The cost for this course is $695, and once you’ve completed everything, it all remains right here for you as an ongoing resource, for many years of practice and support to come.

We also have scholarship help and easy installment plans available. If you want to be here and need help, please just let us know (email Mike@StralaYoga.com).

Please click here to register, it’s all ready for you to begin any time.

Tai chi and qigong are known for a wide array of well-documented health benefits, and not only for much-needed help with back pain.  These benefits also include strengthened immunity, reduced inflammation, lower blood pressure, improved balance, mobility, bone density, cardiovascular and pulmonary function, stress-reduction, healing trauma, and support for stress-related and other ailments, including cancer and Parkinson’s.

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What’s Here For You

– More than 20 Instructional Sessions. All recorded, so you can watch any time, and support your practice for many years to come.

– LIVE Sessions on Zoom. For sharing questions, answers, and practice together. You can join live, or ask questions beforehand and watch your answers whenever you want. These sessions are all saved as well, so they’re always here for you as a resource, whatever your schedule.

– More than 40 Practice Classes. In Tai Chi, Qigong, Shiatsu, and Yoga, all here for you to move through at your own pace.

– 60+Page Guidebook. For additional instruction, case study notes, and detail, along with practical homework assignments.

– Connection and Community. Join our special online group for sharing questions and experiences with Mike, Tara, and everyone in training. Always we’re here each day, to support each other along the way.

– Begin Any Time. We’re recording everything we share, so you can start whenever you want, and watch all on your own schedule.

Please click here to register now!

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Introduction to the 2nd Edition

As Tara and I put together this 2nd Edition, I want to share with you about how we got here.  It was 10 years ago that we created the first edition, at the time we had a yoga studio in New York. A whole lot of people were coming together here to share, and look for help with the usual challenges we all face.  Maybe unsurprisingly, back pain was always near the top of the list.

Around the same time, I had gone through another round of my own back challenges, with herniated and displaced discs in my lower spine. This was accompanied by severe sciatica, that left me wondering if I would ever walk normally again, much less go back to climbing mountains.  I was very focused on yoga during those years, as a way to heal and get back on my feet. So we started adapting the poses and movements, and it worked. For me, and for a lot of the people we met, evolving yoga poses into less rigid forms, and evolving the movements to be more responsive to healing needs, made a world of difference.

Then something happened. Time went by, and I found myself talking with more and more people, in more and more places.  People everywhere were sharing their stories about back injuries, their loss of mobility and energy, the pain that kept returning again and again, getting in the way of pretty much everything. They also shared with me the kinds of things they were doing to help.

In hearing from all these people, eventually I noticed something was missing. With the exception of people who already practiced yoga with us, yoga wasn’t in their stories. So many people patiently listened as I explained all the ways that yoga could help. Sometimes they would move along, and I wouldn’t know what they might do next, or if anything I had shared would be useful. Sometimes months later I would get a letter, from someone who had made progress, and wanted to thank me.

But there were also a whole lot of people who would say to me, “Mike, I appreciate that yoga works for you and some people. But not for me. Down dog, that’s never going to be a resting pose. Standing on one foot, I don’t think so. And that plow pose, not in my body.”

They were telling me something – that for so many people, yoga just wasn’t accessible. It was too complicated, and took too much time to learn all these poses. Many of the poses were too uncomfortable to make any sense as a healing approach. It reminded me of why Tara and I had set out to improve yoga in the first place, by using qigong and tai chi foundations, to add more easy mobility, healing, and harmony to this practice.

People also were telling me that all this took too much time, to get to a class, or even make it through a class at home. Some people said yoga felt isolated. They weren’t sure what their doctor would think of it, or how it fit into their rehab or other care. And rehab was a whole added story, how hard it was to find something good, where the cost wasn’t out of reach, or could be covered by insurance.

Then something else happened. My back problems returned. Only now, it was made worse by an old injury in my hip, and a new injury in my knee, brought on during a mountain weekend with my old college roommates. So I was on the ground again.

I started going through what had worked for me before, but something was different. I couldn’t begin to get into a squat – that old standby yoga pose that had always been so good for freeing up lower back tension. My knee just wouldn’t let me get even close. And hip opening poses like pigeon, that could also help so much with back tension and mobility, were off my list as well.

