With soothing Enya tunes playing in the background, Marnie Pomeroy gracefully goes through “downward facing dog,” a classic yoga posture that mimics the natural stretch dogs take every time they get up.
Pomeroy is not doing the exercises alone. To varying degrees her yoga partner, Hailey, joins in the breathing and stretching exercises.
Pomeroy rocks with Hailey in her arms. She uses Hailey as a yoga prop to move through her position. Sometimes, Hailey takes a break, lying on the exercise mat.
Hailey is a special yoga partner: She’s Pomeroy’s dog, a shepherd mix.
The twosome is among a dozen other human-dog teams attending a free monthly Paws & Flow “doggie yoga” class at the Lakeshore Athletic Club at the Illinois Center in Chicago.
Club general manager Roberta Duguid, who has a half dozen rescue dogs, and exercise instructor Becky Solomon, who brings her littermate Chihuahuas to class, developed the class three years ago.
“We were looking for a way to help dogs socialize with each other and to encourage interactions between busy owners and their dogs. We thought we’d do it once. But it was such a huge hit that we hold doggie yoga every month,” Duguid said.
Solomon, an exercise instructor for eighteen years, said, “I was always into dog training; I just kind of made it up myself.”
Doga Catching On
The idea has been spreading around the country. Classes, sometimes called “doga,” rhyming with yoga, are being held in New York, California and elsewhere around the country.
There’s the book Doga: Yoga For Dogs by Jennifer Brilliant and William Berloni. And the Bodhi Store in Venice, Calif., and online at bodhitoys.com, offers toys for yogi doggies, such as the “Om ball,” which when bounced plays a recording of the om chant recorded by yogi Bhagavan Das.
Solomon said dogs can’t really do yoga, other than the downward and upward dog. But she says that the goal is to give them some exercise and to socialize. She said owners also learn how to relax their dogs with massages.
