At a first look, goats and yoga might seem like an unlikely mix. But Carriage House has one event that has their goats bending over backward.

Just a short drive from Elon, Carriage House is a farm and garden Chapel Hill. In between hosting weddings, the Carriage House partners with yoga instructors to host goat yoga.

For their past few goat yoga events, farm owner Brenda Leeper and yoga instructor Lindsay Alexander have been working together. Their yoga events have had 500 people on the waiting list.

“We have people come to the Carriage House from Fayetteville, the other side of Raleigh," Alexander said. "I mean, all over the place. I mean I think we’ve had people come down from Virginia before."

But for Leeper, the event just gives her another excuse to play with her goats.

"It’s fun to have people meet my goats and for my goats to meet new people,” Leeper said.

And Leeper believes goat yoga is actually harder than just plain yoga. 

“The interesting thing about the yoga that happens here is that it’s a little bit harder to go goat yoga in a pasture where it’s not a level ground,” Leeper said, “It kind of takes you out of your comfort zone and I think it helps to make people not take themselves so seriously because you know it’s kind of hard to do a pose when a goat is underneath you.”

Alexander says goat yoga has some benefits over doing yoga in a typical studio.

“I think letting people just be outdoors for an hour of the day there is something really good and invigorating about that,” Alexander said. 

But not everyone is a fan of the idea of goat yoga. 

“You have people in the yoga community who are not fond of goat yoga or other expressions of yoga at all, who think it’s a distraction or a novelty,” Alexander said. 

And according to Alexander, goat yoga does provide some unique challenges.

“They will straight up poop and pee on your mat,” she said. 

But at the end of the day, both Alexander and Leeper agree that it’s worth it.

“I think the best you can hope for for any community activity is just to bring people together,” Alexander said. “To kind of break down barriers to make a space feel accessible and to offer people something that makes them feel joyful and more at peace.” 

Carriage house farms will be hosting their next goat yoga event on Nov. 11.