I’ve done Pilates about once or twice a week for 5 years now, and I can honestly say it’s one of the most awesome parts of my life. The “Aha!” moments I experience there are profound, and the ripple effect into other areas of my life is powerful.
I felt led to go to Pilates after suffering severe back pain from carrying my infant son. I’d previously taken a mat class at the YMCA but didn’t like it and never felt the same bliss everyone else in my group was raving about. So coming to this local studio was a chance to try again, this time with the machines. I was hooked after the first session and have continued ever since.
In addition to strengthening my back muscles, it has helped to prepare me through my second pregnancy, it has relieved stress during challenging times, it has led to new friendships with people I’ve shared classes with, and I marvel at the clever ways my body tries to avoid the deep muscle work as I try to maintain being present with a given exercise. My teacher once told me, “It’s not intuitive to go to the area where the muscles are weakest.” The other muscles are constantly trying to cover, to compensate for these weaker areas. It occurs to me how often I must do this misguided “helping” in my life, if I’m doing it here in Pilates.
As I go deeper, it is just really hard. No way around it. I don’t want to do more repetitions of this same tender, challenging area. I want to leave, I want to go home, I want the session to end, I hate this. And then we finish that series, and I feel amazing. Not just finishing class, but finishing a given sequence in class. It feels unbelievable. Like a new awakening within myself.
With years of experience with this style of exercise, I am surprised to find how much more I am needing instruction and coaching. I’m finding pockets of complacency in my positions and efforts, and the attentive cues and corrections from my teacher helps me to re-engage. I’m also appreciating instructions for more advanced modifications of a familiar exercise, or a more detailed description for a certain movement.
My teacher’s invitations last week to “have a conversation with my body” about my feet being in parallel position without turning my knees in, or “feel this one in your hip flexors, not your thighs” helping me to refocus the work where it belonged instead of the larger muscle group taking it over, all centering and returning my power to me, going inward, seeing what’s going on in my own body. It also keeps things interesting, there’s always something to release and something to contract.
One interesting shift in my thinking happened a couple of weeks ago. My teacher, like all Pilates teachers, is constantly reminding us to lower our shoulders. It’s easy to hunch them up when we lift our arms up and it happens all the time. I’ve always mentally beaten myself up about this common tendency. “How long have you been in Pilates? How many times have you done this exercise? Why can’t you remember to get those shoulders down?” No one else is saying this, mind you, just me. But last week, she mentioned something about releasing our shoulders to engage our back muscles. What?? Huh?? I had no idea there was actually a *reason* for doing this. I just assumed there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a given exercise, and that lifting my shoulders was a perennial breach of correct positioning.
I love the idea of moving *toward* something instead of just focusing on *not* doing something else. It brought in for me the idea of micromovements, honoring a process that takes place in very small steps. Every step counts, doesn’t matter how big or “useless” it is. There’s no judgment in engaging my back muscles. I do that at the level I am able. But raising my shoulders? It’s like taking a test and receiving a big fat red X from the teacher. That one small cue was cathartic. It helped me to see how much I criticize myself during the class. Which again, helped me to question how much I do that in the rest of my life in brief, insidious ways, whether to myself, or to my family.
If it’s true that “what we tend to, grows,” then I am enjoying this shift from “failure” focus to celebrating the awakenings.
I just found a friend of mine teaches Pilates. Cool. Do you remember the name of the math teacher we had in the 5th grade? That was the only time I ever got an F, and she told me, “Always take your first punch on a test.” I must have second-guessed myself and she could see that my original answers were right. Some of the best advice I ever got! Not 100% related, but I felt compelled to share.
It took setbacks for me to learn also, and think its the case for a lot of people, its a marathon not a sprint.