How Tai Chi Can Improve Your Yoga

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When we introduced tai chi as a practice in our 300+Hour Advanced Leadership Training last July, it had an unexpected result. We wanted to give everyone a new way of practicing the same set of principles for releasing stress, healing what needs healing, and moving with grace and harmony in our bodies and minds – even when things get challenging. Which was wonderful to share.

What we didn’t expect was how helpful it was for all of us, to see ourselves again.

In a way, so many of us have spent so much time with yoga, that really we’re all too good at it! So even when we carry all the old habits from our lives – the ones we don’t want so much – into our yoga, it’s tough to see. Because we’re so good at getting by.

Even better, we’re so good at achieving so much. Even when it’s hard, stressful, painful. Even when we’re getting in our own way.

Practicing tai chi together, we had a chance to change this. We could be beginners again. We didn’t need to be good at this, at all. We could just see who we are, right here, now. The smallest things could become interesting again. The smallest moves uncover so much. It’s why all those old people practicing tai chi are still working each day to move a hand, a foot, a breath, in a better way. Because softness, harmony with our selves, and with each other, is the practice of our lifetime.

Small moves lead to big moves.

Strala follows a mindset, approach, and set of principles for moving well in your life. We practice this together now through a few different form vocabularies, including yoga, tai chi, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and also our regular human vocabulary – how we navigate through life each day. So whatever vocabulary you pick for practice, the underlying principles are all the same.

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, by helping us learn to bring our entire self into everything we do, unblock energy where it’s stuck, and move more naturally and efficiently through challenge.