There’s a question that comes up almost always around week two of our 200+Hour Yoga Leadership Training:
“All this de-stressing and finding ease in my life is so wonderful. Do I need anything else for my health, for my everything, aside from yoga and tai chi? Should I drop running, quit the gym, and change my job?”
If your instinct is you’d rather not give up everything you love, it would be nice to improve not abandon your work, and life is really a bit bigger than just studying yoga . . . then your instinct is probably right.
Strala as a philosophy and practice for moving well in your life isn’t limited to yoga or tai chi. Yoga, tai chi, and qigong give us some simple, uncomplicated movements for practice. It’s easier to see our old habits here, when things are simple. We get to see where we are using stress and struggle as our strategy for moving through life. And it’s also easier to create good new habits here, to replace stress and struggle with some harmony, gracefulness, connection through our whole body.
We aren’t likely to learn how to climb K2 if we’re dropped by helicopter on a vertical wall at 7,000 meters. We begin learning to move well, along with the techniques and forms we need to accomplish very big things, in a much simpler place. From this practice, we have something useful when things are harder, more complicated. If we begin this practice in the middle of great challenge, it’s more difficult, and makes it more likely that we’ll use our old strategies for challenge, more stress and struggle.
If this practice gets limited to just our yoga time, our tai chi time, this isn’t so useful. Life is bigger than this.
And probably if it seems limited this way, it isn’t really there anyway. It’s maybe more just pretending to be easy, hiding the stress, in these practices.
Because how we move is how we are. It’s in our wiring. So what we have in one place will be reflected, repeated, in every place.
How we practice yoga or tai chi is pretty much the same as how we do everything else. So if we want to change something, if we want some harmony, connection, and grace in how we move through our lives – and not so much stress and struggle – it takes going back to very simple, and having a structure for change, a way to practice something new. Our principles of movement, used within a yoga or tai chi practice, give us this structure to see our selves, where we are, and to make some good change.
And from here, go big. Run uphill for 20 miles with half your body resting in every step. Use more breath than muscle as your source of power in high intensity training. Take the Haute Route like it’s a walk in the park. Change how you work, walk, climb stairs, open doors, speak, and connect. You’ll change everything, changing you.
A long way of saying, practice simple, and practice everywhere.
– by Mike
About Strala Yoga Training
Strala combines the movement and healing wisdom of tai chi with the form vocabularies of yoga, tai chi, qigong, and Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine, to help people release stress, move easily through challenge, and live radiantly inspiring lives.
It begins with a mindset, that says our best way to get where we’re going is to feel good along the way. It also works miracles for whole health, helping us to find ease in our bodies and minds, and create the right conditions both for healing and optimal performance.
In our Strala Training Courses, you learn to shape your destiny on every level that counts, from your psychology, chemistry and neurology, to your chromosomes and even gene expression. The unique set of skills you develop – for connecting with yourself and others, unblocking your energy, healing what needs healing and accomplishing challenge with ease – uncovers your ability to create the life you want, and be an inspiring leader to the people around you.
Who’s What’s and When’s of Strala Yoga Training