I didn’t give up right away. These were all things that had once been so easy for me, even when I had been injured. But stubborn as I was, I eventually realized it. Yoga wasn’t accessible to me. Not in my body, not right now.

Luckily, when this door closed, another one opened. I had studied tai chi and qigong for decades before I ever took up yoga. In these practices, there are no complicated forms that require my body to look like anybody else’s. Instead, the shape you take and how you move comes entirely from you. Which is exactly how Tara and I had been working to evolve yoga for years, by following these qigong and tai chi foundations. So all I needed to do was see what’s going on with me right now, and follow a set of healing foundations that arise out of me – my shape, my body, for where I am and what I need, right now.

It was in getting through all this, through the re-opening of this bigger door, that I realized we need something more, better than what we had first shared 10 years ago. We need many more practices, more kinds and more varieties, for more people with more needs. These practices should never be isolated, but instead help our help, wherever it comes from. Nothing should be complicated or take lots of time to learn or practice. But at the same time, what’s healing should be possible to carry with us all day long, into everything we do.

So this is what you’ll find now in this 2nd Edition – simple, uncomplicated, and effective support for back pain prevention and healing, with qigong, tai chi, and yoga. You’ll discover practices that are accessible because they’re easy to learn and do, and also because they don’t require lots of extra time, or any special equipment. And you’ll find practices that are portable – that go with you always, everywhere, in everything you’re doing. So with all the great part-time help we get from professionals and practices of all kinds, now we can also have full-time help, in this incredibly important task of healing, and taking good care of yourself.

Thank you everybody for joining me here, I’m so happy we get to share in all this together now.

– Mike

More About This Course

Western medicine is working miracles every day, in the emergency room, and with all kinds of diseases and conditions. But traditional therapies are not always a complete solution for some of our biggest problems, including stress-related ailments that account for most hospital visits today. Back pain continues to present a big challenge here for so many of us. So we need something more to help, and for this, we can head farther East.

Movement is central to nearly every traditional East Asian healing practice. How we move each day rewires everything about us, from our microbiome to our neurology and gene expression. So when it comes to preventing and healing back pain, we have a good place to begin right here.

This isn’t a way to isolate from or replace Western treatment – far from it. One of the things I love about tai chi and qigong practices, is they aren’t meant just for being good at tai chi, or at separating from the rest of our life. Instead, these practices are meant for working right within where we are. Tai chi and qigong practices give us a way to help our help. And this works for healing and prevention of pain, as well as for enabling better performance across our whole lives.

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One advantage of tai chi and qigong practice is in its simplicity. Anyone can practice, wherever they are, with whatever time they have. While the foundations for qigong and tai chi are much the same, qigong takes this simplicity a step further, with movements that don’t require any special memorization.

If you’ve ever shivered when you’re cold, jumped up and down to wake up, or let out a big exhale to release stress, you’ve practiced qigong. It’s simply written into our human biology and design, to breathe and move in a way that supports us to be healthy, and get things done. Qigong’s simple movements give us a way to enable this design.

Most of us have been taught an incredibly self-limiting myth. It’s called no-pain-no-gain. At the heart of this myth, there’s a belief that if I’m not suffering, I’m probably not doing anything important.

Tai chi presents a very different world view, grounded in a very different way of being. It says that we accomplish most – that everything truly inspiring and magical in this world is accomplished – through harmony and peace. And it gives us a clear structure to work this out. Clinical research has strongly supported both tai chi and qigong practices for boosting your energy and mood, sleeping better, reducing chronic pain, improving strength and mobility, creating an overall sense of well-being, and even healing from the neurological impacts of trauma.

Tai chi gives us an effective antidote to no-pain-no-gain not only because it sounds better. It also works better.

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What You’ll Find Here

Through a series of instructional and practice videos, reading, exercises, and homework, you’ll learn to use the movement and healing vocabularies of qigong, tai chi, and yoga. You’ll also discover how to use your everyday movements all day long, to restore and support the remarkable healing pathways we each have within us.

We’ll share and practice together an approach and techniques that work for a wide variety of common challenges with the back and spine, including joint instability, sciatica, and soft tissue strains and sprains.

Who Is This For

Everything we do is designed to help people move more easily from right where they are each day. So wherever you are is a perfect place to begin. This is true for all of our trainings, including this course to help with healing and prevention of back pain.

