What is Strala Yoga and Why Am I So Obsessed with it?

How I found Strala

I found Strala Yoga back in 2013 when I stumbled across some of Tara Stiles' videos on MindBodyGreen.com. At the time I loved how the short, 10-15 minute practices she had on youtube fit right into my hectic schedule. I would do yoga in my office at lunch or in a few quick minutes before heading out the door. But I started to fall in love with the way the classes flowed. 

What is different about Strala Yoga?

Many yoga classes seem to focus on teaching you how to do yoga properly, with emphasis on how your body should be aligned and how you should be activating each muscle group to best achieve this alignment. 

Or else, they may focus on how hard you can work, guiding you quickly through various movements intended to build your strength and burn your calories.

Strala was the first style of yoga I encountered where the focus was on teaching you how good you could feel if you stopped letting all these yoga teachers get inside your head.

In Strala we guide the movement and the breath more than the actual postures themselves because in movement there is more room for exploration and personal variation. Whenever we do arrive in a pose we'll hold for a while, we encourage you to explore and move around a bit. Decide which version of the pose feels best for you today, even if it looks a bit weird. 

Strala Yoga feels good because moving naturally feels good, but it's something most of us have stopped practicing. 

Natural Movement is Magic

Moving naturally is what children do. It's why when a child runs it is fun, effortless, and fast, and when an adult runs it is cardio. 

Moving naturally is why a goat can climb up a cliff face with nothing but its hooves, but I can't seem to climb up a flight of stairs without losing my breath. 

Moving naturally involves using the breath to help support your movement and letting your center guide you so that movements flow easily. It's also about finding softness and ease even in hard situations because it's almost impossible to move naturally if you're tensing all your muscles. 

How can I try Strala?

Currently, there aren’t many Strala Yoga guides in my part of Florida, so I either practice on my own or with the videos from the Strala Yoga website. But I had an opportunity to guide Strala Yoga at Momentum Fitness a few weeks ago and I would love to do it again!

If you’re interested in Strala Yoga, let me know in comments or email me at megangillmanwellness@gmail.com! I’d love to set up a small group that gets together for classes!

My First Kundalini Class (What's Your Yoga Match Part 3)

Continuing my exploration of different yoga styles, I came across one that I’d never really tried before. If you’re paying attention to yoga in popular culture, it’s easy to see the lean towards a fitness mentality. Yoga clothes that focus on “improving performance” with “sweat-wicking” technology have become the norm, and it’s not unusual for people to start yoga because they want to improve their physical fitness.

That’s not what all yoga is like, though. Today I want to tell you about my first experience exploring a Kundalini Yoga class.

I found Kundalini yoga first through author and speaker Gabby Bernstein. As a Kundalini yoga teacher herself, she offers several meditations and practices in some of her books and online videos. I’d had great experiences with some of those meditations but sometimes felt silly holding my arms up over my head and chanting alone in a room. During one particularly powerful chanting session at home, in fact, both my dogs ran in to stare at me and started barking as loud as they could. Let's just say it wasn’t quite the experience I’d imagined.

Photo by Antonika Chanel on Unsplash

I was intrigued by this style of yoga that focused on moving energy and healing ourselves using more than just asana or postures, so I decided to try a class in person.

Going into my first class I really wasn’t sure what to expect. It was my first time at Namaste Yoga in Tallahassee, and I’m always reminded, my first time at a new yoga studio, how confusing these spaces can be to those who haven’t visited before. Which door do I go in? Where do I leave my shoes? How do I pay?

When I walked into the room where the class was happening I saw all sorts of different people wearing all sorts of different things. The teacher, Jasbir, and two students were wearing all white, one woman wore flared jeans, and I and two other students had regular athletic clothing on. A pretty motley crew! I did some reading after the fact and found out that the white clothing and white turbans are worn in Kundalini yoga are meant to strengthen and expand our auras. You don’t have to wear white to class though.

Throughout the class, we did a variety of postures, repetitive movements, seated holds, and chanting out loud and in our heads. Each part lasted for about three minutes. Some of them, to be honest, I had a hard time keeping a straight face for. I kept thinking during the Har meditation that if someone were to walk into the room, they would be very confused. Some of them were just hard, in that they involved some physical movements that started out easy but became harder over the three minutes we continued.

Overall, I really enjoyed it and plan to go back. It was nice to be in a class where we were all willing to try things that seemed a little silly in the hope that they would help us tune in better to our own inner selves and the universal forces that impact us.

You might love Kundalini Yoga if: you enjoy the more spiritual and metaphysical aspects of yoga, you enjoy chanting and mantra meditation

You might not love Kundalini Yoga if: chanting, especially in ancient languages, makes you uncomfortable, you’re looking for a more fitness-based yoga class

Final thought: The teacher mentioned twice that Kundalini yoga can help you start to see deeper truths and patterns in your life that you can work on moving forward. “If you think your life is perfect,” she said, “don’t do Kundalini yoga.”