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.

The post How to Be Fit Without Pain and Injury appeared first on Strala Yoga.

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

The post How to Practice Softness appeared first on Strala Yoga.

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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When there is no more place for internal bullies, there is no more place for external bullies.

Enjoy this FREE Yoga to Be Calm Practice

The topic of alignment is an interesting one. In East Asian movement and healing systems, connection to your nature is central. So you learn to move your whole self with ease, grace, and coordination. Energy is unblocked, moving freely. Every part of you works happily and efficiently with every other part.

Learning to move always in alignment is how you form a positive connection first with your self, and from from here, with everything and everyone around you. So practice is given to learning about you. When you get to know everything you’ve got, you become very usable to yourself.

Part of this practice it to unlearn all the ways we’ve been taught to move unnaturally. For so much of our lives, we learn that when things get tough, it’s time to struggle and force our way to the top.

We carry too much tension into our movement, ignore how we feel, isolate one part of our body from another, hold our breath, and push hard.  This works, up to a point. But we each reach a level of challenge where it’s a breakdown strategy. It breaks us down.

You’re spending so much energy fighting against the challenges inside you that you don’t have anything left for the challenges outside. So we need a different strategy. We need to learn how to move in alignment with ourselves. Naturally.

Whether your study is calligraphy or combat, painting or healing, traditional Chinese and Japanese philosophy and practice has long centered on this connection to our nature. It’s a practice that doesn’t lead you to move out of alignment, so it’s not necessary to stop, pose, and fix things.

When you move in agreement with yourself, internal struggle falls away.  Which is most of the struggle.

The positions or forms are simply arbitrary waypoints, rather than goals which distract us. So your focus turns instead to being right here, where you are.

It’s a lifetime practice, something you can be better at when you’re 40 than 20, and again when you’re 80 than 40. In the beginning, maybe we don’t move so well, but we have other ways to get around. We can use force to overcome some of the obstacles we meet. But not all. We need a better way, so we keep practicing.

We learn not to push so much to be somewhere other than where we are.  We learn to be here.  It gives us a chance to understand what we are.  And from here, we can move.

Somewhere along the way, you’ll notice that you move better when things are easy, but not so good when things get tough. That’s ok. If you’re practicing with another person and you move unnaturally, they can point out your mistake through your connection with them. If you’re practicing on your own, you’ll sense this mistake as a break in connection with yourself. It won’t feel good. And now you have a new option. Rather than tuning out and pushing through when things don’t feel good, you can tune in, a find a better way.

Usually our mistakes involve disconnecting from our nature. When we’re disconnected, we move in a way that’s imbalanced and without coordination – for example, with too much tension, isolation of one part from another, poor body position, or leading from extremities rather than center – all of which blocks the free flow of energy.

Always we get back to where we need to be through a simple reconnection to our nature.

Energy isn’t something we need to direct or manipulate. It’s natural state is flow. We just need to get out of the way. We just need to be.

Which takes practice! It’s our path to effortless power. It allows us to heal what needs healing, go where we want to go, and achieve what we dream. Most important, it feels completely uninhibitedly good, to live this way.

–

Yoga in the last few decades is something quite different, and has grown obsessed with pose-based alignment. People are taught at great length to move awkwardly and out of alignment with themselves, and then to stop, pose, and fix the problem.

This fix generally takes one of two forms. In the first, a teacher attempts to externally manipulate the student into an idea of correct alignment. In the second, the student attempts to push their way into this same external idea of what’s correct for everyone.

From an Eastern perspective neither approach works, for several reasons.

1) There’s no such thing as a single correct alignment that looks the same on every person. That’s just an idea, with little connection to individual reality. We all have our own bodies, our own shapes and histories, each worthy of individual response.

2) It’s not possible to push or think your way into alignment with yourself.  That makes good sense on any imaginable level.

3) Alignment isn’t a disconnected static concept, it’s a holistic moving reality.  So alignment can not be achieved in static forms by disconnecting and pushing one body part at a time into some idea of what’s correct.  It is achieved by moving in harmony with yourself, as one whole connected being.  Which is what you are.

Alignment is found by practicing softness, so you become movable, creating a relationship between your body and breath, so your breath moves you, moving your body as one whole body from center, rather than as a collection of isolated parts, and creating a position that always supports where you are, and where you want to go next.