For teachers and healing professionals, you’ll gain a structure and process for healing that you can share with everyone you reach.

For everyone, you’ll learn to elicit and support your body’s natural healing response, as well as a variety of techniques specific for preventing and healing back pain. You’ll also learn how to get around your whole life and do what you love doing, in a way that both heals and enables you in every step.

What You Get

Watch: More than 20 Instructional Sessions, and over 40 Practice Sessions, covering an overall approach to movement and healing through the forms of qigong, tai chi, and yoga, as well as targeted practices for prevention and healing of back pain.

LIVE Sessions on Zoom: For sharing questions, answers, and practice together, we’ll have two zoom sessions to get started – one on Saturday June 3, and another to follow up on Friday June 23. We’ll also add a bonus session or two in August, so we can stay connected and helping each with all that comes up.

You can join these sessions live, or ask questions beforehand and watch your answers whenever you want. These sessions are saved as well, so they’re always here for you as a resource, whatever your schedule.

Read: Session notes and tips, and a 60+page manual, that gives additional direction and detail, along with practical homework assignments.

Progress: Everybody learns in their own way, at their own pace, and this course is yours to go through in your own time. We follow an adult learning model with all our trainings, and we’re here to support everyone’s process individually.

Continuing Education Credit: This course counts for 50 hours of credit, Including application to both our 200+Hour Yoga Teacher Training and 300+Hour Advanced Leadership Trainings.

Lifetime: Taking good care of yourself is the practice of a lifetime. When you learn to release stress, find harmony in your body and mind, heal what needs healing, and accomplish challenge with ease, you have something amazing to share.

These practices have been so helpful to me for decades now, in everything from high-altitude mountaineering to martial competition, running and rowing to triathlons. I’ve had my share of pain and injuries along the way, and always this has been right here for me, as a way to heal, and keep going with all that I love doing. I’m so much looking forward to sharing this with you now.

Faculty

Strala courses are all led entirely by the founders. Our program is backed by mind-body medicine pioneer Dr. Deepak Chopra, and Harvard neurology professor and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Rudolph Tanzi.

Mike Taylor is the resident healer and co-founder of Strala. Named “Best Mover” by MindBodyGreen, he’s practiced Eastern movement and healing techniques, including tai chi and qigong, for more than four decades.

In his younger years, Mike challenged centuries of martial traditions in hundreds of competitions, by applying unruly imagination to a world where rules were unbreakable. As he got older, he 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, took up mountaineering, worked at a steel mill, and later founded a software company in the healthcare industry. Now Mike has found his way back to health care done right, helping people let go of stress in their bodies and minds, and become their own best caregivers.

Mike is married to Strala co-founder Tara Stiles, and climbs a few mountains in his spare time. Tara and Mike live in Brooklyn with their daughter Daisy.

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Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala. Thousands of guides are leading Strala classes around the globe in partner studios, gyms, and clubs.

Tara partners with W Hotels on FIT with Tara Stiles — a global program bringing Strala Yoga classes and healthy recipes to W properties around the globe. She collaborated with Reebok to design their Reebok Yoga lifestyle range, and has authored several best-selling books including Slim Calm Sexy Yoga, Yoga Cures, Make Your Own Rules Diet, Strala Yoga, and Guiding Strala, 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 primarily on topics of business building and health & wellness. She has lectured to sold out audiences and internal conferences around the world including Fortune’s Most Powerful Women’s Conference, Epsilon, Happinez, and Hay House events.

Tara supports The Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the American Heart Association initiative to combat childhood obesity, as well as BOKS, which together are bringing Strala classes to more than 30,000 schools around the United States and Canada.

Tara studied classical dance with ABT Principal Rory Foster, and choreography with Paul Taylor original member and world renowned master Eileen Cropley.

When Can You Begin

This training is ready for everyone to begin now, and our LIVE sessions are scheduled for June and August 2023.

You an start whenever you want throughout the year, and once you’ve completed everything, it’s all still here for you. Whenever you need it, just keep coming back for more.

Please click here to register now

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About Strala

Strala combines the movement and healing wisdom of tai chi with the form vocabularies of yoga, tai chi, and qigong, 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.

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Questions

If you have any questions or need something, it’s always fine to reach us directly, using Mike@StralaYoga.com.

Thank you so much everybody, we’re excited to get started with you here.

