A Vital First Step to Healing From the Inside Out

Yoga pioneer Tara Stiles offers advice on how to embrace life with softness

Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala Yoga. Courtesy of Tara Stiles

Wellness often comes packaged in a smoothie, a juice cleanse, a detox, yoga studio, and so many of these “trademarked moments.”

“We’re all saying this is amazing, but hopefully the next wave is just that we can have this in our lives, for ourselves,” says Tara Stiles, the founder of Strala Yoga and a pioneer in making yoga accessible. A former ballet dancer, Stiles learned yoga in dance class before it became a popular, pose-focused form of exercise. With a “yoga that feels like you” approach, Stiles teaches people to move with their body, not against it.

We asked Stiles about why one might not be seeing benefits even after picking up a mind-body practice like meditation or incorporating workouts for mental health.

Can Meditation Be Rigid?

Stiles met her husband Mike through yoga, and had described to him a vision of yoga that was soft and easygoing, not muscling one’s way through a routine or forcing flexibility. Mike, a longtime practitioner of tai chi, told her that what she was describing was tai chi. Another time, a shiatsu teacher attended one of Stiles’s yoga classes, and told her that her approach to connection and touch was like shiatsu.

Stiles started studying the healing arts, and came upon the idea of “softness.”

“They all kind of say the same thing: without softness, nothing is possible,” Stiles said. “I started diving into not just the idea of softness, but the practice of softness; making your body movable and bendable and then allowing your whole self to literally soften, or relax from the inside out. And from there, kind of everything becomes possible.”

“Meditation can still be experienced as rigid if you’re still simply sitting there and you’re experiencing the mental benefit but not getting that whole-body, whole-self benefit. And then on the other side, we see this too in our yoga community, people are already doing a lot of movement but they’re missing that mental connection because they’re simply just exercising themselves without including their emotional state, and how they feel, and that can become a real separate thing.”

What Is Softness?

“I have really experienced how this practice of softness allows your whole self to be included. Once you have the action of softening everything, and now all of a sudden your breath starts to move your body so instead of really muscling through your workout, you can achieve more with this conservation of energy feeling: So your your inhale is lifting you and doing that hard work for you and then your exhale, every exhale is making things easier and more restful and then literally moving you in the other direction.

“From there you get this whole, centered approach, so you can choose whether you want to move your arms and legs together or individually in isolation or disconnection, or really move your whole self from your center.”

These ideas are central in the ancient healing arts that Stiles has studied, and in many ways are also common wisdom passed down through the ages all around us. Her grandmother, now 93, shared the importance of crawling down to the ground, and relaxing when you’re not working.

“We can help ourselves feel better by not overworking when we don’t need to work, rest when we need to rest, and have this practice of softness in our normal lives, not just in our yoga and meditation and workout practice, but really just all the time, so we’re not gaining, for no reason, stress and tension in our bodies and minds.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfTSY446GWg

Self Awareness as a Preventative Health Measure

In our modern lives and fast culture, a lot of people have trouble noticing if something is internally off.

“For a lot of people, it’s hard to notice if you feel bad, it’s hard to notice if you feel stuck, or even gut feelings about decisions that people want to make in their lives, whether it’s changing jobs or working in a different way or organizing their schedule in a different way.”

“I think this practice of softness. People realize, oh, I have a lot more freedom to make decisions and change things in my life than I often think. And it also is a really kind of wonderful, holistic way to help yourself make better decisions about taking care of yourself because it kind of rewires you, puts you in that active relaxation response state so you’re more likely to want to actually desire to make better choices for yourself when it comes to food and rest and and less distractions.”

Rather than taking a break because a phone alert lets us know it’s time for one, or forcing oneself to connect with nature in a walk, or connect with friends and family because these are the right things to do, Stiles noticed that when people practice softness, they naturally come to crave what is holistically healthy, and find more joy while doing so. These simple, common sense ideas that are often forgotten by the wayside are revealed as an intuitive part of your natural rhythm.