As with older Eastern forms, in Strala you learn to move always in alignment with your self, and we practice this equally using the forms from yoga, tai chi, qigong, Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine, and everyday human movement. You learn not to create problems that need fixing. And you’re able to do much more, with much less effort. Being in alignment with yourself also feels good, in everything you do.

So alignment is extremely important. When you move in agreement with yourself, it unlocks your complete potential. It also keeps you safe. At the same time, it’s useful to remember that maintaining a visual of “correct” alignment in a static position is a small part of the safety picture.

Most injury comes when we hold excess tension in our bodies and then carry this tension into movement, which brings the old high-school physics equation F = MA into the picture. Movement under excess tension is the problem. This tension becomes aggravation and injury when we disconnect from feeling, and push into ideas of how we should look in a pose. Which is why injury is now so common in yoga. All the static alignment in the world doesn’t protect us once we have to move. If we move poorly, we won’t ever see our potential, and we’re going to get hurt.

Let’s look at chair pose as an example. Here, squeezing our knees together in a chair pose as we twist from side to side won’t keep anyone safe.

If your immobilize yourself and then try to move, one part of you is now in conflict with your other parts.  You have gone to war with yourself!  Aggravation and injury happens here.

Of course if a convenient crane is available to lift you out of this tension-inducing movement and then drop you in a pool, you’d be safe. But we need to learn a better way to move, so we’re not inducing tension in our knees, and then carrying this tension into our subsequent movement. It’s this movement under tension that injures and inhibits us.

Let’s try a different way. As a start, keep your feet hip-width or even a little wider apart – a nice, natural, stable base. No squeezing or tensing is needed; instead, stay movable whenever you try to move. On each inhale, allow your body to be gently lifted out of the pose. On each exhale, move gently in – whether it’s sinking a bit into your chair, or moving into a twist. Then lift again on your inhale, to a less compressed position. Using this approach, your knees – and all of you – will go where it’s needed to go, to keep you moving in the most efficient and effective way possible. This is the Movement Principle of “Open Door, Close Door.”

When you’re moving in this way, you learn to be in alignment with yourself, every part moving in harmony with every other part. There’s no longer a need to think your way into your body, to control or immobilize one part, while worrying about where the other parts go.

You get out of your own way through this practice.  You also discover how much more capable you are when you connect with and follow your nature.  This is something valuable to learn.

-Mike

Enjoy this FREE Yoga for Healing Practice

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

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Let’s start with bones. But bones don’t move themselves, muscles are involved here too. So alignment is the position of our structure, our bones, and what our muscles do to create that.  Now for right alignment. And for this we might need some context, to say what’s right.

Whether it’s static, moving, or accomplishing something in a particular context, right alignment is the position requiring least amount of effort to be here, move there, get that. The least amount of effort to accomplish what you want in your life.

So maybe we can also say what it’s not. Squeezing, fidgeting, fixing, fussing, rotating, flexing, engaging, extending, in so many ways thinking our way, one disconnected part at a time, into some idea of an ideal shape. This is working as hard as possible, to do even something very simple. Like a yoga pose. Just a practice of working too hard, same as always. Which gives us a strategy for life of working very hard, to accomplish much less than our potential. This strategy of stress, struggle, too much thinking, too much disconnection, tension.

As soon as you pick one part of you, try to fix or fuss about it, things get very difficult. Alignment becomes difficult, with this disconnection. You lose the source. How all of you got here, all together. Now it’s a pileup of symptoms. This foot, this rib, that shoulder, that tailbone, each causing problems. This is needed, sometimes. Treating symptoms this way is needed if hit by a bus, we need to fix a broken arm. But mostly, treat the source.

It’s very difficult to practice disconnection, tension, pushing as a way to arrive at connection, ease, and peace.

So we need some different strategy, to accomplish something bigger. Some connection, balance, harmony, ease under challenge. So this is right alignment. Ease, the most ease possible, under any condition. We’re all trying to line up this way. The important part of the equation, more than just the line, is how we get there.

Have you heard the phrase signal to noise ratio? It fits here. Right alignment is how we get the strongest signal, the least noise interference. So we can increase the signal to noise ratio. Just stress, so much control, over-trying, over-doing, this creates a lot of noise, not so much signal. More ease, more ability to move in balanced connection with our whole self, in some good relationship with our whole self, then we have more signal. We sensitize, see, connect, to everything.

We become what we really are, here. Not the stress-based version of our selves, covered by so many layers, legacies, copies, habits. A different version. Unlayered. In alignment with your self, always. You become the ease-based version of your self. Creatively, breathtakingly, unique.

