About Strala Yoga
Strala Yoga 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.
Strala Yoga combines the movement wisdom of tai chi with the forms of yoga, tai chi, qigong, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, as a way to help people release stress, heal, and move more easily through all kinds of challenge.
Strala Yoga was created by Tara Stiles, drawing on her background in classical ballet and choreography, as well as her long-time practice in yoga. Tara trained with Paul Taylor Dance Company choreographer and dancer Eileen Cropley, and began her yoga study in the 1990s with her ballet teacher, Rory Foster of American Ballet Theater.
The science and movement of Strala Yoga is also guided by Mike Taylor. Mike studied mind-body medicine at Harvard, and complementary medicine at Oxford. He has practiced Eastern movement and healing, including tai chi and qi gong, for 30 years.
Sam Berlind is a long-time contributing member of the Strala Yoga Training Faculty, with primary responsibility for Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine. He led one of the most prestigious Traditional Japanese Medicine schools in NYC for 25 years.
This is Strala Yoga.
The Experience
Strala Yoga is a way of being, moving and healing, that helps people connect with how they feel, move how it feels good, and handle challenges with ease.
This is yoga that moves far beyond poses, helping you blow past your goals and get into your dreams. It’s a freedom flow that expands your limits and cracks you wide open. You reveal your radiantly inspiring self.
Your Body. You get strong, a healthy range of mobility, and radiantly healthy from the inside out.
Your Mind. Elevated, connected, switched on, sparks are flying everywhere. You’re in the Flow.
Your Health. Immunity strengthens, your Relaxation Response is activated, and stress dissolves. Imbalances have the space to rebalance, repair and restore to optimal you. your energy levels skyrocket.
Your Life. Gets Fun, Fearless & Feels like You.
Your Result. You look and feel fantastic. Because that’s who you are when you’re you, turned on. You are creative, inspired, connected to your intuition, and to the world around you. You have the space to improvise, to move easily in everything you do, and to create more than you dream. Your health shines bright. You get happy.
The Science
Flow State. Strala Yoga brings you here, using calm connected movement, through all kinds of challenges. This is your body and mind working at levels beyond your imagination. It’s the way you are meant to be. Creativity is heightened. You achieve a super-human state of strength and movability in your body, and calm focused awareness in your mind. You move through the familiar and unfamiliar with far less effort, taking you much further without tiring, just feeling good.
Relaxation Response. Strala Yoga is designed to activate your body’s Relaxation Response – a chemical cascade responsible for overall health, healing, and wellbeing. This doesn’t happen in common yoga or exercise systems, which stimulate cortisol production. When attention is aimed narrowly and forcefully at accomplishing goals — for example in yoga, jumping and pushing into poses — our body is bathed in stress hormones, including cortisol. We become chemically less able to see the full range of options available to us. We are less creative and less intuitive. We’re ready to survive an attacking tiger, but that’s about it. Keep pushing this way, and we’re likely to gain more weight than we need, injure our bodies, and suffer from a variety of stress-related disorders.
By contrast, when we move with ease through all conditions, we trigger our body’s Relaxation Response. This is where we want to live most of our lives. The good news is, we can activate our own Relaxation Response response by moving gently and exploring where we are, rather than forcing to be somewhere else. We get happy, creative and intuitive. It feels amazing!
Class types include Strala STRONG, Strala RELAX, Strala ENERGIZE, Strala BASICS, Strala GENTLE, and Strala CORE. Movement begins with your breath. Every inhale opens and creates space, every exhale relaxes and lets you move easily into the space you create.
Strala Yoga is known for its inclusive and open attitude. Strala Yoga classes are led by thousands of Strala Guides around the world. You can also find Strala classes online here!
Strala partners with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, and is practiced in more than 30,000 schools across America. We’ve been profiled by The New York Times, Times of India, The Times (UK), and featured in most major national and international magazines.
Fun Facts
Strala = moving with ease, accomplishing hard things easily.
Strala = a Swedish word meaning “to radiate light.”
Strala = a moving meditation that creates a radiantly strong, clear, connected body & mind, and a healthy, happy & capable life.
Our Classes
All Strala Yoga classes move slowly and continuously, guided with deep breath and easygoing movement from your middle. All classes have long-time practicers next to relative beginners, and everybody gets to move easily from right where they are. You’ll get strong, let stress go, and accomplish tremendous challenges with ease. You’ll also feel free, creative and intuitive, and get healthy and happy from the inside out!
