The Isle of Man looking far lovelier than as a prison

I started writing in this space for a few reasons.  A big part of how I chose to set up the space was to write under a pen name.  My husband has tried to convince me to drop the name many times over and yet I’ve stuck by it.  When I opened this space I was burned out on the Pilates personalities that I’d been working with.  Traversing the psychology of my teachers was an exhausting labor that I’d taken on in my quest for knowledge.  When I turned my attention toward being a mom, I no longer had the energy to hold other people’s stuff.  I am biased in believing that is what we ultimately do when we accept others’ personality quirks and stifle our own frustrations with them in order to complete some sort of task, be it learning or producing some sort of event in which we play host and organizer.  I also did not want to inflict my personality on others.  I wanted to have a place where I could share what I know and the insights that I’ve gained through experience without blatantly promoting myself.  I wanted the ideas to be enough.  Because I believe that while we must live out our lives in a series of actions and interactions, if we apply some analysis to those activities we can improve.  But the two things are often separate.  Having a space for ideas makes sense to me.  It gives me a place to put my thoughts so I can keep on living in the present.  And I hope that it offers others a place to do the same.

For what felt like a long while, I had very few people reading my posts.  That was fine on a couple levels since the space was in large part for me and my posts are sometimes more stream of consciousness than most readers would like.  But I am by nature ambitious and I wanted my ideas to be “out there”.  At least a little bit.  Somebody suggested that I post on FB and so I did.  And then somebody who had started another FB forum invited me to join it.  That is when I started to share my posts, only the ones that I felt were relevant to that community.  And people did start to read them.  I have little idea what they thought, but at least they stopped by and had a look.

Once I turned that corner, I came to realize that all bloggers with success engage in self-promotion to a degree.  In most cases, people are writing as themselves and so when they know people in the real world those people also know about their blog.  I had naively thought at one point that blog friendships could happen online.  Not so – they happen in the real world and are merely mentioned in the blogosphere.  I had effectively cut myself off from that avenue of promoting my writing through the nature of my blog.  Creating a space apart from the real world had some serious ramifications, as my husband had pointed out.

Following that thread of insight further along it’s fairly obvious that at a basic level we are all self-promoting.  Anybody who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.  For a long time I held a romantic story in my imagination about how someday I would be noticed and supported in becoming something more than my lowly beginnings in the midwest.  It’s the story of fairytales and being “discovered” by some talent scout.  In all candor, I carried that romantic ideal into my adult life and my Pilates training.  It is in the Pilates world too – how many people tout that Romana or some other great teacher called them a star or honored them with some title of expertise?  Apart from the fact that I’m not that person, and perhaps because of that I had to learn through time and experience that I was the one that had to do the discovering of what I have to offer this world.  And then I have to have the courage to present it to the world.  No one is going to introduce me to the broader world, I have to do that myself.  Most of us do.  In reality even the stars do.  I’ve spent enough time in LA to see all the people clamoring for their moment in the spotlight to be seen and “discovered”.  We are all self-promoter in one way or another.

And finally, this discussion would be incomplete were I not to point out that Joe Pilates was a fierce self-promoter.  He traveled to a new country twice to do his work.  In NYC, he was a stranger in a new world, and for the second time he was living in a place that was at war with his nation of origin.  Germans were not popular in the US in Joe Pilates day, he had no choice but to self promote.  I think that’s important to remember.  The work of Pilates builds our confidence from the inside out.  It makes us into self-promoters because we become so impassioned about the work that has fortified us for living a productive and meaningful life.  While it is always important to temper ourselves and our tendencies and I believe in a constant process of self improvement which lends itself to being more cooperative than a purely self-interested person would be, I think it’s equally important to know our roots.  Pilates started with a passionate hot headed genius who carried out the work of his dreams in a sea of strangers who were bound to misunderstand him.  He did it his work and enough people got it to carry it on till today.  At some fundamental level, self promotion is the reason that we have Pilates today.

On one of the forums that I joined under my pen name way back when, there is currently a thread on the topic of self-promotion.   It hits a chord within me for obvious reasons.  I am very much of the mind that I want to participate in the community in a larger way than just promoting my own work.  But I’m bound by my choice to be anonymous and so I end up doing the very thing that I set out not to do.  I wanted to explain myself a little more thoroughly somewhere, and this is the place.  And to make a broader general point, that our actions are usually the result of complicated mental machinations.  We each have our reasons for participating in any given community the way that we do.  Which is all the more reason to practice compassion and maintain an attitude of curiosity.  We will learn far more from those perspectives than from quick judgements based purely on outward behavior.

