Yoga Pets

Yoga Pets
By Mehtab, Founder YOGA YOGA

According to a 2007 Harris Poll, 69% of pet owners sleep with their pets and 18% of them dress them in some type of clothing. Our own internal Yoga Yoga polling found that nearly 80% of yoga students regularly practice yoga with their pets at home, while a much smaller percentage (less than 5%) have actually dressed them in any sort of yoga clothes.

So what do your pets have to do with yoga (other than the downward dog or cat-cow)? Well, a lot more than you might think…

My teacher Yogi Bhajan had a ranch in New Mexico that was the home to many animals that his students would give him. He loved horses and also had a good collection of goats, geese and even a pair of miniature deer that he donated to the Austin Zoo a few years back.

Wherever he lived, he seemed to attract a dog or cat or two that took up residence in the ashram and welcomed visitors. One small white cat in particular showed up at his door one day and made herself at home around the entryway where everyone left their shoes. Unerringly, she always took her nap atop the shoes of the most revered or spiritual visitor in the ashram. She always seemed to know which pair of shoes among the many at the door belonged to the person of honor and it was her privilege to keep them warm until the guest left.

On his daily walks along the roads of rural New Mexico, Yogi Bhajan would encounter neighborhood dogs that time and time again would bark and bark and bark -- but he never said anything to them. "Why don't you tell them to shut up or go away?" one of his students asked him as they walked together. "They didn't listen to their spiritual teacher last lifetime," he said, "so why should they listen to me now?"

He once explained that pets are like servants who served us in previous lives. "Now it is our turn to serve them," he said. Indeed, in Vedic Astrology, the same house that rules servants also rules the pets in our lives and in that observation is the reason that pets and yoga have something in common.

Pets teach us to serve. If you harbor any doubts about that, you must have had a very unusual non-demanding cat or dog. There is a caring and giving and service in the relationship with a pet that comes from the same heart centered compassion for something outside ourselves that yoga attempts to teach us.

Pets teach us that love is more powerful than fear. Even when abused, a dog will protect its master. Even when neglected, a cat remains near its home and owner. Pets can only control through their love and in the giving and receiving of affection. They have nothing else to offer, and just like the final practices of yoga, all fear leaves and only love remains.

Pets teach us about the transient nature of reality. They live in the present moment, like perfect yogis, without harboring resentments about the past or worries about the future.

Pets teach us to die. We outlive them and we mourn them but look at the yogic lesson they give us through their death. They go gracefully. They do not create suffering for those they leave behind. They do not cling to life, for like good yogis, they practice "aparigraha," the detachment from even the most precious gift of life that creates our bondage.Pets teach us about the universality of life, that all is one. As we drop our separation caused by gender, class, religion, and race, it is our pets that teach us the final separation we must surrender - the separation between the species, the artificial divisions we make between living things based upon the similarities and differences to ourselves. The care and compassion we can extend from our own species to our pets is the first step toward realizing that all life is one. Why is one life form less than another? Why do we separate ourselves through our imagined self-importance? If we can love at least one species different from ourselves, perhaps we can extend that to all of life and all creation, to the realization that the practice of Yoga holds, that all is Union.

And so our pets should be doing yoga with us because they have much to teach us about its ultimate practice and realization. There is no accident that they are with you for you have karma to share. Give them your love, your compassion, your service, just as you would all living things, and learn the lessons they bring you this lifetime.

Just don't dress them up in yoga shorts or name them after a Hindu god for goodness sakes. After all, they are just pets.