Treat Yourself Like a Good Friend Who Asks for Help.
It’s my birthday month and for the last, gosh almost 10 years, I’ve spent my birthday leading yoga, hanging with community, and snuggling with family. From NYC, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris to Miami, being in a group practicing and discovering ease has been everything I ever wanted. Thank you.
Having Strala Home, our global studio, has been a dream of mine since I first started leading yoga, around 20 years ago. When Mike and I first started the Strala NYC studio in his living room, I often said, but what about everyone who isn’t living within a 10 block radius that wants to be here? Because, I think, NYC is a fun place to visit, lots of people started adding us to their destination and would show up for classes or trainings. I absolutely loved meeting people from all around the world to share in this practice, and see everyone hang out with each other was and still is our own little global party of ease. I couldn’t believe it. We’d go around and say who we are and where we are from and it was like the UN of yoga in the room.
I still felt for all the people who might want to be in that room, who weren’t able to be there. Everyone has busy lives and coming to one specific location for a yoga class or training is a very special thing. Back in those days broadcasting a yoga class seemed like something you’d need prime time news tv truck and hundreds of pounds of cables to pull off. Having yoga at home is possible with your favorite youtube video, and I’m so grateful to have connected with so many people in that way since 2006, but as we all know, the internet has changed for the chaotic. These platforms are designed to make us feel anxious. That’s the opposite of what we want with our practice of ease, harmony and connection.
I craved something calm, peaceful and harmonious for you. And now we have it! Daily classes, workshops, trainings, community board and now our Strala Hangs, online meetups. Together we created a calm, safe, place to practice, from the comfort of your home. I’m so grateful. Thank you so much for practicing with us on Strala Home the Strala Yoga app.
Strala Home is here for our every day moments, making taking good care of you, something to look forward to. I’m so grateful to all of our members. If you’re not already a member, enjoy your 7 day FREE trial now, and let us know if you need any extra help. You deserve to feel better. We mean it.
Please join us for practice and sharing at StralaHome.
Download the May Strala Home Calendar.
Practice together with us at StralaHome Now.
We have our usual new every day practices for in the Practice this Week category right at the top.
A great place to connect with everyone is right here on our Community Board at StralaHome. Please let us know your requests, suggestions, how it’s going for you and how you are feeling. We love hearing from you. Also feel fee to use this as a place to create your own posts, let us know what you are up to, events you’d like to bring awareness to, and things like that. It’s social media that’s positive!
We’re happy to let you know the app version of StralaHome, Strala Yoga for iphone android, apple tv, roku, and all the fancy places, has some great updates that you have been asking for including the ability to create multiple playlists of your favorite practices, instead of just one favorites list. Yay!
Strala Hangs is Happening Saturday May 27th 10:30am EST
Come and hang and meet members of this community of ease. We’ll chat about yoga, how things are for you, and some of the themes of Hope by Jane Goodall that we see in our yoga practice. Conservation of energy, doing what you can with what you have, being consistent and more. This will be a fun one. Don’t worry if you haven’t finished or even started the book. Everyone is invited! Join here
Strala Reads is a no-pressure book club. We are celebrating reading as part of wellbeing. We are reading Burst by Mary Otis for May. Don’t worry about if you can’t read a book a month, just join. There is literally NO PRESSURE and no endpoints, just like our yoga. It’s so fun. We have monthly meet ups where we hang, chat yoga, catch up, geek out about where we all are in the world, from Asia, to Europe, to South America, to North America, Canada, and so many places in between, we are the world!! We want you there
Please join us for practice and sharing at StralaHome.
Upcoming Training & Events
200+Hour Yoga Teacher Training with Tara, Mike, and Sam Berlind in Miami
May 8, 2023 – May 21, 2023
We’ve been coming to Miami more than a decade now for retreats and Strala Trainings. It’s the perfect warm and relaxed atmosphere to make moving well and feeling better a real part of your life, and what you share with others. Our theme for this 200+Hour Strala Training is Co-Creating. Leadership easily slides down a tough path of doing only for others – which invokes a leaning forward, off-center and out of balance, sacrificing yourself for someone else, for an idea about a greater good. It’s a well-meaning path, but it has an endpoint, often in burnout and injury.
