Registration is Now Open
What: Strala Online 25+Hour Yoga and Tai Chi Training for Vibrant Longevity. This yoga and tai chi training is a special chance for us to connect together, and discover how to carry these highly-effective foundations for vibrant longevity into all that you love doing. It’s something you’ll love carrying with you, always and everywhere, into everything you do. Click here to register.
And if you’re looking to lead classes in yoga, tai chi, or carry new approaches, skill-sets and practices into your work, this also provides a 25+Hour Yoga and Tai Chi Leadership Certification and continuing education credit.
Where: This course is entirely online, so you can join from right where you are each day. You’ll also have forever access to the private online group for everyone in this training, so you have all our shared sessions, questions, and discussions forever, as well as a place to keep connecting with your whole group.
When: Live video sessions January 6 through 8, 2023, and once we begin, you can get started whenever you like.These sessions can be completed in three days, just like our in-person intensive trainings, or you can go entirely at your own pace. Everything here is all recorded, so you can begin any time, watch on your own schedule, and keep it all as a resource forever.
Everyday private online group for everyone in this training. This group is for sharing more discussions and video sessions as questions and experiences come up, and also remains here for you forever, so we can all keep connecting and growing together. If you’re taking this course as a teacher training, review and practice is super-important, so please go through the instructional sessions twice, and always you can come back for more whenever you need it.
Training Cost: $595. This includes three instructional video sessions each day (or at whatever pace is best for you), all recorded so you can watch any time and keep them forever, a series of practice classes, plus forever-access to the private group for everyone joining this course. You can click here to register.
For thousands of years, the practices of tai chi and qigong have been well-known to provide an astonishing array of benefits, including astonishing levels of well-being and vibrantly-capable longevity.
In an all-new curriculum for this training, we’ll share this uniquely-special approach with you. It’s a chance to discover how you can carry these highly-effective foundations into all your yoga, tai chi, fitness, and well-being practices, as well as in a completely practical way across your whole life.
Through this practice of mobility, breath, and harmony, you discover something truly amazing. You can be better when you’re 40 than when you were 20, and again better at 80 than when you were 40. I’ve been wonderfully lucky to train with teachers who prove this each day, so magically and beautifully throughout their whole lives. It’s a practice that replaces the no-pain-no-gain approach found in so many of our efforts, with one that heals, replenishes, and enables in every breath. The result is we all get to feel better and do better, in all that we love doing, for a very long time.
We all deserve to feel better and do better, for a very long time to come. I’m so thrilled to be in this together with you.
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Our program is backed by mind-body medicine pioneer Dr. Deepak Chopra, and Chair of Neurology at Harvard and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Rudolph Tanzi. Strala is also a Registered Yoga School (RYS) with Yoga Alliance Professionals.
Please Click Here to Register
“Strala is an elegantly simple and sophisticated way to move our breath, our body, and our whole self into the state we need, to create who we want to be: the optimal expression of ourselves.”
– Dr. Rudolph Tanzi – Chair of Neurology at Harvard and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital
What’s in this Weekend Intensive Training
Tai chi and qigong are known for a wide array of well-documented health benefits, all gathering together to create a vibrantly healthy and capable long life.
The list of benefits include strengthened immunity, balance, bone density, cardiovascular and pulmonary function, stress-reduction, and help with stress-related and other ailments, including cancer. Clinical research has also strongly supported these 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.
In these three days together, we have a special chance to dive into how this all works, and how to make it real in our lives. Whether you have 5 minutes or 50, and whether you’re 20 or 80, it’s something we can put into our yoga, our tai chi and qigong, our fitness and all kinds of well-being practices. And maybe most of all, these foundations and practices are something we can put to work for us all day long, in all the moments we have. It’s our way to make every moment count, for creating something better.
Daily Plan and Topics
Introduction. An overview of tai chi and qigong foundations and practices for enabling vibrant longevity and healthspan.
Approach. How the foundations of tai chi and qigong empower our yoga, tai chi, qigong, fitness, and well-being practices, plus how we can carry these practices along for the ride of our whole lives – Always, Everywhere, in Everything we do.
How to enable an Always, Everywhere, in Everything practice. We can accomplish so much by giving ourselves a little time each day to slow down, feel what we feel, and respond in a way that makes things better, right now. Imagine how powerful it is when we discover it’s possible to carry this always, into every moment, in everything we do. Even when things get tough, we can find a way to make here better, and make it better to be here. It’s the practice of a lifetime, and we’ll share the practical foundations together here.
Give yourself a break. There’s a foundation in qigong practice called “softness” which tells us something very simple. Before you try to move, be movable. We all carry a lot of extra stress and tension, bracing for impact, just to be ready for when things get hard. But from a qigong perspective, this means we’re working twice as hard just to overcome resistance inside us, before we even make it to the challenge on the outside. So softness practice literally gives us a break by making sure we can move easily, even when things get hard.
