I practiced sheepskin yoga

Never Done: I did sheepskin yoga

My friends David and Pamela raise sheep. Not just sheep, but they have a farm with chickens, peacocks, and wonderful mutt named Tetley. They used to have the best donkey in the world, named Norman, but he died from injuries inflicted by a breeding ram. Over the years I've grown to know and love these animals -- which I had plenty of opportunity to do because they live just 1/4 mile down the road where I grew up, and where my parents lived out their days.

Last year I got to help castrate and dock and ear tag the lambs, and then this year I wish I hadn't already done that so I could do it for the first time and write about it. This year they decided not to breed their sheep, but they had a couple miraculous conceptions anyway, which means that we didn't do a great job castrating the lambs last year. It was, by the way, elastration, not castration, and my job was to hold the lambs while David did the hard part. What a fake-out for the lambs. I picked them up, and I rubbed between their ears, and I treated them real nice, and then David snapped a rubber band around their tail, or their balls, and then once they were used to that, he tagged their ears. Each of them reacted similarly -- I put them down and they were stunned, and staggered around for about 30 seconds to a minute, and then they found their mother and started to suckle. All except the two little orphans, who were bottle fed for a couple weeks until they could eat enough grass and other food to keep themselves healthy and nourished.

I'm going into all this detail to explain that I had a relationship with these lambs, as well as with their moms. And so when I went to visit David and Pam and some sheepskins arrived from the tanner, they weren't just any old sheepskins, they were the sheepskins of sheep I had known. I've been saying for years that I want to buy a sheepskin. My dad had a little one next to his bed, which he stood on when he woke up in the morning. When these arrived, and I happened to be staying at their house for the weekend, I realized it was the chance I'd been waiting for. I chose the biggest, softest sheepskin -- so big that I can lie down on it, just a little curled up, and fit entirely. It turns out that it's not creepy to be enveloped in the wool of a sheep I once knew; instead it feels connected and comforting.

I brought it home to New York, and I put it near my bed, like my dad did. But when I woke up, I didn't just want to stand on it -- I wanted to lie down on it again, and feel connected to the sheep. I did that for a couple days, and then very naturally I started to stretch, and before I knew it I was doing cat cow, and before I knew it even more, I had invented sheepskin yoga. Well, maybe I didn't invent it. Unless we don't define invention in terms of who was the first, but instead in terms of did we innovate it ourselves. I mean, it's not like I'm saying it didn't exist in the world before I came up with it -- just that it didn't exist in my world before I came up with it. Whatever. It's wonderful. There is nothing like child's pose with your nose sticking into soft sheepswool, rather than sticking into a smelly yoga mat. And what better way to stay connected to other beings -- which I think is an essential part of yoga -- than to be enveloped by one. Namaste. (The spirit in me respects the spirit in you.)