We have a variety of yoga class types, and you get to pick based on how you feel each day.
STRONG: Strala STRONG is a moving flow that builds strength, balance, and flexibility evenly in the body. Calm ease is carried through simple and challenging movements alike. You get happy and healthy from the inside out!
RELAX: Strala RELAX is a moving flow that releases tension from your body and mind, while resting attention calmly on your breath. You drop the stress and feel all-over revitalized!
ENERGIZE: Strala ENERGIZE is a moving flow that invigorates your body and mind while resting attention calmly on your breath. You’ll feel awake, energized and super-creative!
BASICS: Strala BASICS is a simple flow that builds body awareness, while calming and focusing your mind. Moving with ease through simple and challenging moments alike, you’ll feel refreshed, confident and happily capable!
GENTLE: Strala GENTLE is a simple flow that opens and strengthens your body while calming your mind. You’ll create a healthy balance between strength and flexibility, stability and mobility. Most of all, you’ll feel all-over great!
CORE: Strala CORE is a 30-minute flow that strengthens your middle. It’s fun, feels amazing, and is far more effective than traditional crunches and leg lifts. You’ll get every inch of your body working together to build all-over strength and capability, beginning right from your middle!
Yoga Guides
Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala, the revolutionary approach to being, moving and healing. Strala teaches yoga, tai chi, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, to help people release stress, let go of bad habits, and move easily through all kinds of challenge.
Strala is practiced in more than 100 countries, and thousands of Guides are leading Strala classes daily around the globe. Even more Strala training graduates bring what they learn into their office work, healing practices, and all of life. The mission we share is to help people accomplish far more, through softening and connecting with our creativity and purpose.
Tara has authored several best-selling books including Yoga Cures, Make Your Own Rules Diet, and Strala Yoga, all translated and published in several languages. She has been profiled by The New York Times, Times of India, The Times (UK), and featured in most major national and international magazines. Tara is a sought-after speaker on topics of entrepreneurship, health, and wellbeing. Harvard profiled Tara's work in a case study, and she has spoken with students at Harvard and New York University about her experience, and approaches to creativity and leadership.
Tara supports The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, an initiative with the American Heart Association and Clinton Foundation, to combat childhood obesity. This brings Strala classes to more than 30,000 schools around the United States. She also supports the BOKS program, which delivers Strala classes and wellbeing resources to educators across North America.
She lives in New York City with her husband Mike Taylor and their daughter Daisy.
Mike Taylor is the co-founder of Strala, with focus on East Asian movement, meditation, health, and healing practices.
Named “Best Mover” by MindBodyGreen he’s practiced Eastern movement and healing techniques, including tai chi, qigong, and shiatsu, for more than three decades.
In his younger years, Mike challenged centuries of reasonable and well-tested martial traditions in hundreds of competitions, by applying unruly imagination to a world where rules were unbreakable. As he got older, he happily become more interested in supporting bodies than disrupting them, and continued on to medical applications of the mind-body connection in university. Mike studied mind-body medicine at Harvard, and alternative medicine and psychology at Oxford. After running into walls with standard medical practice in the U.S. and England, Mike left his healthcare roots. He worked at a steel mill for a while, joined a web company, and then founded a few more.
Now Mike has found his way back to health care done right, helping to create a system of yoga that draws on his martial and healing experience. Unbound by rules and guru-traditions that don’t work, Strala is helping people let go of stress in their bodies and minds, become their own best caregivers, and live happy capable lives.
Mike is married to Strala co-founder Tara Stiles. They live in Brooklyn with their one year old daughter Daisy.
Sam Berlind is a member of the Strala Training Faculty, with primary responsibility for Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine.
Sam is an Ohashiatsu teacher and practitioner living in NYC. While studying Comparative Religion and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1981, he began to practice Iyengar yoga. Sam continued to practice and teach yoga after moving to NYC. Eager to learn more about the relationship between the healing properties of yoga and traditional Asian medicine, he began studying with Wataru Ohashi. Sam fell in love with shiatsu, began teaching Ohashiatsu in 1987, and has since taught in NYC, Omega Institute, and throughout the US and Europe. Sam also teaches enhancement workshops and seminars based on his study of Feldenkrais Method, Gestalt therapy, Zen Shiatsu, TCM, and other modalities. His understanding of the healing arts is deeply influenced as well by his study and teaching of martial arts since 1988.
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