Here’s to learning to accept the important role that strong individuals play in a thriving society even if that means accepting the reality of self promotion.

And to bring my point just a little further home, I’ll add a quotation from the Orson Scott Card novel that I’m currently reading because I love it when an idea I’m currently marinating on shows up in an unexpected way:
“‘I’ll tell you what I think, ‘ said Wiggin.  ‘I think you don’t grow up until you stop worrying about other people’s purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself'”

open leg rocker at Squam Lake, 2013

It’s time for March MATness again and I’m pretty happy about it because last year was the first time I caught wind of it and it was already underway when I did.  Not that I’m that much more on top of my game this year, but at least this post is going up on March 1st.  And I’ve already got a message out to my clients.  For me being an in-home mom and studio owner, it’s a great way to feel connected to the Pilates community “out there”  and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who is constrained in that way.  Hooray for the internerd!

For people who are used to taking mat classes but want to build a daily home practice, I’ve got just the videos, Pilates I and Pilates II are the mat exercises in real time without the official Pilates Mat (that’s why I perform a version of the roll up that I teach to folks with sensitive backs or no strap).

And if you’re looking for a little inspiration, here’s what my Pilates Mat work did for me back in 2013.

Let the MATness begin!

More and more steps to climb…

The many types of Pilates that are currently on offer (Classical Pilates, True Pilates, Traditional Pilates, Contemporary Pilates, Stott Pilates, Winsor Pilates, Romana’s Pilates, Fletcher Pilates, Authentic Pilates, Real Pilates, Power Pilates, Basi Pilates, to name but a few), beg the question that I’ve been seeing online lately about different types of Pilates.  I wanted to put down my thoughts on the topic in this space which is more permanent than forum threads.

I believe this is a reflection of the unfortunate reality that anybody can label themselves a Pilates expert and pass on what they know as Pilates from that assumed position of authoritative knowledge.  It follows from that reality that Pilates professionals would want to differentiate their offerings by putting a descriptive label in front of Pilates.  These labels are about marketing and risk drawing people into more confusion than anything else as indicated by the many questions of similar theme currently being raised.  Since the labels are used by anybody regardless of how much they know about the intention behind the name, they take on whatever meaning the general populous assigns to them which soon renders them no more clarifying than they were to begin with.  It is quite a feat to stay in control of your brand, if Pilates professionals know anything about marketing that should be it.  If the type of Pilates really is important to know, then it seems to me that getting to the intended meaning of the name would require asking whoever it was that trademarked it.  In some cases, the person behind the name is actually offering eduction about Pilates and they have merely chosen to play by the generally accepted rules of branding that currently dictate such things, in other cases what they are offering is not actually Pilates.  The substance is not in the name, it is in the people behind the name.  All that being said, my personal bias is that Pilates is Pilates and if you don’t know what Pilates is and you want to, all you can do is keep studying and investigating until you arrive at a complete sense of knowing.  And you are probably going to arrive at that place through working with somebody who has undergone a deep and longstanding study of the original work.

Clearly my bias comes from my personal experience which boils down to three phases of investigation.  Initially, I accepted Pilates as what my dance teacher in San Francisco called Pilates.  I grew interested in learning to teach because I thought that it would enhance my performance as a PE teacher in schools.  I entered a local program that was recommended to be by a man who I served breakfast to every weekend in my job as a waitress.  I did not have to prove what I knew in order to be accepted into the program, my minimal knowledge of what I was soon going to learn how to teach was not ever brought up as a cause for concern.  Interested in learning as much as I could, I read Joe Pilates original writings.  As I neared completion of my first certification, I realized that in spite of learning a lot of very interesting and seemingly beneficial exercises, I still hadn’t learned Pilates because what I had learned was not at all reflected in Joe’s writings.  Lucky for me, a dear friend had completed her training with Romana Kryzanowska and was teaching in Berkeley.  I began taking her class.  Eventually we traded a session on the apparatus and upon completion looked at each other in amazement:  we were teaching completely different things and calling them by the same name.  Within a month or so, I was taking regular lessons with her to prepare for my audition for Romana’s program.  My training with Romana’s Pilates was amazing and transformative, but it was not the end of my journey.  I still had questions.  Little pieces of the work seemed to be absent from what I’d learned and I really wanted a complete and thorough understanding.  (I wanted that Pilates magic at full strength.  I want to be able to transform a body in 30 sessions, heck I am still working on transforming my own body into a normal healthy one!)  I believe that this mostly had to do with the challenge of bundling the incredibly large and layered body of work in a certification program.  These days, I’m mostly alone in my studio but my investigations into the original Pilates system continue.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Biography because it confirmed many of my theories and gave me inspiration for my ongoing investigations.  I may be alone in my studio but thankfully I’ve got the internet and I know that there are others who are working on the same project and that gives me encouragement and a plan for the future.  When I’m more able to travel, I know where I’ll be going.  (In the meanwhile, I’ve got our conference to keep new information informing my practice, so things are looking pretty good these days!)

