'Dog-<i>asana</i>'
Yoga classes with your dog in tow! Bow wow! Evenings at the Seattle/King County Humane Society have folks coming for yoga sessions accompanied by their pet dogs. These are not very rigorous sessions though, they are just 40-minute fun sessions of 'doggie yoga' for you and for your dog. You get to learn specially designed yoga exercises under a trained instructor and also use your dog as a gentle support when exercising. Besides you can get your dog to do light exercises and also gently massage him. And dogs being dogs, for your pet it is a session of yoga, sniffing, pawing and all other doggy things!
According to Eve Holt, director of community relations for the Seattle Humane Society:
This is 80 percent fun.
Going by the reactions, the pet-owners are a delighted lot. Suanne Nagata, owner of an 11-year-old toy poodle, said that her pet Leilani enjoys being touched:
I could just feel her relax.
Emily Keegans' black labrador Magnet is having a whale of time at the classes. It is just not yoga alone for him, because once classes start he sets off to explore the room along with Beans, a Vizsla. Keegans, who incidentally is a good dog massager and yoga instructor, and one of those who conceived this kind of classes admitted:
Magnet and I were just in this little bubble. I love doing yoga and I'm just really busy. Just to spend time with him and be with him is great. It was really just a marriage of all the things I love.
Beans' owner Chantale Anderson was 'full of beans' when she said:
He likes to nap. He is a cuddle bug, but playing is so much more important.
'Doggie yoga' instructor Brenda Bryan said that she developed the special exercises, one of which goes by the name 'downward facing dog', by working with her pets Gus and Honey, both mixed-breed dogs, and also researching on the exercises with experts from New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. Said she:
As we get into it, the dogs all kind of calm down.
Bryan also takes a lot of pain in modifying the exercises as per the body frame of the owner and also the breed of the dog and its nature. She also takes a lot of care to see that the owners do not push their dogs too hard. She has this to say to her trainees:
Don't be too ambitious. Honor where your dog is and remember that dogs respond to our energy.
'Partner yoga', another name by which she calls this yoga, is believed to increase the bonding between the owner and the pet. She added:
We've been having a lot of fun with this. Everyone is being so good - and the dogs too.
No sooner does she spread the mat to start a yoga session at her home both her dogs rush to accompany her. And in class, during one such session she had two other pets on her mat.
Dog-asana is really fun!
Via: Discovery News
