A Different Kind of Mindfulness

In Pilates, we focus on organizing the mechanics of the body—how the bones and joints align, the balance of the muscles around the joints, our breathing mechanism. And we believe this organization creates a better performing, more aligned body.

I think the same is true of our minds. They can use some organizing and aligning. Instead of a little more of this muscle and a little less of that one, it might be a little more of this emotion and a little less of that one.

Try gratitude journaling. See if you can think of ten things to be grateful for each day.

For a long time, the mind and body have been thought of as separate. We now know that’s not true at all. The mind influences the body and vice versa. The emotions you feel, the thoughts you have, they create chemical signals that affect every cell in your body. This is how we “feel” emotions, with the help of hormones and neurotransmitters released in response to them.

This means that a potent way to organize and clean up your body is to clean up your thoughts and emotions. This year, I stumbled upon one of my all time favorite books: Letting Go by David Hawkins. He takes the world of emotions and puts it into a framework that a more scientific mind like mine can appreciate. In fact, he assigns a number that represents its energy to various emotions. This helps you understand their impact on your body. For example, shame is the lowest of the emotions at only 20, guilt is 30, grief is 75, fear is 100, anger is 150. He classifies negative emotions as falling below 200.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a Pilates organized body with a mind vibrating on the frequency of fear or anger. How do I rise above that? Dr. Hawkins places acceptance at 350, love at 500, and peace at 600.

The emotions with the highest energy, with the most positive biochemical impact on the cells and tissues of your body, are love and gratitude. In fact, the energy of these frequencies is so powerful that researchers have found it to create microscopically measured effects on water (The Hidden Messages by Masuro Emoto) as well as macroscopic effects (The Living Language of Water by Veda Austin). So not only do your thoughts and emotions create biochemical changes in your body via hormones and neurotransmitters (The Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton), they also affect the water that comprises 60-70% of your body by weight and over 99% of you by molecular count.

So basically, your thoughts and emotions matter!

Eight months ago, I decided to create a consistent, dedicated gratitude practice. I resolved to write a minimum of ten things I was grateful for in a journal every night. Let me tell you—there were some nights that I really struggled. I could hardly come up with a few things to be grateful for that day. So busy was my mind with all that was wrong, I could hardly find anything right.

Struggling to feel love and thankfulness? My sweet dog is my go to for feeling more love and gratitude!

Within a couple months, finding ten things to be grateful for became easy. In fact, I could regularly get to 15-20 without trying. And then suddenly, the gratitude crept into my day. I wasn’t just thankful for things when I focused on it. I was thankful for things in the moment, and in the midst of difficult moments! When I slept only four hours before waking up in the middle of the night and struggling for the rest of the night to fall back asleep, I could genuinely be grateful for those solid four hours of sleep rather than focusing on how that was half of what I wanted.

I truly believe that this is making me happier. I don’t need circumstances to fall into place, I don’t need an exotic vacation, I don’t need my spouse to plan the perfect date, I don’t need elections to go my way. I am starting to find boatloads of things to be grateful for in my mundane, everyday life.

Try a gratitude walk. Commit to only thinking of things you’re grateful for on a walk. In nature, it’s easy to find things to appreciate.

Try it! If a gratitude journal is not your style, try a gratitude walk. I take my dog on a walk and the entire walk, I think of things I’m grateful for. Especially if you’re in nature, it’s amazing what you will find to appreciate. Or try a gratitude body scan. During my meditations, I will go body part by body part thanking it for all it does well. How often do we ever thank the things that work well in our body rather than focus on what hurts or is riddled with disease? Seriously. I’ve never thanked my left elbow for not giving me a single issue ever!

Once you get started, you’ll realize that there is so much to be grateful for, there’s not much space left in your mind for complaining, worrying, sadness, fear, irritability, judgement, annoyance, or anger. And that kind of mindfulness over your thoughts and emotions is more powerful than the kind that brings awareness to how you move in Pilates.

Like this subject and want to learn more? I highly recommend the book Thank and Grow Rich by Pam Grout.

Out of Control or In Control?

When life feels out of control, unpredictable, and scary, remember that you have a movement method originally called Contrology.  The science of control. 

You may not be able to control what's going on around you, but you have control over some things. 

You have the chance to spend part of every day moving mindfully, thoughtfully, with intention.  You have the chance to breathe deeply, put all your joints through their full range of motion, coordinate your movements, forget about your troubles, and focus on yourself. 

Life may be uncertain, but you can have moments of certainty, calm, clarity.  You can choose to take control of the things you can control and by doing so, feel empowered.

We're here to help.  Our studio has gone virtual and we have multiple options to keep you practicing the coordination of mind, body, and spirit at home. If none of our options meet your needs, just reach out and we're happy to help craft a solution that does.  