-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

The post What Does Alignment Mean to You? appeared first on Strala Yoga.

So is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Sure. For me it’s cookies. Sugar isn’t a bad thing on its own. In fact, it’s a fundamental component in cellular respiration that we need to survive. But, it’s pretty easy for us (me) to have way too much, because there’s so much available all around us now. Which can lead to all kinds of serious health problems, ranging from depression and anxiety to diabetes and cancer.

So yes we can have too much of a good thing. But what about ease. Can we have too much of this in our lives? Do we need to input some stress to stay on our toes?

It’s a reasonable question, and there’s a short answer that comes to mind.

It’s unlikely that any of us find ourselves living with too much ease. It’s unlikely that any of us are living too much in an optimal chemical state. That’s just not the reality of how we live. So with this particular good thing, ease, we don’t need to worry too much about steering away.

But, some good vigorous challenge-tackling – the ability to handle stress and accomplish great feats – is also good. In fact, it’s part of navigating our way to progress. And ease in this context, in a chemically and neurologically useful sense, isn’t just sitting on a couch doing nothing. Because this doesn’t lead to much of anything.

Instead, our aim is to have ease in the midst of everything, so we can handle greater and greater levels of challenge. It’s how we fulfill to our greatest potential the very human desire for creation, invention, progress.

I’ve been thinking of this a bit lately. The best fighters I know, best rowers, best climbers, aren’t stressed, rigid, anxious and afraid. So they endure and thrive much longer, and much more successfully, than someone living in an anxiety and stress-driven chemical state. Go into battle as if already dead. It’s a very old Chinese writing. Simmering in stress and tension, you’re already at war with your self on the inside. There’s nothing left for the war outside. So you have no energy for challenge, death will come soon. But that’s not what anyone wants. So much better to be already dead.

The thing about survival states, we’re designed to be here for only very short times, measured in seconds to minutes, not hours or whole lives. Which means they’re not a good performance strategy, unless what we want to do always takes less than 2 minutes.

So if you’re a 2-minute kind of person, maybe your performance can be all stress-based. But for most of us, really we want both. Ease and challenge at the same time. It’s how we create progress, both inside and out.

How to get there? Practice. We’re not used to practicing ease, so it’s something we actually need to practice, just like we’ve practiced stress and struggle. And to make it effective, start simple.

Practice the simplest things, easily, all the time. Whenever it’s possible, it’s really useful to approach your body and mind through how you move in your life – hopefully before serious conditions or symptoms develop that need more urgent intervention. This practice creates the conditions we want – in our chemistry, neurology, gene expression, and psychology – to accomplish much more, in everything there is.

It’s why yoga, tai chi, qigong, can all be such useful places to practice, when we use them to practice moving well. Practice just the forms, making poses, maybe not so much benefit, if you’re thinking of neurology, chemistry, rewiring our old habits. We don’t change so much by making a shape. But how we move and breathe is at the heart of how we handle stress, how we age, our healthspan and disease, and what we’re able to accomplish in this body. So we use these forms to practice how we move.

It’s not often that we learn to climb in the Karakoram by dropping from helicopter onto a vertical wall of rock and ice at 7,000 meters. More we like to start simple, discover how to use our body in the best possible way, how to create some harmony with our whole selves. From simple, we can gradually escalate the level of challenge we approach, sticking with the strategy of ease, harmony, using just the amount of energy needed to handle what’s directly in front of us. Nothing more.

When we slip back to the old stress and struggle strategy, we use too much energy. On the mountain, use too much energy and you have not enough for the next challenge.  So if that challenge isn’t optional, maybe you die.  Or you get carried home.

In yoga or tai chi, when you slip back to using too much energy, too much stress, some disharmony, you get to see yourself some more.  You see where you are, what layers of pre-tension, disconnection, exist between here and the un-layered uninhibited version of your self. Who you really are. And from here keep working on creating something better, something bigger for yourself.

The amazing thing about this un-layering process – this path to finding connection and harmony as our way – yes, it works. Better than the other way. So we do bigger things. But more, this forming a positive connection with our selves, without pretense, with ease rather than struggle, we form also a positive connection with everything. Everyone. So this is much much bigger.

– by 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

The post The 2-Minute Performance Problem appeared first on Strala Yoga.

“All this de-stressing and finding ease in my life is so wonderful. Do I need anything else for my health, for my everything, aside from yoga and tai chi?  Should I drop running, quit the gym, and change my job?”