– Tara & Mike

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We need a practice that’s practiced always, in all the hours, in all the places, so that healing and empowering ourselves isn’t something left to the side, but occupies our center.

It’s your way of feeling better, sustainably, in everything you do. When you feel better you do better, for yourself and for everyone. We can get here together.

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Please click here to register and begin any time!

The post Strala Online 50+Hour Intensive Training – Prevention and Healing Support for Back Pain appeared first on Strala Yoga.

Gratitude practice is a simple moment that has a profound effect on your day. When you’re feeling too busy, over tired, and a little bit less like yourself, gratitude practice connects you right back in. Having this practice in your routine is a game changer when it comes to your wellbeing and reaching your goals. The best part is (for me) is you can do this right from bed. It can be one thing, and most likely once you get going you will find a pile of things and people you are grateful for. Ok I’ll go first.

Today I am grateful for my health. I’m grateful for Daisy and Mike and my family. I’m grateful to have a safe home. I’m grateful for our Strala Yoga community. I am grateful for the comment section on the Strala Yoga. It’s really developing into a safe space where we can connect with each other. I’m grateful for Lantern (our cat). I’m grateful for Daisy’s friends. I’m grateful for our local health food store and local yoga studio and our neighbors and local community.

See, it’s easy, and fun too. It’s an instant shift from stress to softness and puts you in the right body and mind position for the day.

Settle In

I’m hooked on our top of the month series, Settle In. It’s a little extra space for us, outside of our regular yoga, tai chi and shiatsu practices to check in and reflect. t’s a bit of a chat, community celebration, and meditation. I hope you enjoy this Settle In. Leave any comments with projects you’d like us to highlight, milestones you’d like us to celebrate, or anything else you’d like to share with our gorgeous global community of ease.

We’re so grateful to practice with you at StralaHome.

Practice Gratitude.

Download the November Strala Home Calendar.

Practice Now

The post November 2022 Strala Home Calendar: Practice Gratitude appeared first on Strala Yoga.

The post 30 Minute Wake Up Yoga appeared first on Strala Yoga.

The fall gets busy and that can turn into hectic really fast. Thankfully we have a practice of ease to ground and nourish us. Let’s get to it. This September our theme is Ease. We can all use more ease in all we do. I back away from rigidity and choose ease in my practice and everywhere I can.

We have a great month of practices planned for you. Five new class drops a week from gentle yoga, strong yoga, HIIT yoga, tai chi and everything in between. We kick off the month with our friend, superstar Jillian Michaels, who is sharing a few favorite workouts to compliment longevity and support your overall wellbeing, that we can do with ease.

We’re so grateful to practice with you at StralaHome.

I back away from rigidity and choose ease.

Download the September Strala Home Calendar.

Practice Now

The post September 2022 Strala Home Calendar: Choose Ease appeared first on Strala Yoga.

There are many special results of practicing tai chi in your yoga. One is, when you move your whole body in harmony, every part helping every other part, you accomplish more with less effort. And, you can feel good in the process of improving. Good things happen when you practice improving AND feeling good.

Our culture tries to trick us into force, push, and struggle now, so we can have some hard-to-reach reward later. Tai chi reminds us not to hurt one part of us, while trying to help another. There’s always a better way, to get where we want to go. It’s a way that involves sensitizing to what’s happening inside, and all around you. And it’s a practice that expands what’s possible, when we bring all that we are into all that we do. This leads to good things.

Whether your goal is to gain strength, mobility, mental clarity, or use your energy for good in the world, how you practice is essential. We are thrilled to practice with you and expect good things to happen, together.

We’re so grateful to practice with you at StralaHome.

Expect Good Things to Happen 

Download the July Strala Home Calendar.

Practice Now

The post July Strala Home Calendar: Expect Good Things to Happen appeared first on Strala Yoga.

We have a special online course that covers these foundations and practices, specifically for healing back pain.  And it works for all kinds of muscle and joint troubles, so if you need some extra help with pain relief, as well as preventing pain from returning or finding you in the first place, you can find help right here in our Strala Training for No More Back Pain.

And in case it can help right now, I’ll share some more stories with you here, that begin with a few challenges in how I’ve approached my strength and endurance training.  My guess is you might find some of this familiar.

