morse is now pursuing Goat Yoga full time. She believes that this is the reason for its popularity: "I think probably right now everybody is stressed out with politics and everything going on ... this is a story that's a happy distraction."

If you are a yoga practitioner and want to try something new, sign up for one of Morse's Goat Yoga classes. It guarantees to be a new experience and it also offers therapeutic benefits as well.

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