If your instinct is you’d rather not give up everything you love, it would be nice to improve not abandon your work, and life is really a bit bigger than just studying yoga . . . then your instinct is probably right.

Strala as a philosophy and practice for moving well in your life isn’t limited to yoga or tai chi. Yoga, tai chi, and qigong give us some simple, uncomplicated movements for practice. It’s easier to see our old habits here, when things are simple. We get to see where we are using stress and struggle as our strategy for moving through life. And it’s also easier to create good new habits here, to replace stress and struggle with some harmony, gracefulness, connection through our whole body.

We aren’t likely to learn how to climb K2 if we’re dropped by helicopter on a vertical wall at 7,000 meters. We begin learning to move well, along with the techniques and forms we need to accomplish very big things, in a much simpler place. From this practice, we have something useful when things are harder, more complicated. If we begin this practice in the middle of great challenge, it’s more difficult, and makes it more likely that we’ll use our old strategies for challenge, more stress and struggle.

If this practice gets limited to just our yoga time, our tai chi time, this isn’t so useful. Life is bigger than this.

And probably if it seems limited this way, it isn’t really there anyway. It’s maybe more just pretending to be easy, hiding the stress, in these practices.

Because how we move is how we are. It’s in our wiring. So what we have in one place will be reflected, repeated, in every place.

How we practice yoga or tai chi is pretty much the same as how we do everything else. So if we want to change something, if we want some harmony, connection, and grace in how we move through our lives – and not so much stress and struggle – it takes going back to very simple, and having a structure for change, a way to practice something new. Our principles of movement, used within a yoga or tai chi practice, give us this structure to see our selves, where we are, and to make some good change.

And from here, go big.  Run uphill for 20 miles with half your body resting in every step.  Use more breath than muscle as your source of power in high intensity training.  Take the Haute Route like it’s a walk in the park.  Change how you work, walk, climb stairs, open doors, speak, and connect.  You’ll change everything, changing you.

A long way of saying, practice simple, and practice everywhere.

– by 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

The post A Practice for Everything appeared first on Strala Yoga.

“If no-pain-no-gain is such a terrible life strategy – that ages us faster, shortens our healthspan, and keeps us locked away far short of our potential – then why is it so popular?”

It’s true. Nearly all of us have grown up thinking that the hardest way is the best way. Stress and struggle are how we get anyway good, and ease is for vacation . . . which never really comes, because we’ve spent so much time practicing stress and struggle, it’s just tough to leave it behind. So how did we get here, and how can we leave it behind?

For the first part, there are a few really strong factors at work – including our chemistry, neurology, psychology, and culture.

Beginning at the beginning, we’re chemically addicted to stress.

Our evolutionary design gave us stress cocktails that include adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and endorphins to make escape from danger, hunting, and reward-seeking possible, and even pleasurable. Which is good when you’re faced with an angry herd of marauding giraffe, or need to delay your rest and relaxation time long enough to find food.

This same design never anticipated that we would put stress into every minute of every day – even into our health and healing practices. But, we do. We carry the stress and struggle, and the oddly-pleasing chemistry it creates, into pretty much everything. Unfortunately, this keeps us in a stress state for most of our time, and out of relaxation and healing state, where we should be most of our time.

So that’s a quick run at chemistry. Next there’s our neurology – or in short, our habits. Our body pays really close attention to everything we do, assumes that we’re doing the right thing, and then even works hard to make it easier for us to do it again. This happens right down to the level of our neurological pathways, which are constantly created and fast-tracked (myelinated) to keep doing more of what we choose to do.

The catch is, thanks to a few factors like chemical addiction, psychology, and cultural support, we don’t always choose to do the best or most adaptive things. And it’s not like every time we have a choice – a good behavior or a bad one – it’s equally likely that we go either way. Not at all. Once we’ve made the bad choices for a bit, it’s increasingly likely that our neural networks will fast-track us into making that bad choice, and follow that bad habit. So our habits are not always the ones we want – but they do become more and more a part of us. Which maybe gives us our first clue to a solution.

Our body pays really close attention to everything we do. Maybe we should, too.

Next there’s our psychology, our mindset and beliefs, which gets wrapped up in everything from our chemistry and neurology to culture and all kinds of personal experience. And fundamentally, what we believe is what we do.

