This week I had the pleasure of attending my first cat yoga class at a local Cat Shelter in Chicago called the Catcade. If you don’t believe that cat yoga a thing, believe it now! It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. I mean, there’s goat yoga out there too.
People are even doing yoga on paddle boards in Lake Washington (Seattle area) where you have a very strong reason not to fall in, the water pretty much never warms up.
Anyway, I digress, back to cat yoga! The general premise of cat yoga is that you do yoga and you teach your cat to imitate the poses along with you. They really don’t like downward dog though…Just kidding!
You do the yoga. The cats wander freely during class and provide mountains of entertainment. The goal for you is to have fun and stretch out. The goal for the cats is to show how adorable they are and convince you to adopt them from the shelter.
It is quite the genius plan if you ask me. Others agree, they’ve logged over 252 adoptions since August of 2017!
The Warm Up
The class I attended had 8 students, the teacher, and maybe 15 felines running around the room. Each student was armed with a provided yoga mat (which became a cat scratching pad) and a small plastic treat box.
You could use the treats as you saw fit to entice the cats. The cats of course know what’s in the little boxes and they bat them all over the place hoping you’ll open them up and share.
If at any time you felt “catless” a simple shake of the box brought a cat running to your side.
You can image that many yoga poses can and do provide great opportunities for cats to jump on you or get right in your way. And jump on you and get right in the way they did!
The very first table pose someone did in our class resulted in a feline hopping right onto her back and promptly laying down for a nap. The rest of the students were extremely jealous. Let’s be honest, that’s what we all wanted to happen to us.
I wasn’t fortunate enough to get a cat to jump on me, at first I thought perhaps I just smelled bad. But persistence prevailed and they spent plenty of time with me. Some even tried to imitate me as you can see above. That was me when I got tired…
My first downward dog resulted in 3 cats all walking under me and deciding they’d lay there just to see what I’d do. “Hold the pose human.” is what their expressions said as my arms began to quiver.
My warrior poses were also critiqued by the judgmental eyes of a cute little buff (the color, not the physique) domestic short hair that couldn’t have been more than a year old. He clearly saw that my hips weren’t properly aligned and was chastising me mentally.
Yoga poses put us humans in a lot of precarious positions and we cat lovers know that our feline friends absolutely love to explore new areas. They love subtle changes in their environment, it keeps them curious.
Nine people doing yoga in a small room basically ensured they had a constant supply of new places to hide and explore. Every change in pose caused the cats to scamper under your feet or through the new tunnel created by your arms and legs.
The True Excitement of Cat Yoga
The class itself would have been exciting enough for me just because there were 15 cats in the room, but there was additional fun in store. The room the yoga takes place in has large front windows exposed to a busy sidewalk. A constant train of dogs made their way past the windows throughout class time, normally with no problem at all.
One particular dog however seemed to cause quite the predicament in passing. First a cat began hissing at the window. A chain reaction quickly occurred and what started as a little hissing immediately exploded into a full scale cat stampede toward the window.
Cat tails were fluffed to their fullest and lots of wrestling matches and games of cat tag broke out through the human obstacle course of yoga poses.
Stacked up furniture was knocked over (zero injuries to cats or people) and humans quickly jumped out of the way mid pose to avoid head on cat collisions!
It settled down quite quickly, a minute at most. The cats went back to their preferred humans looking for treats or took it easy on the arcade games. The humans laughed it off and finished off the rest of the class without another event.
The Cool Down Period
Wrapping the class up was the highlight. And no, not because I’m out of shape and my arms were tired!
During the cool down phase the instructor shook a huge jar of cat treats and placed a few on the chest or stomach of each individual student. You could of course opt out if desired, but who would want to?!
If you hadn’t had luck getting cats to hang out with you during class this certainly solved that problem. I had no less than 5 cats climbing on me trying to get to the treats, they were surprisingly well behaved!
Some cats even climbed on top of students and fell asleep after chowing their treats down. Talk about a great way to wrap a class up.
As an added bonus we were also able to stick around for another 30 minutes and hang out with the cats after yoga finished.
This gave us more time to get to know the cats and let the staff know if we’d developed an interest in a cat and wanted to adopt.
So what’s my overall take? Would I do it again?
If you couldn’t already tell, I had an absolute blast at cat yoga. I would do it again in a heartbeat. But full disclosure, I wouldn’t do it in place of a traditional yoga class. I’d instead pursue this as an alternative activity.
It was a great class and it takes a special kind of teacher to pick up a cat in one hand mid pose and maintain balance. My point is that if you’re primarily interested in yoga you’ll probably want to attend a cat free yoga class that doesn’t have the same level of distraction.
If however, like a cat, you are curious and want to try new things then you’re going to love cat yoga. I will definitely be back for another round.
Not only does it help a non-profit take care of cats that haven’t yet made it to their forever home, it gives me a cat fix above and beyond that of my cats at home!
If you’re interested in cat yoga check out these resources for locations in major cities across America:
- Chicago: Cat Yoga at the Catcade
- New York: The Meow Parlour Cat Yoga
- San Francisco: The Kittea Café Cat Yoga
- Seattle: The Seattle Meowtropolitan
You can check out this short video below I took of pre-yoga class and post-yoga class where the cats were having a great time exploring the yoga mats and wrestling.
Namaste and have a wonderful day!
About the Author
Craig Rutkowske is the founder and author of the cat blog StuffCatsWant.com. StuffCatsWant provides high quality product reviews about all sorts of cat products and gives advice on general cat care. Craig has owned numerous cats, fostered even more cats and is a long time volunteer at PAWS Chicago.
