Question

Dear Strala,

I’m on an uphill stretch with my yoga and could use your help.

I get everything you’re saying about yoga having little to do with perfect posing.  I believe you’re right about moving and finding your own way, rather than following gurus or rules.

I’ve been lucky enough to take classes with Tara and Mike whenever I visit NYC.  In nearly 30 years of yoga, I’ve found my way into classes with pretty much all the prominent teachers.  I’ve never seen anyone who could move like Mike or inspire like Tara.  You guys really are what you’re talking about.

While I agree with all your writing, I still feel like I could use some more specific guidance to help me along.  I get why people want the rulebooks and gurus.  It gives you something to do!  I also get why it never works.  

I’m not looking for rules, but I could use a push.  Could you share some experience or guidelines on how to keep improving?  I’ve been doing this a long while, and feel like I’ve covered the books and techniques.  I know there’s still something more, and I can see it in what you’re doing.

Thanks Strala, keep it up!

– LD, Massachusetts

Answer

Thanks LD, you’ve pretty much summed it up here!  Keep moving, exploring, and feeling into you.  Believe what you feel, and respond to that.

But you’re right, sometimes that can feel too vague.  What if I’m just not comfortable exploring?  What if the boundaries I’m seeing are much smaller than the real ones?  What if there are no boundaries at all and I just fall off the edge?  What if I try, and I still don’t feel anything?

Luckily, things can get a little more clear.  What’s important is that you keep a good focus on what you want. We all get what we focus on, probably more often than we think.

I’ve never seen a correlation between ability to stand on your head, and ability to live an expansive, capable life. When most of us first walk into that yoga room, it’s the life part we’re after.  We’re not wanting to become master posers and contortionists. It’s just easy to get sidetracked if that’s what’s going on, and all the rules point us there.  More often, what we really want is just to feel good, and get capable in our lives.

If that’s what you want, you’re in luck.  Because you can do it.

Here are some good guides to follow in your yoga that keep your focus, and your results, right here

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 Yoga 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

1) Move easy. Rather than hold poses stiff and tense, soften in your elbows and knees, and drop all the extra effort.  Start moving and feeling your way into every inch of how your body can move and feel.

This is your first step in connecting with you and getting capable in your body.  It works much better than trying to follow pictures of other people, or rules for other people’s bodies.

It’s also what keeps you injury-free for the entire life of your yoga practice.  If you’re easy, listen to your body, and leave pushing and forcing for rugby matches, you won’t get hurt.  You’ll just get good at you.

Think of yourself as the conductor of a great orchestra.  Your job is to get all your parts working in tune, easily and capably, with all your other parts.  It makes for a good concert.

2) Asymmetric exploration.  Who said you have to have your hands and feet in the same symmetric spots on your mat, every pose, every day?  Will your chakras fall out of your body if you have a foot daringly off to the side in down dog?  Or your walk from down dog to standing forward bend drifts rakishly from left to right??  Probably not.  It just might feel good.

This is your start for being able to do everything capably in every direction, rather than just a few things in a few well-defined places.

3) Fault-tolerance.  You might be able to crow or hand stand when everything is lined up just right.  Hips square, hands in just the right place, feet at the ready in proper launch position. Of course, the sun is shining, and the moon a friendly waxing gibbous.  But what happens if life doesn’t line up exactly how you expect?

What if your hands aren’t lined up like any picture you’ve every seen in crow?  What if one leg comes straight off to the side in handstand, and one elbow is a little soft as you sway and roll side to side?  What if you leave the comfortable yoga room behind and do this all on a nice rocky beach?

You’ve gone asymmetric, now it’s time to lose the pictures altogether.  Move in and out of things in every way you can imagine.  Find new places for your hands and feet, new ways to lift your body and your legs, new directions to lean, drift, and explore. Loosen your grip on the poses. Make your own shapes.

Practicing this way, you’ll have no problem when life isn’t a perfectly even wood floor, a comfy temperature, blocks and blankets neatly by your side.  You’ll have no problem with life just as it is.

4) Chaotic movement.  You’ve done a great deal of deliberate exploration.  You no longer need things to be symmetric or by-the-book.  Your body and your mind are more broadly capable now.

Your movement and exploration has so far been based on what you decide to do.  Now you can flip the switch.  No more decisions.  Let your movement and exploration drift along with how you feel.

This one might not happen over night, until it does.

It’s creating enough space around you that you get to see everything that’s there.  Your intuition lives in this space.  Your creativity lives in this space.  Your conversation with the universe is in this space.

If you’re interested, read some more about fractals.  It turns out the “chaotic” universe is a beautifully organized chaos, defined by fractal geometry.  If you can work with chaos, you can work with nature.

You can get quite capable in your life by practicing all the possibilities you can imagine.  

That’s what we’re doing when we practice moving easy, asymmetry, and fault tolerance.  

You can get limitlessly capable in your life by practicing all the possibilities you can’t imagine.

That’s what we’re doing when we practice feeling and moving with how we feel.

And that’s the best part about all of this.  It’s never something you don’t have.  It’s just connecting to what you do have.  There are no limits here.