It’s hard to imagine a day when Edgar Navarro and Joseph Armstrong, now co-owners of Miami Life Center, weren’t Ashtangis. Yet not so long ago, Navarro, an industrial designer by training, subsisted on Coca-Cola and cigarettes and hated sweating in public, while Armstrong was battling a years-long drug addiction. Today, both are devoted practitioners of Ashtanga, one of yoga’s most physically demanding traditions, and sweating in public now comes with the job. Together they run Miami Life Center’s Wynwood and South Beach locations. Armstrong is up before dawn to teach the 6 a.m. classes, while Navarro teaches throughout the day and curates the studios’ front-of-house concept store, The One Who Travels.
Like Navarro, Miami Life Center has evolved over the years. Founded by Kino MacGregor and Tim Feldmann, two internationally recognized Ashtanga teachers, the studio once offered only Ashtanga and pranayama classes. Seven years ago, Feldmann and MacGregor decided to step back from daily operations and become silent partners. By then, the two had bought the Wynwood building Miami Life Center now calls home. Navarro helped Feldmann with its design, spending hours on details as small as where each light switch should go. The effort paid off in a space that is meticulously composed and genuinely striking. Eventually, he and Armstrong were offered the chance to step in and run the place.
A Bigger Circle
Navarro and Armstrong have taken a schedule once built largely around a 6 a.m. Ashtanga practice and a 10 a.m. Mysore-style class and opened it up to a wide range of styles.
“We started bringing in people of diverse experiences, cultural backgrounds, different modalities,” says Navarro. “We brought in different very established guest teachers, like David Kyle with Rocket Yoga, and that really helped us build a whole community of people outside the circle of Ashtanga.”
The goal, he says, has been to become “a school of yoga in all its forms.”
Feldmann and MacGregor both still teach at the studio, and the emphasis on Ashtanga—and the lineage at the heart of the practice—remains. Navarro and Armstrong are themselves products of that tradition. Both studied under Feldmann and MacGregor and traveled to Mysore, India, to study with Paramaguru Sharath Jois, grandson of Ashtanga founder K. Pattabhi Jois and one of the most influential teachers in the modern lineage.
Armstrong, now an authorized Level 2 Ashtanga teacher, found the practice while working through that addiction. Alongside AA, yoga became an important part of his recovery and, in time, a central part of his life. He was also the one who brought Navarro to the practice.
Navarro’s studies have since taken him beyond Ashtanga, but no less deeply into yoga. Years of pranayama study under Mark Linksman and Yin training under Jo Phee complement his traditional Ashtanga practice, and both show up throughout the studio’s schedule.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Today, Miami Life Center’s schedule includes Vinyasa and Yin, meditation and breathwork, restorative practices, and Rocket, alongside the Ashtanga and Mysore classes that have long anchored the space. The idea is to offer enough depth that students can find a practice suited to where they are, and teachers who know it well enough to lead them somewhere.
“We put so much effort into finding our teachers,” Navarro says. “These are people that have practiced each one of their modalities for so many years. They have really studied.”
Some return to India year after year to continue that study. Others have spent decades immersed in their particular discipline. Together, they’ve built a schedule that works for the devoted Ashtangi, the yoga-curious, the person looking to slow down, and the one hoping to leave totally wrung out.
“If you want a slow-paced restorative practice, there’s one for you,” Navarro says. “If you want to sweat and be challenged, if you want meditation, breathwork, there’s something for you.”
Widening the menu of yoga styles has been only part of the work at Miami Life Center. The studio has also developed practices that belong alongside yoga.
Enter the Heavyweights
For longtime Ashtanga practitioner and Miami Life Center teacher Emilia Arenas, that project involved picking up some weights. After years of yoga, she began thinking about a reality familiar to anyone committed to a physical practice for the long haul: the body you practice in at 25 isn’t (gulp) the same one you’ll practice in at 45, 65, or 75.
Yoga can do plenty for an aging body, from maintaining mobility and balance to building body awareness and control. But it may not cover every physical need on its own. Beginning in midlife, maintaining muscle mass and strength becomes increasingly important, as does loading the bones. Progressive resistance training can provide a stimulus that even a physically demanding yoga practice may not consistently deliver.
For a yogi specifically, that added strength has a practical purpose too. Stronger muscles can better support joints through demanding ranges of motion, and loaded movements can prepare the body for forces it doesn’t encounter through stretching and body weight alone.
“Emilia wanted to develop a method that both served longevity in your practice and overall health in your body,” says Navarro.
The result is Wholesome Training, her own method combining weight training, resistance work, and yoga. Rather than positioning strength training as an alternative to a yoga practice, it treats the two as complements, with each supplying some of what the other tends to leave out.
Wholesome Training is now offered at both Miami Life Center locations, in a different format at each. Wynwood’s programming works different parts of the body on different days, while South Beach offers a led, full-body class.
There’s More in Store
At both Miami Life Center locations, The One Who Travels brings together independent brands and handmade pieces from creators around the world. For Navarro, it’s a natural meeting point between the two worlds that have shaped much of his life: yoga and design.
His own brand, Navarro Official, began when he was just 19, after his industrial design studies took him around his native Guatemala to learn about the country’s artisanal traditions. What started as an exercise in exploring how design might streamline production instead left him fascinated by the handmade process itself.
Today, Navarro works with artisans in Guatemala to create components for his jewelry, which he then assembles in Miami. His pieces are not shy. Think sculptural, oversized, and inspired by his grandmother, who wore layers upon layers of necklaces, chunky rings on every finger, and enormous earrings to top it all off.
The One Who Travels gives that appreciation for craft and storytelling a home. Navarro describes the store as a kind of storybook experience, where the objects become more meaningful as you learn about the makers, techniques, and traditions behind them. Many of those makers are Miami Life Center students and teachers themselves.
“A lot of these creators are also part of our yoga community,” Navarro says. “They have a space to practice and also to showcase what they have to share with the world,” he adds.
At Miami Life Center, community has always been the connective tissue. It’s in the lineage passed down through generations of teachers, in the new practices introduced by those who have made the studio their own, and in the ideas and creative pursuits that have found a home there too.
That feels true to the practice itself. Yoga takes its name from the Sanskrit root “yuj,” meaning to join or yoke, and Navarro and Armstrong know something about that pull. After all, the practice brought them to their teachers, to each other, and, eventually, here.
Miami Life Center has two locations: 1940 NW Miami Ct., Miami, FL 33136 (Wynwood), 305-400-8761; and 437 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach, FL 33139 (South Beach). For more information, visit their official website.
The One Who Travels is located inside both Miami Life Center locations. For more information, visit their official website.