When it comes to fitness training, there’s a problem with “Be here now.”  It’s not really possible. In particular, it’s not possible if where we want to be isn’t here. And even more, it’s not possible if we don’t really like here all that much. After all, that’s the whole point of why we’re trying to get someplace else. It’s better there than here.  But somehow we’re asked to stop trying to get where we think we should be, and instead get into where we are.  It’s complicated.

So, this has to do with a bit more than yoga or tai chi, running or climbing, or whatever our fitness and wellbeing practices might be. It has to do with how you move around always. And it has to do with how you think – about moving, about going where you want to go.

Simple everyday everywhere movement for pain-free fitness

Let’s begin very basic, with very simple everyday movement. It’s easier to be here, to practice here, than to go right for our mindset about achievement, about life. How we move is always the same as this mindset. So we can work from very simple, very small, to change things that are very complex, very big.

Walking, heading up and down stairs, standing and sitting, all of these things are very important. Because usually we spend more time here than in practice. Until we’re just all the time practicing, which is one of the things I love about tai chi, it helps make this a little easier.

Now what happens when we have some pain, some difficulty, when we run up against a challenge? A friend asked recently about pain on the inside of her knees when she’s moving. So I’ll try to walk around this a bit and see where it can go, in a way that’s also a bit broader.

To begin, I’m wondering if pain comes when you’re standing or walking, climbing stairs or getting up and down from the floor? Or does it come along only when you practice?

There’s always a chance that how you do yoga or tai chi is the cause of trouble. There’s also a chance that how you do everything is the cause, in creating what’s happening for you. Often it’s this. And then how you do the yoga or tai chi just carries the same habits you have in the rest of life, both good and bad.

And next, I’m thinking about where you’re experiencing pain, on the insides of your knees.

Understanding causes of pain and injury

Difficulty in general often happens when we carry too much tension, too much immobility, into our movement. So this creates some strain and awkwardness, some lack of coordination and grace that has us working too forcefully, which can lead to inflammation and injury.

Pain on the insides of knees can have a few different sources. Often some torsion under tension, some twisting while the knee is carrying too much weight and tension, can lead to difficulty here.

For yoga practicers, awkward poses also play a role. For example, holding a long, low warrior 2, with the back foot perpendicular to the front, puts some unwanted pressure and strain on the inside of your back knee. Over time this can produce some unwelcome lengthening of supporting tendons. From here, the insides of your knees will start hurting when you try to move.

So it might not be the moving right now that’s your problem. It’s longer-term destabilization that creates a difficulty, wherever you are. And of course moving around more will highlight this.

If something hurts, don’t do it

There are many solutions to begin exploring. To start, if something hurts, don’t do it. There’s always a way to move better, using your whole body in harmony, with less tension, less disconnection, less forcefulness, and more ease. This can have a profound and rapid impact, both for healing injury as well as for enabling performance.

Body position is a good beginning here. Rather than long, unstable workout or yoga poses – where it’s not possible to move well either in or out – you can remake the forms you’re practicing to something more stable, and more movable. From here, you get to practice moving well, around a better form.

But this isn’t the entire solution. Just repositioning my feet to a wider or shorter stance doesn’t solve all my movement habits. Often there’s a good deal of tension in old ways of doing things. I might use a lot of force to go from one place to the next. It’s the long-term result of my body not working as well as it can, and getting too used going wherever I need to go by force.

The thing is, using the force that’s available to one or another strong part of my body, this works a lot of the time, for a lot of smaller challenges. But there’s a problem here. The most interesting challenges out there are always the ones that are bigger than us – at the very least, bigger than the limited versions of ourselves. Those big challenges, they need all of you, working together as all of you. So here’s a good fitness goal, that you can put into practice.

Posture, position, and whole-body movement

When our body isn’t working as a whole connected body, efficiently, in harmony, force can become the only option. Everything is difficult when we’re out of harmony. Even things that aren’t difficult are difficult. So we either have enough force to overcome the resistance, or we don’t. Either way, when there’s so much resistance first inside of our own bodies, we get hurt.

Trying to overcome ourselves by force is never really our best strategy.

And maybe worse, we hold onto all this force, all this tension. Even when we have a chance to rest, we don’t. It’s not our habit. Tai chi, qigong, neigong, all can highlight this quite a lot. Rolling your center from side to side while standing, allowing your arms to swing – it’s a very simple way to practice many things. Softness, posture, connection between breath and body, moving from your center, unweighting one leg at a time, learning to use what’s working and rest what’s not.