Strengthen, relax, and heal, just by breathing. Another foundation in qigong that can carry across our whole lives, lies in creating a moving and healing relationship between your breath and body. Dr. Herbert Benson’s research with hypertension showed that very deep breaths, in a relaxed moving relationship with your body, bring on a cascade of healing effects that he called the Relaxation Response. Mountains of research have followed to support the chemical and neurological benefits from this kind of breathing. How you breathe can not only strengthen and enable you to do more than you imagined possible. It can also heal you, particularly from a tremendous lineup of ailments that have stress as a factor.
Work half as hard to do twice as much. Forget relying on your strongest parts to overcome what you think are your weakest. From a qigong perspective, pushing with the strength of your thigh or shoulder to move the rest of you along is like going to war with yourself. No matter how strong you are, this kind of isolated effort is depleting, and leads to imbalances in performance and health. You can’t do it forever, and for most of us, our knee and shoulder joints will tell us that pretty quickly.
Through a practice of harmony, qigong gives us a very different way. In every movement, use every part of you equally, to enable every other part. In qigong, this practice shifts us from being limited by our weakest links, to empowered by what we can do when everything we have is brought to the table.
Sustainability. Through these practices of mobility, breath, and harmony, you discover something truly amazing. You can be better when you’re 40 than when you were 20, and again at 80 than when you were 40. This isn’t just something nice to say. I’ve seen it’s astonishingly real again and again. More than ever I’m so happy to share in this together with you – a path that lets us feel better and do better, in all that we love doing, for a very long time.
Practice. All of our trainings are very practical. We’re not just talking about this – we’re going to do it together. So we have plenty of real class time for practice, exploration, and making what you want real in your everyday life.
What You Get
Approaches, Practices, Skill-sets: We’ll explore these foundations for creating vibrant longevity, put it all into practice, and discover how to keep things simple and straightforward for every day practice, right where you are, in whatever you’re doing. This is powerful enough to change everything. You are powerful enough to change everything. It all begins with you.
Daily Instructional Video Sessions: Live video sessions January 6 through 8, 2023, and once we begin, you can get started whenever you like.These sessions can be completed in three days, just like our in-person intensive trainings, or you can go entirely at your own pace. Everything here is all recorded, so you can begin any time, watch on your own schedule, and keep it all as a resource forever.
Practice Classes: You’ll have 10 classes in yoga and tai chi, for learning and building these foundations into your whole life.
Private Online Training Group: During and after this training, you’ll also have access to our private online group specially created for this training, so we can share questions and experiences together just like our in-person courses, and our daily instructional video sessions, which are also recorded, so you can watch and review whenever you like.
Community: Once we’ve completed this time together, you’ll have access to our other private online community, this one for Strala graduates worldwide. It’s our way to keep connecting with each other, and with Tara and Mike, for ongoing questions, sharing experiences, and progress.
Teaching Foundations: Following this intensive, if you want to share what you’ve learned here in your own classes, this is wonderful. And you can call your classes by the Strala name, as long as you’re staying current in your practice through enrollment in Strala Home. Of course there’s always more to learn and share as we keep growing together, so if you’re inspired for more, it’s wonderful to progress from here with more detailed guidance, approaches, and practices in our additional training programs.
Certification: We provide a 25+Hour Yoga and Tai Chi Leadership Training Certification upon completion of this training. These hours include our instructional sessions, classes, repetition, and practice, just like our in-person trainings. You’ll receive a formal 25 Hour Diploma, and a profile on our website that documents all your hours, coursework and degrees completed.
Strala is credited by the Chair of Neurology at Harvard, and Director of the Genetics Research and Aging Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, by mind-body-medicine pioneer Dr. Deepak Chopra, and by the global Yoga Alliance Professionals.
Continuing Education Credit: This training provides you with 25 hours of credit, which also counts toward the additional study and practice components in our 200+Hour Yoga Leadership Training, as well as our 300+Hour and 500+Hour Advanced Leadership Trainings.
Lifetime: Inspiring and uplifting leadership – creating the space for ground-breaking achievement in your own life and the lives of the people you lead – is the practice of a lifetime. When you learn to release stress, find harmony in your body and peace in your mind, heal what needs healing, and accomplish challenge with ease, you have something amazing to share.
Common Questions
Q: Can I call my class Strala after taking this Intensive?
A: Yes of course, once you’ve completed this training, you can join Strala Home for continuing education. It’s our way of sharing, growing, and progressing together in these skill-sets, practices, and approaches, for connecting and helping. As long as you’re here, you can use the name Strala Yoga as your class title. Often teachers and care providers also keep going each year or every few years, with another online or in-person training here. Always what we share is new each year, so you’re never repeating hours, and everything builds toward a more advanced degree and certification. Please click here to start with your Strala Home classes, we’re so happy for this place to keep supporting each other and practicing together each week.
Q: I’ve already done my 200 Hour Yoga Training, is this the same?
A: We follow a completely unique curriculum grounded in the movement and healing foundations of tai chi and qigong. So what you’ll learn here is all new, and makes a wonderful addition to any previous studies. And every year we share a new curriculum in all our courses, so always we can keep growing and progressing together.
