Source: http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/07/i-did-ca...

“I like to start with Cat Pose for this class,” says Amy Apgar, a Prana Power Yoga teacher who’s sitting in front of a ten-person yoga class at Meow Parlour, a “cat café” on the Lower East Side. Though the space is typically used for people to socialize with adoptable cats while chomping on cat-face macarons, Meow Parlour shuts down for an hour and a half every Tuesday for some cat-themed exercise.

Apgar is appropriately flanked by two cats: one who’s sleeping in a board-game box above her head, and another who sits in a cubby beside her, eyeing its human prey. Today’s class is all women, because — and I mean this as a sincere compliment to us women — there are very few men who would pay money for the privilege of exercising in the vicinity of cats. As a proud cat lady, I’m situated among these fearless femmes, pretending the room doesn’t have the faint smell of a giant litter box.

Yes, cat yoga might seem absurd when you consider it’s something you could do at home, with your own cat and your YouTube yoga videos, for free. But you don’t go to cat yoga because your regular exercise class was overbooked. You go because it’s a unique experience, and will probably be a funny story to tell later on, and because when you mention you went your friends will say, “But do the cats, like ... do the yoga with you?” Or, in the case of one woman who attended, “You’re doing yoga with cats?