So if your knees begin to hurt in an exercise like this, there can be a few causes. Overarching in the lower spine is a common habit, which puts too much tension in knees, and makes it impossible to move well from your center. And continuously carrying excess tension and strain – even in the parts of you that are not currently working – this is also so common. It takes some practice, to learn how to give ourselves a rest.

We need a body in some harmony – soft enough to be movable, body and breath connected, moving all together from center. Without this, it’s arms and legs, hands and feet, doing all the work in their own separate corners. Knees go one way, feet and thighs another, upper and lower body not together.

Disconnection, disharmony, makes everything much more difficult. It’s how we wind up using so much force in our movement. We’re moving against ourselves. Which leads to injury and pain. It also leads us to be able to do much less than we can. Everything is harder here, without connection, without harmony.

How to get fit and feel great without pain and injury

So now I’m thinking about how to change. How do we practice connection, harmony, ease? In some ways, it’s not an easy or quick practice. Learning to let go of old habits – like using stress and tension as our strategy to get where we want to go – takes some effort. It takes many times making a choice to move differently, using a different strategy. It’s not easy creating harmony, learning to move with our whole self all together. But, you’ve probably experienced at one time or another that it’s possible to open this door, to feel a very substantial difference, right away. So this is where we want to begin.

Whether you’re practicing in yoga or tai chi, or just walking around in your life, begin where it’s easy for you to begin. Not thinking so much of poses or forms, where you should or should not be, how you should or should not look. These ideas make things hard from the start. They invite old habits back in. So instead, try this

1) Begin where you’re comfortable. Maybe it’s sitting or standing, on hands and knees or lying down. If you’re not in a comfortable position and posture right from the start, it’s tough for things to go better from not comfortable. So give yourself a good start.

2) Soften up, so your whole body is easily movable. This means when you try to move, you’re not fighting against tension and strain in your muscles and joints, just to get moving. Trying taking some deep breaths, jump up and down a bit, and give your whole body a good wiggle from your center (more belly than hips). Then walk it off, and get ready to begin.

3) Connect your breath and body together, so your breath moves you. Take a long deep inhale. So deep that your breath lifts up and expands through your whole body. Hold for a moment at the top of your breath. Now let it go, with an even longer exhale, letting your whole body release, relax, and settle down. Go through a few of these breaths. When you breathe in, wait for the feeling of lift to be real in your body, then let it lift, arms included. Same thing when you breathe out. Wait for the feeling of easing down to be real, then let your whole body ease down.

4) Move your whole body as one whole body, starting from your center. When we spend too much training time isolating and working with one body part at a time, whatever it is we really want to do gets that much harder. Because doing is something that requires coordination, both literally and figuratively. From an Eastern perspective on both marital arts and healing, you want harmony in your whole body – so every part helps every other part. It’s your best way to bring everything you are into every challenge, and that’s a very good thing to practice, in everything you do.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, keep repeating them.  Right from the start, remember it doesn’t work well to begin in a bad form or position, and then try to fix it. I can work on one part at a time if things don’t look quite right – move my feet a little, adjust my shoulders, repoint my knees – and this might fix how things look. But it doesn’t quite fix the reality of where I am.

To borrow again from an Eastern perspective, where you are is created by how you get here. If my form and posture for my workout, yoga, or tai chi practice isn’t so good – maybe my knee is out of line, or I’m holding too much strain and tension in some muscles and joints – I can’t fix this by fussing with one part at a time. Because where I am right now was created by how all of me got here. So my solution also needs to be more holistic. If I want to be more capable where I am, I need to be more capable along my way here. I need to move better, all the time, in everything I’m doing.

Set new fitness goals

Goals are important for progress, and always I want to make sure the goals I’m setting point me in the direction I actually want to go. In an older way of thinking about fitness, I might set more isolated goals – how much weight I can lift, what pose or drill I can perform. But the problem with isolation is, nothing is ever really isolated.

We all know this from our workouts. I was a rower for a long time, which means strong thighs. But no matter how strong I can be on the sled, if my focus is all on training this isolated part, things aren’t going to go well for my knees. It’s that next link in the chain that suffers, from isolated goals and practices. And when one part suffers, every part suffers. It doesn’t matter how strong one or a few parts can get. What matters is everything. So you can set new goals to match.