Q: I’m not interested in teaching yoga or tai chi, but I want more ease in my life, is this for me?
A: Absolutely. We all deserve to feel better, and bringing sustainable ease and health into your life is a perfect reason to join in. Fair warning, once you start walking around embodying ease, folks are going to start asking you to show them how you’re doing it. We’ve had quite a few scientists, moms, school teachers, actors and performers join these programs for personal reasons, and end up sharing yoga in creative ways with those around them. A big part of my goal is de-mystifying leading yoga as something for a select few. Just like cooking, once you know and love the recipe, it’s impossible not to share.
Always if you have any questions, we’re right here. Please email us using Help@StralaYoga.com.
Who Is This For
Everything we do is designed to help people begin where they are, and develop the concrete practices that carry us where we want to go. So wherever you are is a perfect place to begin. This is true for all of our courses, including this online training.
The people joining our trainings and retreats are a wonderfully diverse and inspiring group. They range from 16 to over 80. They’re from dozens of countries worldwide. They are entrepreneurs and chief executives, professors and librarians, scientists and researchers, studio owners and fitness instructors, yoga teachers of every style, psychologists and physiotherapists, life and health coaches, doctors and lawyers. They are moms and dads, daughters and sons, and lifelong friends.
Some are relative beginners, some are long-time practicers and teachers. Some want to teach, and some want to progress with their own yoga. Wherever you are now is a great place to begin. We’re lucky to have this rich diversity, it makes wonderful ground for real-world learning and sharing.
You might join for your profession, for teaching yoga or tai chi, or you might join just for you. Whatever your purpose, we have this time to share a set of holistic skills and practices, that carry across your everything you do.
How It Works
All our trainings and retreats have a unique curriculum that’s different from what’s covered in other intensive, 100, 200, and 500 hour programs. So what you learn here will be all new approaches, practices, and skill-sets, and makes a nice continuation from any previous studies with Strala or anywhere, without repetition. You’ll always discover new ways to take good care of yourself, find harmony and ease in your body and life, and give this to the people you lead.
All this begins with you. You’re always leading what have, how you are, in everything you do. It’s in how you get around a room, how you get around your life, that people follow. Much more than what you say.
And it’s wonderful, magical, when what you say agrees with what you do. So we’re coming together here to share this as a practice. To create the ground we all need to be how we want to be, first in our selves, and then for each other.
It’s not always complicated, but it’s also not easy. It takes some slowing down, simplifying, subtracting the noise around us and in us. From here we see where we are, and discover who it is we’re meant to be. What are you good at? What do you love? It’s in these simple practices to find this, and grow stronger, more capable, in who we really are.
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.
FACULTY
Strala Trainings are all led entirely by the founders, and every member of our faculty has more than 20 years of practical experience, and between 4 and 10 years of advanced education at top institutions, including Harvard, Oxford, and University of Edinburgh. Our program is backed by mind-body medicine pioneer Dr. Deepak Chopra, and Chair of Neurology at Harvard and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Rudolph Tanzi.
Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala. Strala is practiced in more than 100 countries, and thousands of people are leading Strala in studios, gyms, and schools worldwide. Even more Strala training graduates bring what they learn to their office, team, healing practice, and across 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 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. 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 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. She is married to Strala co-founder Mike Taylor.
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 learned tai chi and other martial arts, with a practical military perspective guided by his grandfather. He later studied with Ken van Sickle, one of Cheng Man Ching’s original students on Broadway in New York City. Mike also explored the medical applications of these arts, studying mind-body medicine at Harvard. After running into walls with standard medical practice, Mike took up mountaineering, worked at a steel mill, and founded a software company in the healthcare industry. Now Mike has found his way back to tai chi, as a practical everyday way to help people be safe, and transform wherever they are into a better place.
Mike is married to Strala co-founder Tara Stiles, and climbs a few mountains in his spare time. Tara and Mike live in the Berkshire Mountains with their daughter Daisy.
REGISTRATION
Training Registration is $595. This includes three instructional video sessions each day (or at whatever pace is best for you), all recorded so you can watch any time and keep them forever, a series of practice classes, plus forever-access to the private group for everyone joining this course. You can click here to register.
Installment plans and scholarship help are available, just email Mike@StralaYoga.com.
Please understand that all payments are final, and this is non-refundable, except if you are not admitted this time. Admission to training is solely at Strala’s discretion.
About Strala
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. 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.
Resources
We have an online library of classes, retreats, and trainings with Tara and Mike, which includes weekly live classes and workshops. New videos added regularly, and always we’re here to help.
Questions
If you have any questions or need something, it’s always fine to reach us directly, using Help@StralaYoga.com.
Please Click Here to Register Now
Open the door to a whole new way of connecting, sharing, and growing with everyone in your life.
These trainings are an incredibly rewarding life-long adventure of mutual support, and inspiring accomplishment. We’re lucky to have this in our lives. Thank you everybody, it’s so exciting to get started with you here.