William & Mary schedules Doga with Guinness in campus wellness week

William & Mary put FitWell Pop-Up: Doga with Guinness on the April 24 calendar as a 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. class in Studio A at McLeod Tyler Wellness Center, and the draw was not just yoga. The session paired yoga therapist Patti DeBlass with Guinness, her certified therapy dog, giving the class a calm, hands-on wellness angle that felt more therapeutic than novelty.

The listing sat inside a tightly packed April lineup that made campus wellness look deliberate rather than scattered. Pet Therapy with Norman ran April 22 from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the lobby of McLeod Tyler Wellness Center, Yoga for Better Sleep followed on April 23, and Doga with Guinness closed the sequence the next morning. Put together, the three events read like a compact stress-relief circuit, with dogs anchoring two of the three stops.

DeBlass brings the kind of credentials that make the doga format feel built into William & Mary’s wellness culture instead of borrowed from a trend cycle. Her health and wellness profile says she is certified in Functional Yoga Therapy and has more than 8,000 hours of training and teaching. She also co-directs Shanti Garudasana Yoga School and serves as an adjunct professor at William & Mary, teaching Sound Wellness and Yoga. That background helps explain why the university keeps putting her name on specialized programming that blends movement, breath and nervous-system reset.

For first-timers, the practical part of the class was straightforward. William & Mary said participants needed a FitWell membership to sign up for FitWell classes, and full-time students could register for a free annual FitWell membership. A past Doga listing from August 28, 2024, added that registration opened 48 hours in advance, sign-up was available through the W&M Wellness app or online, waivers were required, and nonmembers could buy a drop-in class pass for $5.

That setup makes the class easy to sample without a big commitment, which may be the point. William & Mary’s FitWell classes run across Bee McLeod Recreation Center, McLeod Tyler Wellness Center and Briggs Amphitheatre at Lake Matoaka, with yoga, meditation, Pilates, barre, cycling and other wellness options already on the menu. Doga with Guinness simply sharpened the pitch: a low-pressure yoga flow, a certified therapy dog in the room, and a campus wellness week that treated canine comfort as part of the routine.