When I first tried Strala Yoga, I felt as though I had finally found a place from everyone, athletes, yogis, and just plain normal people. No incense, no chanting, no readings, just a yoga workout that anyone from a yogi to your average Jane looking for a good stretch can appreciate.
While this may seem simple, in my experience, it’s actually pretty rare. While there are a few studios I happily frequent (okay, frequent is a relative term in my yoga practice, but you know what I mean): Laughing Lotus, Pure Yoga–and when I need a quick, cheap yoga fix: Yoga to the People. I don’t venture out to much because I find that many studios are just too dogmatic for my taste or practice level. I don’t do yoga for spiritual reasons, or to connect with the universe, I do it for the wonderful full body stretch and relaxation it provides.
Fortunately, I recently tried Strala Yoga. Strala is a relaxed studio with a friendly vibe where yogis and occasional yoga practicers can co-exist happily. The studio is simple, just a very large, open rectangular room with soothing, clean white walls and hardwood floors. As I set up my mat, I noticed several water bottles on the floor. I was once told that real yogis don’t drink water because it cools the body, whereas yoga is meant to heat the body and allow it to cool itself naturally without water or brow wiping. Seeing water bottles next to my fellow classmate’s mats reassured me that I could enjoy a swig of water without exposing the fact that I am not truly a yogi. I was in good company.
While I loved feeling so comfortable at Strala, what really sold me was the workout. Founder Tara Stiles, author of Slim, Calm, Sexy Yoga, created a practice comprised of workouts that emphasize gentle breathing and create strong, long, lean bodies. The classes are simply titled strong, relax and basics. I found the strong classes to be uniquely challenging and each had a discrete style and format. Unlike most yoga classes I have taken, the classes I took at Strala didn’t follow a traditional flow or center on the sun salutation, but rather focused on a several series of poses that complemented one another, I never knew what was coming next.
The classes started out with a gentle stretch and warm up before moving into a challenging series of poses. In one class, I was challenged to hold variations of boat pose for what seemed like five minutes, I was already falling out of position in the first ten minutes of the class! Typically ab work is my favorite part of the workout, so I was surprised that a yoga class could push me past my limits so easily. That is one of my favorite things about Strala, it’s a challenging workout, but still provides stretch and stillness. The strong classes are almost athletic as they challenge you to use balance and strength to hold poses for several breaths. The instructors are wonderful about making slight corrections that make a big difference in how much you feel the stretch. As someone who doesn’t practice regularly, I am always worried that I am going to look silly when it comes times for inversions. But I was happy to find that inversions at Strala were always optional; they give those who want a challenge the chance to go into handstands, headstands and wheels, but an alternative were always offered–and I gladly accepted. Even if I didn’t partake in inversions, by the end of my classes, I was sweating and ready for savasannah. The hour and fifteen minutes was just enough to challenge me and give me the full body stretch I need to balance out my running workouts.
There was one thing about my Strala classes that was completely unexpected. The feeling of calmness I felt for several hours after class. It was wonderful to leave the studio, step into the madness of the city and still have a lingering sense of relaxation and serenity to guide me through my day. It’s not always easy for cardio fiend like myself to find a yoga workout that is both enjoyable and beneficial, but Strala’s slim, calm, sexy style of yoga is exactly what I need.
Strala Yoga is located at 632 Broadway. Classes are $15 and new member discounts and packages are available.
Would you like it if someone said, “I want to run but when I go running in groups, everyone refuses to walk and they are just too dogmatic about running the whole time?” No, you wouldn’t, because the essence of running is to run, and the essence of yoga is spirituality. Yes, you can strip the spirituality out of it and make it simply exercise, but you are changing it, so stop insulting the ORIGINAL FORM by calling it dogmatic, and own up to the fact that YOU are CHANGING it to fit YOUR non-spiritual, “sexy lean” desires. You’re taking something sacred and insulting it for being sacred and then making it secular. I don’t mind, but at least admit what you’re doing. I’m so tired of girls obsessed with their bodies insulting things they know nothing about. And that calm you felt after yoga that you don’t feel with your cardio? That’s the result of meditation, which IS spiritual. You need to realize you just insulted something and then benefited from it. You don’t deserve yoga. Stay out of yoga studios and just be a gym rat. Don’t try to turn these serene beautiful atmospheres into your daily burn. Fuck off.
To Amber, above, I don’t think it’s fair to make broad categorizations about what the “essence” of yoga is or is not. My own practice seems to suggest that what is essential about yoga often varies from individual to individual. Yes, yoga connects many of us with something spiritual, or offers us a glimpse of the divine, but there are others for whom it offers more secular benefits: physical strength, flexibility, a sense of local community, the satisfaction of meeting a challenge. These experiences are not invalid because they are not spiritual, ipso facto. I agree that it can be irksome when people strip yoga of anything but its caloric burn, but I also don’t think that’s what this post did. It simply offered up a more secular, but still respectful, narrative.
And for someone who values spiritual life and meditation, you are demonstrating colossal intolerance and judgmentality, to say nothing of bad manners.