1) Be soft enough to be movable, so you’re not moving against yourself. 

2) Keep your breath and body connected, so your breath moves all of you.

3) Move every part of you together, beginning from your center. No parts left behind, every part helping every other part.

Staying relaxed enough to move easily, especially when things get hard, is a lifelong practice. So is developing a moving energizing relationship between your breath and body, and learning to move all of you as one you. The good news is, all these practices work for pretty much everything. And they don’t cause injury.  Practice this way, and you get to keep doing what you love doing, better, for a very long time.

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But softness isn’t common in usual yoga, fitness, or therapeutic practices, because it’s not so much in our lives now.  As one example, yoga in the last many decades is more focused on rigidity and tension, moving one isolated part of our bodies at a time, into an idea of what things should look like.  It’s the opposite of the harmony we need with our bodies, to achieve softness, mobility, and ease, especially when challenges come our way. So these usual practices are reflecting the tough parts about how we live, rather than working to fix them.

There’s a question comes up so often in yoga: “Should I be locking my knees and elbows – arms and legs held stick-straight – in all the poses?”  It’s a good question that opens the door into mobilizing so many aspects of our lives, through the practice of softness. Once we see this new path, we can also see something about locking, and about rigidity.  It’s kind of like spending our time going around locking every door we see.  It might be better to stay open.

How to practice softness

Of course it takes a long while to get really good at softness – to be movable without always moving, bendable without always bending. But on both chemical and neurological levels, this is central to the results we want, to the progress we want.

Locking our joints I understand, I’ve been there. It’s a show of strength, and feels like it keeps us safe. But what we want is real strength, not a show. Holding tension generally leads to aggravation and injury, along with reduced ability to do what we want to do. So locking, flexing, engaging, extending, rotating – all these things don’t so much give what we’re looking for.

It’s really what most of us are already too good at – tension and stress – and reminds me of that old saying “Bringing our neuroses into our cure.” That this saying exists tells me it must be something we all do pretty often, just being human.  So I think East Asian arts have this a little better, a practice that leads to harmony rather than rigidity and disconnection. And if you’d like to read some more about the science on this, Harvard Professor of Neurology Dr. Rudolph Tanzi wrote a bit here.

Luckily, softness gives us a different way to practice, that begins with a few easy steps:

1) Shimmy. Stand comfortably with your feet about shoulder-width apart, take a deep breath in, then let it go. Now give your whole body a shimmy from your center (more your belly than your hips). See if that shimmy can spread equally through all of you, out through your arms and legs. If it gets blocked by locked-up knees or shoulders, walk it off. Then come back, take a deep breath, and repeat your shimmy. You’re heading for something called “wave propagation” – when you begin movement with the energy and direction of your center, this movement carries through your whole body, without getting blocked.

2) Breathe. Now that you’re shimmy-able, take a long deep inhale. So deep that your breath lifts up and expands through your whole body. Hold for a moment at the top of your breath. Now let it go, with an even longer exhale, letting your whole body release, relax, and settle down. Go through a few of these breaths. When you breathe in, wait for the feeling of lift to be real in your body, then let it lift, arms included. Same thing when you breathe out. Wait for the feeling of easing down to be real, then let your whole body ease down. You can let the movement in your body be just the lift and lower, or you can add a whole-body shimmy and wiggle on your exhales, to see how this softness is working for you.

3) Repeat. Take a walk around, and repeat the whole practice from your shimmy.

Just as much as this can be in your yoga and tai chi, softness is an all day, everyday, everywhere practice you can carry into your kitchen, meeting room, or wherever you’re getting around each day. It takes practice, to replace all our old habits like tension and rigidity, with new habits of moving well, in harmony with our whole selves. We’ve been listening to as many Dalai Lama podcasts as we can lately, and it brings to mind now something he said.

“If you want to do something, if you want to change something big, don’t be in a hurry.  Don’t be impatient.  Being impatient will create failure.  Because anything big takes time.  At least a few years of practice.  So first be sure that you want to do this, that it’s important to you.  And then take your time with it.  Be patient, with you.” – The 14th Dalai Lama

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This all works so much better when it’s not just teachers telling kids what to do and instead involves teachers influencing kids through their own way of being, and how they are in their own lives. As a small example – no more soda machines in the teachers’ lounges! I think this aspect of what we’re all doing – centering on how we are, and how easily and peacefully we’re able to move in our lives – is a very powerful starting point.

