CORVALLIS, Ore. — Jessie Ryan was ready to move out of her Warrior II pose when she felt a nudge on the back of her leg.
When she turned around, she couldn’t help but laugh when she saw Quincy, a 1-year-old mini-goat, staring back up at her.
It was the moment Ryan had traveled from Portland to Oregon’s mid-valley to experience: the birthplace of a nation-sweeping craze known as goat yoga.
“How can you not connect with this face?” Ryan asked as Quincy bleated back to her. “You’re in the middle of doing a pose, thinking about how terrible everything is, when a goat comes up and kisses you or steps on your fingers and all that stress goes away. It sounds like something a modern-day Lewis Carroll would write.”
Ryan joined 15 other people for one of the first goat yoga classes of the new year at Corvallis’ Hanson Country Inn.
But they aren’t the only ones who have signed up for founder Lainey Morse’s sessions — the waitlist for the class grew to 2,400 people over the winter.
Goat yoga combines a one-hour yoga session with the animal-therapy of social mini-goats that wander around and interact with the class. When Albany’s Morse first combined the words “goat” and “yoga” for a simple event last July, she inadvertently created a media whirlwind. Since then, her life has been anything but simple.
Goat yoga fever
In the last eight months, stories have appeared in hundreds of media outlets around the world, including The Washington Post, Time magazine, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, ESPN, National Geographic, Vogue, BBC and hundreds of blogs.
Last September, the Post’s Karin Brulliard wrote, “Well, it’s about time: Someone has finally launched a yoga class with goats” and noting that when Morse created the class “magic was made.”
Two months later, under the headline “Bring a Yoga Mat and an Open Mind. Goats Are Provided,” New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson wrote, “As you smell that grass on a yoga mat, you realize that you have entered the goats’ world, not the other way around.”
There is now a “Goat Yoga” page on Wikipedia, too.
Even “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon covered the story in a September 2016 opening monologue.
“Apparently, there’s a farm in Oregon that offers a yoga class that you can take with goats roaming around you,” he said. “They even have a special position called the downward facing (soundbite of goat bleating).”
Morse, who lives at Albany’s No Regrets Farm with her 11 Nigerian dwarf goats, had hosted several goat-centered events previously, including Goat Therapy (spending relaxing time with goats) and Goat Happy Hour (spending relaxing time with goats and wine). They were well-attended, locally popular and helped supplement her income. But Morse had no idea goat yoga would hit like it did.
“Nothing prepares you for that; it’s just absolutely mind-blowing” Morse said while preparing for a class at the Hanson Country Inn. “You always hear about something going viral but you don’t know what it means until you experience it. It’s intense. It’s like a roller coaster you can’t get off. It’s the most crazy thing you could ever do.”
The media blitz started last summer after Heather Davis, a yoga instructor at Corvallis’ Live Well Studio, suggested to Morse the farm as a fun place to host a yoga class. To drum up publicity, Morse posted photos and videos on social media featuring Davis doing a yoga pose with one of Morse’s mini-goats on her back.
“I really like yoga and I really like goats. I guess other people do, too,” Davis said. “I told Lainey this felt like the most Oregonian thing ever. But neither of us expected this.”
In less than a day, the photos and videos gathered hundreds of social media “likes” and shares, attracting local and national media attention. And the more media attention the story got, the more calls Morse received for interviews and from people asking to sign up for a session.
“It got to the point where I was doing nothing but answering phone calls,” she said. “I lost 20 pounds when it all started happening.
“Everything was going 1,000 mph,” she said. “I mean, who do you go to for advice when something goes viral? You almost feel lonely because there’s no one to go to when something hits like that.”