But that’s me and my personal relationship to Pilates.  While I do feel that it’s important to acknowledge ourselves in these questions because we all have a bias, I also think that it’s important for every Pilates instructor to arrive at her / his own professional code with respect to the work and business promotion.  That inevitably involves tackling the big questions surrounding Pilates and having an opinion that may very well set us apart from other professionals.  I do not mean to be divisive and I certainly do not have any interest in policing others – indeed I believe that we all are best served by minding our own business and leaving others to speak for themselves.  But I do believe that we have to “police” ourselves if we are to adhere to any particular form.  And part of that process means gaining a clear and definitive understanding of just what is and isn’t acceptable for ourselves.

Consider this line from Joe’s Spine Corrector Poster, it’s one of my favorites:
“‘Just doing’ the exercises will prove of tremendous benefit….’Doing them with careful deliberation and thoroughness’ will gain for you that ‘extra something’ you are searching for” 

Much of my understanding of Pilates is based on those words.  I think of the work as layered.  There are the moves, the choreography; and there is the internal coordination of the body’s contents (muscles, bones, and fascia primarily) to perform those moves in the specific Pilates way.  To me, the complete and consistent integration of those two layers is what determines that one is doing Pilates.  I’ve seen impressive results from clients just doing the moves and clients have often reported great results from doing the internal work in the movements of their daily life.  But to really integrate it all takes dedication over a long period of time – ten years at minimum.

In real terms, it boils down to this, Pilates has a reputation for getting a certain set of results.  How can we guarantee those results?  Only by knowing Pilates.  And the only way to learn Pilates is from a teacher.  So you want to pick your teacher wisely.  To me that meant getting as close to Joe Pilates as possible.  But then we do also need to do our own due diligence, we need to be able to discern what is the teacher’s personality and life experience and what is Pilates.  Over time, this becomes easier.  With dedication, our sense of the work becomes clearer, until that is all there is to our understanding.

By design, life is full of distractions.  If we are to keep a body of work alive through generations, we must have a system of accountability in place to keep us from getting distracted and we must establish a trust in the people who do the work day in and day out through the years so that we have a blueprint for the maintenance of the work.  We the people, individually and collectively, hold the only way of sustaining a body of knowledge and / or work – dedication and accountability are how such a feat is achieved.  Because it is really a daily practice to keep the actual work of Pilates consistent to the original, I’ve come up with my own way of monitoring how well I’m keeping true to the original.  I keep tabs on what is happening in every move in my studio – either we are working on the choreography, the internal coordination, or we are clear that we are not doing Pilates but experimenting with something that we hope will enhance our Pilates practice.  As an aside, I’ve noticed that the sharper my understanding of Pilates gets, the less I’m inclined to dabble in other modalities.  Pilates is complete, but it takes years of dedicated study to understand that because it is such a deeply layered system.