How you are is what influences kids the most

Much more than specific yoga sequences or techniques. These are useful too, but they follow behind How you are, how you connect with yourself and everyone, and how you share with who’s around you. Without first giving attention to how we are, techniques are just things we do to each other. Even with really good intentions, it leads to an imbalance in relationships that we all can feel. As adults, maybe we’re used to it a lot of the time. But kids can feel it, and it’s not the best kind of feeling we can give.

Maybe it’s not surprising that in traditional medicine this imbalance – doing something To someone – is avoided, and seen as a kind of manipulation. Instead, the aim is to make good connections, that support and remind each other about what’s possible – the magic we each have inside to heal and enable ourselves. This is a wonderful way to share all kinds of connections with people. And maybe it’s not surprising that it works so well with kids. They know exactly what’s up with the adults around them.

It makes sense, but really this is an unusual concept. Usual teaching is done by learning and memorizing knowledge and techniques, then repeating information from a disconnected place. It’s a line from teacher to student, rather than a kind of sharing where we’re on the same circle, moving and being moved in connection with each other. This is something else to learn from traditional medicine and practices like tai chi. Even when we think we’re on a line – doing something to someone – we’re always on a circle. Everything you do counts, for everything and everyone around you. And, it always comes back around. We all know the best teachers are so far from disconnected. What they share and how they share it is a together thing. We’ve felt this. We know the difference.

How you hold or release stress, how you move with isolation or harmony in your body, bringing just a part of you into what you do, or bringing everything you are into all that you share, how you breathe and approach challenge – it all matters. The way you move through your life creates a chemical exchange in your mind, that influences your perceptions, and your ability to connect with others. Even if we can’t always verbalize how we feel in one kind of experience or the other, we feel the difference. We learn better from each other when we’re taking good care of ourselves, and making good connections on the same shared circle.

Kids are especially sensitive to this. They don’t have as much armor around them as we adults tend to have. They know when we’re moving gracefully and easily. They know when we’re struggling and stressed. It makes a difference.

Teaching foundations and yoga class structures for kids

Building the right pose library, movements, sequences, and language for sharing with kids, is all extremely important as well. And there are simple things to keep in mind. So we share in all this too. One small example: keep eye contact with your kids. If you put them into positions like down dog for long, you lose them. If you create simple sequences that keep you connected with them, building up to some fun challenges like crow and dancer, you have something wonderful to share.

If you’re a teacher or parent, caregiver or healthcare provider, we have an online Strala Kids Yoga Teacher Training that gives everything you need, to share this learning experience with kids. 

Empowering young people to form a strong connection with themselves, to trust their intuition for a lifetime, so they have their best chance at a safe, happy, and fulfilled life – this is important work, for anyone who spends time around young people.

And if you’re looking to lead kids classes in yoga and tai chi, or carry these new approaches, skill-sets and practices into your work, this training also provides you with a 100+Hour Kids Yoga Teacher Training Certification and continuing education credit.

Please click here to learn more about this training. It begins in October 2022, and once started, you can join any time, go at your own pace, and keep everything as a learning resource forever. We’re so excited to share this together with you here.

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To ease into the New Year we are happy to offer 1/2 off our 7 Day At Home Retreats. Enjoy Rest and Renew You, Simplify, and How to Practice at Home through the month of January. Use the code: HOME at checkout. These retreats are an easy way to glide into and firmly set all of your New Year Intentions.

Notice how you feel & respond. 

Download the January Strala Home Calendar.

January Schedule for Strala Home: The Strala Yoga app

Weekly LIVE Classes (EST)
Monday 8am: Intention-Setting Meditation & Energize Yoga
Tuesday 8am: De-Stress Yoga
Wednesday 8am: Gentle Yoga
Thursday 8am: Workout Yoga
Friday 8am: Tai Chi & Qigong
Saturday 8am: Strong Yoga

Special Workshops – Sundays 8am EST
Dec 5: The Dance of Life with Tara
Dec 12: Yoga the Tai Chi Way with Mike
Dec 19: The Dance of Life with Tara
Nov 26: Restorative Yoga with Tara

Practice Now

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