“It becomes your own idea to spontaneously take better care of yourself, and notice a lot sooner when something feels off or something feels stuck. In a lot of ways it’s preventative for a lot of these sickness that people get from burnout and stress,” Stiles said. “People notice a lot sooner that they need to take a rest, or eat better, and it becomes a joy and desire instead of kind of a punishment.”

When and Where Can You Practice Softness?

Stiles teaches this approach in her yoga classes, but has also taught people how to embrace softness in their everyday lives.

“[They] can move through their day with softness, and move their whole selves while they’re doing their other kinds of workouts or at work or at home, kind of anything,” Stiles said.

“The neat thing about softness is it’s an action so you can literally do it. You don’t have to think yourself into it. You can bend your elbows, your knees, your hips, whatever’s bendable, and whatever position you’re in and then let your whole self soften or relax, and then start to notice what’s happening with you.”

“It kind of is the gateway entry to a really simple awareness practice: Just noticing what’s happening with you notice how you feel. Notice what you’re aware of that’s going on with you, and then once you have that kind of as a first step, then expand your attention to what’s around you, noticing whether it’s the temperature of the air or the sounds, whatever that you can notice that is happening around you, and bringing your attention back to how you feel.”

If you already have a regular meditation or workout practice, it’s easiest to start practicing softness by incorporating it as a few minutes before the routine.

“Just sitting, or even standing, however is comfortable, first bending what can be bent: your knees, your elbows, your hips, whatever position you’re in, and let your whole self—exhale—have that relaxation moment. ”

“Simply, from there, notice what happens with your breath. Notice your breath pulling you out, expanding, kind of like a big globe with every inhale. And with every exhale, moving you with more ease inward. That inhale feels like you have a helper, somebody doing the work for you during the hard part. And then that exhale feels like an opportunity to rest and relax and renew.”

“It’s really quite a quite an awesome feeling of getting help from your breath with everything you’re doing, and then also realizing every time you exhale, that’s a chance to relax. You don’t have to wait you know until the end of your workout to relax or your end of your meditation to come up with your big idea. That exhale is that moment, and that inhale becomes more of that inspiration or that assistance with the big work you’re doing.”

Once you get used to it and how good it feels, people find ways to incorporate it into the meditation or workout.

“And then you can have little softness breaks throughout the day whenever you can remember, whenever you feel stressed about this thing that’s happening, you can just stand up and bend what can be bent and allow your whole self to soften, literally watch your breath move you, and from there notice how you feel.”

“That simple moment, literally just a few seconds, always works for people changing this relationship with themselves from stress to noticing what’s happening,” Stiles said. It may not erase the stress, but it better equips you to deal with it. “It shows people that oh, I can make a better choice this moment, or I don’t have to be wrapped up my mind about the situation, I can do the things I need to do and worrying won’t help improve it.”

Getting Unstuck in Life and Decision Making

Getting tuned into yourself can result in a wave of positive effects.

“A huge, still-missing part of general culture and of wellness and meditation and workout is just including yourself in what’s happening with you. But softness, it’s not a new thing, but it is a new thing in our kind of modern world,” Stiles said.

“Without softness, it’s really easy to get stuck and rigid and this feeling of being immovable by yourself, or your breath, and things start to feel hard.” Not everyone gets stuck when things get hard, because “we’re all used to being able to do hard things and just muscle our way through it and that addiction to stress feeling, ‘it feels good to feel bad’ in a way.”

“But when when people really start to experience this softness and just do it as a practice, any moment when they remember, any moment when you know those things are getting a little bit tougher and rigid, come back to bending yourself a little bit, and emotionally softening, and letting your breath help you and be part of that breath-body connection instead of just kind of muscling your way through things or getting through the meditation. It really just starts to include your whole self and you have a much more holistic experience.”

“People often say, I feel like myself now, I don’t feel like I’m doing this meditation to get good at meditation. I feel more connected to what I need to do, and how to take care of myself in a really simplistic but kind of profound way.”

“We don’t have to have stress as a sign of success. You can soften and breathe and have a good connection, and achieve more that way.”