I see this all the time just in yoga. If what people believe is that it’s really important – even life-changing – to put both feet behind their head, or bend over backwards enough to put their heads into their bottoms, then even if they say it’s ok to go easy, to enjoy the process, what they’ll really do is push hard for the endpoint. More stress and struggle, in a practice that – done another way – could release the stress and produce harmony and good health instead. So there’s another clue here.

What we believe is very important, and it takes some examination to uncover what’s real for each of us. Because our beliefs are much more than what we say. They are exactly what we do.

And last, there’s our culture, our community. What if we begin to believe that harmony and ease are a better life strategy than stress and struggle – but we find ourselves in a community where this comes off like our hair is on fire? Work is just always going to be hard as nails, you’re not supposed to like it or even understand it, just endure it, and someday this will get you somewhere. And same for your health and fitness practice. If that’s our community, can we do something different?

So there’s a last clue here, somewhere in what it means to be a community, and why we’re all here. The truth is, we come together to support each other. And we all want about the same thing. Feel better. Feel happier. Have some progress and achievement in this life. Community is created for this. And it’s created around what we believe – but even more direct, it’s created around what we do. So what we do is important. It’s important, the choices we make.

It’s important that we believe our best way to get where we’re going is by feeling good every step along the way. Because how we get where we’re going is how we will feel when we get there. And it’s important that we practice this. Not just think about it, not just say it. Practice.

Yoga, tai chi, qigong, all places that can be good for this practice. You don’t learn to climb mountains by dropping from a helicopter onto a vertical wall at 7,000 meters. Start simple, learn to move well from here. These practices give very simple forms to see our old habits that don’t work so well and build some new ones that do, so we have them in our bodies and minds when things get more complicated, more difficult.

Our neurology, our gene expression, our chemistry and psychology – are all created in how we move through this life, in the choices we make. We move with aggression, force, stress, this creates a chemistry and neurology, a certain set of habits, that lets us accomplish some things, and also leads us to aggravation and injury, to less health, less happy.

We move with connection, harmony with our whole self, grace and ease even under challenge – this also produces a chemistry and neurology, a set of habits, that lets us accomplish far more, being fully who we are without the pre-tension of stress and self-limiting habits. More healthy. More happy.

It’s why we’re all here, practicing this, together.

– by 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

The post Why Is No-Pain-No-Gain So Common? appeared first on Strala Yoga.

This comes up sometimes. A part of us doing something another part doesn’t like. Recently it was in a question from a friend about learning martial arts. I’ll share a bit of her question here, it’s helpful for learning martial arts if that’s your interest. It might also relate to some other choices we make, about how we learn, and what we practice each day.

“It felt like we were consciously destroying our bodies, crushing our feet, legs and joints. Seriously, it was harder than getting kicked and hit by a guy who was twice my size. So my question is: can I practice a contact self defense martial art without crushing my body? How do I go about it? I gave up tai chi because I didn’t like the way the teacher was making us move, we were supposed to be standing on bent knees for 75 minutes and it hurt.”

Well as a start, this experience is pretty normal. And, we always have a choice.

We can approach combat, challenge, by first going to war with ourselves. Or we can approach it by first making peace.

In the first way, you beat yourself up, as much as possible, imagining that this is good practice for beating other people up.

In the second, you create harmony with your self, as much as possible. So when conflict arises, you are not wasting your energy on beating yourself up. This would just deplete you, as you’ve now experienced, before the outside battle even begins.

It’s probably best not to practice depleting yourself, by going to war with yourself. This gives people some satisfaction of feeling very worn out, but is not of much value for moving in conflict, resolving conflict.

It’s more useful to learn how to move well. Also more difficult, than just beating ourselves up. Because it’s not what we’re used to doing.

See what’s inside of you, drop bad habits, build good ones. From here you have a chance to see what’s outside of you, and respond by moving harmoniously, moving well. Which isn’t something you learn by beating yourself up.

Of course, this isn’t a common way to teach. Because it’s not a common way to be.

As teachers, we’re always giving our being. How we are. If our experience of life, how we feel about ourselves, is in this internal conflict, frustration, disconnection, disharmony, this is what we give.

It doesn’t matter much what words we say, if our being is something different. So it’s good to practice something better, so we give something better.

Learn to move well in you first. Give this time. If you’re interested in how to move in conflict, there are some techniques, some forms that make sense in this context. But moving well is first. The right form for moving in conflict has a chance to arise naturally in you, from you, following this practice.

– by 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

The post How to Learn Martial Arts appeared first on Strala Yoga.