BELLEVUE, Wash. - By the end of their doggie yoga class, most of
the wandering and sniffing participants are passed out on their
mats, in a position their instructor calls the "upward facing belly
pose."
Beans, a majestic 2-year-old Vizsla, however, is ready to play. The
overgrown puppy has tried to relax with his owner, Chantale
Anderson, but once Magnet the black lab heads off to explore the
room, Beans is ready to go.
Mostly, however, both the dogs and the humans on a recent evening
at the Seattle/King County Humane Society seemed relaxed and
focused for about 40 minutes of "doggie yoga."
Leilani the toy poodle is the star of the class, perhaps because
the tiny 11-year-old is too timid to venture off the mat to play
with the big dogs.
Her owner, Suanne Nagata, said afterward that Leilani just loves
being touched.
"I could just feel her relax," she said.
Brenda Bryan, who teaches human yoga as well as the new class for
both dogs and humans at the Humane Society, says the dogs react to
the gentle energy in the room.
"As we get into it, the dogs all kind of calm down," said Bryan,
who developed the poses for the class by working with her own two
dogs Gus, a mixed breed, and Honey, a Shar Pei-Boxer mix and
talking to instructors in other cities like New York, Los Angeles
and Pittsburgh where yoga for dogs and their owners is starting to
catch on.
The question she and the Humane Society get the most from
prospective human students is how do the people and dogs
interact?
In Bryan's class, the humans do traditional yoga poses yes,
including "downward facing dog" while staying in contact
physically with their pets.
Part of the class includes gentle stretching and dog massage,
another specialty of Bryan's, but most of the time the humans
gently use the dogs like yoga props.
In downward facing dog, for example, the humans rest their heads on
their companions, who are relaxing napping? on the mat.
The yoga poses are modified both for the humans of different sizes
and abilities and for the dogs. During class, Bryan reminds the
people not to push their canine partners to perform.
"Don't be too ambitious," she said. "Honor where your dog is and
remember that dogs respond to our energy."
The class was designed to offer a new way for humans to spend time
with their pets.
"This is 80 percent fun," said Eve Holt, director of community
relations for the Seattle Humane Society.
Bryan calls it "partner yoga," because the class encourages both
the human and the dog to increase their awareness of each
other.
"Magnet and I were just in this little bubble," said Emily Keegans
afterward.
She said her dog really loves getting the one-on-one attention he
receives in yoga class and she likes having another opportunity to
both exercise and spend time with her dog.
"I love doing yoga and I'm just really busy. Just to spend time
with him and be with him is great," added Keegans.
She said she was doing dog massage at a Humane Society fundraiser
a dog fashion show when during a conversation with the agency
director she mentioned that she is also a yoga instructor. And the
idea for doggie yoga was born.
"It was really just a marriage of all the things I love," Bryan
said.
She said she hopes the class will open up yoga to a variety of
people and dogs who have never done this kind of exercise
before.
"We've been having a lot of fun with this," said Bryan, adding that
her own dogs rush to the mat as soon as she unrolls it at home,
whether or not she was planning to involve them.
Both the humans and the canines seemed to enjoy themselves before,
during and after a recent doggie class at the Humane Society.
Shadow visited every mat during the class and made a complete
circuit of shoe sniffing toward the end. Beans seemed a lot more
interested in making new friends than relaxing, as his owner
predicted before the class.
"He likes to nap. He is a cuddle bug, but playing is so much more
important," Anderson said.
Nearly every dog in the group took at least one break to sniff a
canine or human or both, but Bryan seemed pleased with how the
class was going and was neither outwardly amused nor flustered when
Honey and Shadow crowded onto the mat with her and Gus.
Although her voice was yoga calm, her words showed she shared the
other humans' amusement.
"Everyone is being so good and the dogs too."
