Early-Bird Registration is Now Open
What: 20+Hour Intensive Training in Tai Chi and Qigong. For thousands of years, the practices of tai chi and qigong have been well-known to provide an astonishing array of benefits, for health and healing, fitness and well-being, work and caregiving, and just plain feeling good each day.
In an all-new curriculum for this training, we’ll share the highly-effective foundations of tai chi and qigong, alongside their extraordinary application to everyday life and work – including yoga, fitness, all kinds of athletics 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.
Where: EDEN*****, Breite Straße 43, 13187 Berlin / Pankow. A beautiful sunny open space with a wonderful cafe.
When: Saturday 1 February through Sunday 2 February 2025, from 9am to 5pm each day.
What to bring: Comfortable clothes for moving, a yoga mat, and paper + pen are all helpful.
Special Early-Bid Cost: This very special early-bird is $550, given as two equal installments of $275 each, with the first to register now, and the second whenever you want before we meet up in February. This early-bird special is $350 less than the usual cost of $900, and is available through Monday September 30, Please click here to register now.
Scholarships: We have all kinds of scholarships and easy installment plans available, so if you want to be here and need help, please just email Mike@StralaYoga.com.
Certification and CEC: We provide a Strala 20+Hour Intensive Yoga Teacher Training Certification and formal diploma upon successful completion, your degrees and hours are listed on our site, and this course counts for 20 hours of continuing education
Accreditation: Our Yoga, Tai Chi, and Qigong trainings and classes are accredited by the American Tai Chi and Qigong Association, and Strala is a Registered Yoga School (RYS) with Yoga Alliance Professionals.
Our program is also backed by mind-body medicine pioneer Dr. Deepak Chopra, and the Professor of Neurology at Harvard, Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit, and Co-Director of the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Space in this training is limited, so please reserve as soon as possible. Enrollment will move to a waiting list when full.
Accommodation: There are many good hotel and Airbnb options all within easy walking or train distance.
Click Here to Register for Your Early-Bird Now
What You’ll Find Here
I’ve practiced both tai chi and qigong, as well as yoga, for many decades. I’m a beginner in so many ways, but there’s one thing I know for sure. When these practices come together, something magical happens. We learn how to be good to ourselves.
Even when we’re getting so much done and going through so many big challenges, the foundations of tai chi teach us how to go through it with harmony, some ease and peace in our bodies and our minds. In tai chi practice, this way of harmony in our posture, position, how we move, means that everything in us, and everything around us, is coming together to support what we’re doing. We learn how to live with ease, in all our moments. When this magic comes into our yoga, we grow this wonderful ability to heal and empower our lives, and to share all this together, with the people we teach and support.
Tai Chi is a way of being, connecting, and moving, that creates a harmonious, peaceful relationship with our bodies, our minds, and our world. It’s our everyday ordinary path to extraordinary life – the whole amazing unblocked unlimited version of you.
These practices we’ll share together create a tremendous and immediately-accessible way of transformation – the ability to make it better to be where you are, and to make where you are into something better. It’s something truly wonderful to have in your life. And it’s something so important to share with the people you teach, lead, and support.
A Special Note for Yoga Practicers and Teachers
Yoga gives a spark to tai chi. Tai chi gives ease to yoga. We can be so hard on ourselves, in so many ways. When we make things easier, we feel better. Maybe especially when we learn to be easier in the midst of challenge. It’s what tai chi gives to our yoga. When we feel better, we do better8
Have you been teaching yoga for a long time? Or practicing yoga for a long time? How would you like to discover a whole new set of poses, and a whole new set of movements, that are easy to share with a much wider variety of people – kids and adults, older and younger, healthy and needing help, experts and brand-new to practice – in a much wider variety of settings – studio, office, conference, park, indoors, outdoors, anywhere?
That’s tai chi, and qigong. A new world of practices to carry into your yoga, your work, your caregiving and whole life.
Whether you’re just beginning or looking to begin again, this training gives the foundations, skills, and practices you need, to have the extraordinary benefits of tai chi in your yoga, and to share this meaningfully with others as a yoga teacher. It’s your way to feel better and do better, in everything you love.
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 this weekend 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. A detailed overview of tai chi and qigong foundations and practices, along with real-life application to wherever you are and whatever you’re doing each day.
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.
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When you make a home for harmony in your self, you make a home for peace, sustainability, and miraculous accomplishment, everywhere.
Who Is This For
Everything we do is designed to help people begin where they are, and develop the 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 training in tai chi and qigong.
One of the great things about tai chi is its sustainability. You can be better when you’re 40 than you were at 20, and again at 80 than you were at 40. Brought together with yoga, it’s a practice for enduring mobility, balance, healing, and well-being, that lets us keep doing whatever it is we love doing, at any age.
Our community is a wonderfully diverse and inspiring group of people. They range from kids in school 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. It’s so wonderful if you can be here to share with us now.
ACCREDITATION AND CERTIFICATION
Our Tai Chi, Qigong, and Yoga classes and trainings at Strala Yoga are all accredited by the American Tai Chi and Qigong Association, as well as by the global Yoga Alliance Professionals. You can find our ATCQA page here, for all kinds of helpful details and benefits.
When you graduate from any of our yoga, tai chi, or qigong trainings, as well as when you accumulate class hours with us on the Strala Yoga App, you’ll have ATCQA accreditation and certification, in addition to YAP. You can also join ATCQA to access all their member benefits, and a worldwide community of practitioners.
The ATCQA has received wide recognition from the federal government and a variety of health agencies, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It also connects us with the North American Studio Alliance (NAMASTA), which among many benefits, gives access to affordable liability insurance for yoga, pilates, tai chi, and qigong teachers.
FACULTY
Strala Trainings are all led entirely by the founders. 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.
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.
Common Questions
Q: Can I call my yoga class Strala after taking this training?
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’m not interested in teaching but I want more ease in my life, is this for me?
A: Absolutely. We all deserve to feel better, and bringing sustainable ease 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 our goal is de-mystifying leadership, in tai chi, qigong, and yoga alike, as something for a select few. Just like cooking, once you know and love the recipe, it’s impossible not to share.
You can always email us any questions through info@stralayoga.com.
Please Click Here to Register for Your Early-Bird Now
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, 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.
Questions
If you have any questions or need something, it’s always fine to reach us directly, using Mike@StralaYoga.com.
Thank you so much everybody, we’re excited to get started with you here.
– Tara & Mike
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We need a practice that’s practiced always, in all the hours, in all the places, that carries us into a world where we are sustainable, connected, harmonious, and at peace in our selves. This is how we get there together.
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