What do you want to be good at doing? What do you want your life to be like?

Ask these questions when you practice your yoga. If you practice a lot, you’ll likely get exactly what you practice!

You can push and force your body to take a shape that isn’t your own.

You can get into your own shape.

You can spend many hours getting into a pose.

You can spend many hours getting into feeling.

You can memorize other people’s rules and regulations.

You can feel, connect to your intuition, and create your own rules.

You can practice hiding comfortably away from difficulties in your life.

You can move easily with challenge, and lift yourself out of difficulty.

You can follow a guru.

You can follow yourself.

You can struggle, and learn to do hard things the hard way.

You can be easy, and learn to do hard things the easy way.

You can make someone else’s yoga from the outside in.

You can make your own yoga from the inside out.

Not too many people walk into yoga saying “Hello! I want to sign my control over to a guru, learn to do things the hard way, and injure myself! Oh, and, I want to become less capable in my life!” Mostly we all want to feel good. We want to walk through life creatively and capably on our own two feet. We want to live healthy and happy, and inspire our friends to do the same.

It’s a good philosophy. So take a look at the yoga practice. Does it match? Or do philosophy and practice appear like they’ve never met? Maybe philosophy leaps out the window when practice time begins! Someone tells us there is a correct and advanced way to pose, and there is a sacred stack of textbooks, rules, and regulations we must follow to enlighten ourselves. They know this of course because their guru told them so. And if we’re one of the chosen few, we can stand in line to get the sacred transmission!

Sounds odd, right? Well, before we walk away from that strange approach, let’s look at the results. Is the yoga working? Are people getting what they need?

In my wanderings around the yoga world, I haven’t seen it work. I’ve seen it make people less capable in their lives, their work, and their relationships. I’ve seen people injure themselves physically and psychologically in their yoga. I haven’t seen people lifting themselves out of difficulties in their lives; I’ve seen them get stuck hiding under a comfortable yoga blanket.

Is this because things in life are just so hard there’s no solution? I don’t think so.

When people connect to themselves and feel who they are, again and again I see people get happy. It seems like there’s happy in there, just waiting for us to listen and feel. They get healthy, so looks like healthy is in there for us too. They get more creative, intuitive, and capable in their lives. Again and again, I see these things happening.

It begins with choice, and it’s all up to us. We can choose signing it over to a guru and someone else’s unbreakable rules and regulations. Comforting, but not effective. We can study books. Academically intriguing, but we’ve got a body to live in, and feeling begins here.

We can also choose to feel into who we are, see what we’ve got to work with, and act on that. No aggressive struggle, just easy capability. No rules but the ones you make. No shape other than your own. No life but the one you create for your self. These are good things to practice!

You’ll see it in your yoga. It’s in how you move, how you feel into your body, how you respond to what you feel. You can get very good at your yoga this way. You can get very good at your life this way. It all begins with choice.

-Mike

About Strala Yoga Training

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, 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.

Who’s What’s and When’s of Strala Yoga Training