On a personal policing note, I’d like to frame the choices that we all make around branding within the human aspect of Pilates that I think we often forget now that there is a broader business dimension to the work.  Pilates was invented and practiced over the the course of four decades by one person, Joe Pilates and his partner, Clara.  Over many years, they developed a close and strong bond with Romana Kryzanowska, who carried his work with clarity and devotion into the next century.  Rebranding the name or calling other things by the same name is highly personal to those people who have dedicated the most of their lives to developing and preserving the Pilates method.  What would possess someone to alter its name or worse, use it to describe something else that is quite different in practice?  I can imagine feeling a great sense of offense were I the person whose life’s work was pirated or renamed because the name I gave it wasn’t deemed suitable by someone in the next generation.   These branding choices are easy to make when time or circumstance have kept one from knowing Joe, Clara, and Romana personally, but such actions have impacted them during their living years and continue to influence the broad perception of their contribution to the whole humanity through Pilates.  Ultimately, on that point alone (I realize that there are many complicating factors in these scenarios don’t get me wrong) the case could easily be made that such choices are disrespectful.  If one choses to say that Joe Pilates’s system was flawed and they have made the necessary improvements, would it not be better to simply drop the name of the imperfect original and go with one’s own new and improved name to match the new and improved system?  It would seem not.  In truth, Pilates is a remarkably effective system and so it’s name actually does count for something.  At least for now, in some places.  The more that non-Pilates is associated with the name Pilates, the more it is in danger of losing its stellar reputation.  Despite the illusion of individuality, we are interdependent – any lack of respect for the humanity that we all have in common has a negative impact on all of us.  Pilates is brilliant, it would be a shame to lose it on account of our excessive and completely unreal notion of individuality.

I cannot help but think of Romana’s consistent and sensible request that summed this all up so neatly:  teach what you want, just please don’t call it Pilates.

Does the internet need another springtime bouquet? I do believe so!

I’m going to share my insights thus far into the second phase of My Pilates Body Boost.  Here’s what’s happened in a nutshell so far:

1)  Off and Running…I started doing my prescribed workouts with the Cadillac as my focal point.

2)  Space takes time…I quickly realized that with my particular goal of creating more space in my body, the workouts were getting longer and longer, just as my available time was getting less and less.

3)  To find the perfect balance…Unfortunately, I did not get the balance of stretch and strength right in my workout plans and so I ended up with overly sore muscles that were sort of uninspiring and longstanding because the nature of my workouts didn’t have as much flow as regular mat and reformer workouts (in my experience, sore muscles dissipate with a light flowing workout).

4)  MELT…I got really hooked on MELTing and started putting more time into that because I was sore and without my usual degree of physical support I needed to be careful about pushing myself too hard.  And the MELT method is totally awesome.

5)  Hooray for cyber Pilates friends…Thankfully March MATness came along and gave me an inspirational boost.  I started doing a daily mat before my cadillac exercises, always hanging at the end, and MELTing.

6)  Groove or rut?…After about a 6 weeks of that I realized that my body was getting pretty large – pants not fitting again.  I’m currently operating under the assumption that my body is so accustomed to regular and rigorous exercise that it goes haywire without it.  If I dial back my routine I don’t just plateau, I start expanding.  For sure, something else may be at play but for now I can attend to myself by keeping my workouts regular and invigorating.

7)  Ready for action…With my daily pain much lower than it’s been in over two decades, I revamped my workout to a daily 30 minutes that involves sweat, heavy breathing, and each piece of apparatus.

8)  Definitely groove…I’m happy with my new regimen, inspired and feeling sore in places that give me a sense of having done something productive.  I’m still MELTing daily and loving it.

9)  Uh oh, forgot to hang…Today is day seven of a muscle ache in my upper back that returned after a couple month’s hiatus.  I’d attributed the relief from MELTing, but given what I’ve been doing the past week, it dawned on me that perhaps the thing that was actually keeping my upper back loose enough to be pain free was hanging.  Pretty much every time I hang I get a pop or two in my middle and upper back.  So hanging is now back in the daily mix.  (By the way, my interest in hanging took a rather sharp dip when one of my feet slipped out of the fuzzy while I was head to the floor – yikes!  That was really scary.  Those feet must be in just the right place!)

10)  Business as usual…I’ll putter along for a while, until I feel that I’ve actually got something to show for my efforts at which point I’ll call phase two done and take a set of photos that I hope will show a longer and leaner me.

* On the topic of MELTing, I’ve got a fix-my-feet project going (“before” photos have been snapped, daily exercises are in progress).  I’m figuring this project is going to be at least six months in duration.  In the meanwhile, I’m so enamored with MELTing that I’ve joined their affiliate program.  If you look to the upper right of this webpage, you’ll find a MELT button.  Click there to learn more and if you decide to begin your own MELT practice with a purchase in their online store, I’ll get a little piece of the pie.  The way I see it, it’s a triple win, with anybody who takes up MELTing as scoring a big-time-life-changing set of balls.