So there’s a real magic you feel right away in the tai chi practice of harmony – that makes it so clear how things don’t get better when one part of us suffers to help another part. Or when one person suffers to help another. There’s a better way. No part of us is ever truly isolated. No one of us ever truly isolated. Even when we are not.
The magic of tai chi, that we can carry into our yoga and our everything, is in finding this truth of harmony – in how we care for ourselves, and in how we connect, create, and care for each other. There’s always a way to help, to lead, to enable, that helps all of who I am, that brings all of who I really am to the table.
Every one us can come together in this practice of harmony, and this shared circle of caring without endpoints. Through yoga, tai chi, and shiatsu, we’ll focus on the tools we need to co-create while practicing, leading, and sharing all the moments we have together. – TS
How to Find Ease in the Mess – Conversation and Q&A with Tara Stiles – LIVE Online
Ease brings with it a very different feeling. It says we accomplish most – that everything truly inspiring and magical in this world is accomplished – through harmony and peace. And it’s not just a nice idea. There are very clear practices that make it real in your life – a path we can each choose to move away from no-pain-no-gain in our lives not only because it sounds better. It also works better.
Join us for a whole-you centered meditation, followed by a talk on applying the practice of ease to support your life, especially when things get messy, and a Q&A.
June 4, 2023
20+Hour Intensive Yoga Training with Tara and Mike in Berlin, Germany
Sept 23, 2023 – Sept 24, 2023
Berlin has become a wonderful home base for us, thanks to our global community of ease-makers. Joining a 2 day intensive is a comforting mix of new friends looking for more calm, and leaders of all yoga styles and backgrounds, excited for some self care time and a big reset.
We begin each day with an inclusive Energize practice. We spend the day workshopping principles of moving into harmony and balance with our selves, and all that’s here to support us, carrying these ancient foundations of qigong and tai chi into your yoga, and our everything. And we wind the day down with a Gentle practice.
It’s a mini-retreat, a renewing burst to invigorate, replenish, and inspire. You’ll discover a wonderful way to be, just for you, and for leading people together on this same circle of self-enabling care. Everyone is welcome. – TS
Retreat – Dolomites, Italy Peaks + Foreset + Flow
April 28 – May 3, 2024
This is a special collaboration retreat with our longtime friend and OG strala guide, Erin Lewis, founder of Eat Pray Move. Join us in the spectacular Dolomite region of Italy for a week of luxurious self-care, daily yoga, forest bathing meditation, spa time, and learning how to find ease and flow in our lives.
200+Hour Yoga Training with Tara, Mike, and Sam Berlind in Berlin, Germany
November 18, 2024 – December 1, 2024
Berlin is the perfect home to soak in your 200+Hour Strala Yoga Teacher Training, together with a wonderfully supportive, caring, and inspiring group.
You’ll learn to move through your yoga, and all that you love doing, in a way that’s powerful, sustainable, and healing. You’ll discover the ancient foundations of qigong, for mobilizing, harmonizing, unweighting, and replenishing in every breath, and every step. And you’ll learn to use these foundations in your yoga, and all your moments, to transform wherever you are into something better.
If you’re a care-giver, a teacher or health practitioner, in your family or across whatever you’re doing, you understand what it means to give until you’re out of energy. There’s a big secret and gift waiting for you in these practices. It’s at the heart of why Strala Guides and practitioners have found a way to stop burnout, and keep going sustainably, for the people they help and love.
There’s something deep in the foundations of tai chi and qigong, that teaches a way to care for you – in every moment, every action, every breath – and in all those same moments, how you can bring the people you support into this same circle of healing and care. It’s literally called turning lines into circles. The lines of giving and giving until you hit an endpoint, depleted – are transformed in these practices. In their place you find a way of being, moving, and giving that keeps going, that lets us all move each other together into a better place, on a shared circle of caring.
Our program is for anyone interested in feeling better, and gaining the tools to help others work toward enjoying a life of wellbeing. You’ll have yoga with Tara, tai chi with Mike, and shiatsu with Sam Berlind. Yes, you’ll learn how to lead a yoga class, in countless variations. But what we’re practicing alongside these tools is a real-life all-the-time self care practice, that cares for and empowers all that you do. This program changes every time, and changes lives every time. – TS