How Pilates Prevents Injury and Improves Tissue Health

Joseph Pilates said in his 1945 book Return to Life that we should not “devote ourselves only to the mere development of any particular pet set of muscles…” The term “pet muscles” is exactly right, even 85 years later. We do have muscles we love more than others, and requests to work the abs, glutes, and triceps are abundant. But what about iliacus, quadratus femoris, or supraspinatus?

Rather than training specific muscles with intensity while completing neglecting others, Joseph Pilates believed we should work towards the uniform development of our whole body. And here are two important reasons why.

Injury Prevention

When you develop your big gross motor movers, like the quads and glutes and lats, without training the smaller muscles that stabilize the spine or support the joint, you create an imbalance. The big muscle is likely already stronger, relatively speaking, then the smaller, supporting muscles. And by focusing your training on it, you exacerbate that imbalance. Now when the bigger, stronger muscle pulls on your bones, the smaller muscles will struggle to balance its pull—and voila, the risk of injury increases. It’s like hanging a really heavy painting on a very thin wall. The wall just can’t support it. And your spine, or your shoulder, or whatever other joint you want to think of, can’t always support the strong pull of your gym-developed big muscles.

Improved Circulation is Specific

As if injury prevention wasn’t a strong enough motivation to work all your muscles in an even, balanced way, there’s more. We tend to think that exercise of any kind increases health to the whole body. But not exactly. When you use your muscles, the contraction of that muscle helps pulls blood to the area from the capillaries—bringing oxygen and nutrients to the tissues and removing waste products. However, when you exercise your legs, this affect does not occur in your upper body. Only the areas of the body you use get the improved circulation, nutrition, and waste removal. If you want that kind of health for all your tissues, you have to work all your tissues. That includes your feet, your hands, and your neck. Definitely not the pet muscles you were hoping to strengthen, but ones that need strength, range of motion, movement, and circulation just as much as your six-pack abs.

Multi-tasking Exercise

Joseph Pilates wanted you to work your whole body in every exercise. First of all, that’s highly efficient. We don’t really have time to isolate each muscle and work it effectively every day. But Pilates exercises are also multi-tasking exercises—rather than an isolating clamshell for your deep six rotators, you’re going to do side kicks, which works not only your hip’s external rotators, but also your hip abductors, flexors, extensors, as well as your knee extensors and foot dorsi and plantar flexors, and depending on your form, even your stabilizing shoulder, obliques, and your non-active or standing legs abductors too. Phew! That’s a lot of muscles to work in a single exercise. If you’re aware of your whole body in every Pilates exercise, you can benefit multiple areas at once, ensuring more parts of your body benefit from improved circulation and waste removal, and ensuring a better chance of uniform development of your body that will help prevent injury.

So don’t play favorites. Work everything. Give every muscle some love and attention, and better yet, do it in whole body exercise!

Bye bye butts?

Do you ever people watch and notice the details of their anatomy? Sure you notice their hair, clothes, shoes. But what about their body—how they walk, how they hold their head, the shape of their backside?

In being a keen observer of human bodies and in teaching movement for thousands of hours, a trend becomes clear—as a whole, the people of sedentary cultures like ours have lost their butts. Where have they gone?!

Tilted vs. Neutral Pelvis

When you stand on your legs, ideally the pelvis is perched atop them in what we call a “neutral pelvis.” To see if yours is neutral, place the palms of your hands on the top front of the pelvic bones (anatomically referred to as the ASIS—anterior superior iliac spine) and your finger tips onto your pubic bone making a triangle with your hands. If this triangle is perpendicular to the floor, your pelvis is neutral. If the pubic bone is forward in relation to the top of the pelvis, we call this a pelvic tilt. In this case, a posterior pelvic tilt, or what you might call a tuck. We can tilt the pelvis when standing, sitting, laying down. And when the top of the pelvis tilts back while the base of the pelvis tilts forward, the butt and all its muscles are somewhat tucked under and likely clenched. The majority of people who come to our studio lay on the reformer on day one in such a position.

Triangle hands can help you notice whether your pelvis is tipped or “neutral.”

But people haven’t just tucked their butts out of the way. They’ve pushed their pelvis forward in space and essentially hung all its weight onto the ligaments in the front of the hip and the hip flexor muscles. This alignment of the bones makes the quads grip eccentrically to keep you upright and renders the hamstrings and gluteal muscles unable to participate in keeping you up. You’ve found a way to stand without using your backside. Yay for energy conservation, bummer for the function of your joints and development of the muscles that support them.

Sitting behind the sitz bones in a posterior pelvic tilt.

Sitting Pelvis

We reinforce this pattern in the way we sit. Rather than perch atop our sitz bones, many of us roll back behind them. Again a posterior pelvic tilt, this time putting pressure and stretch on the low back as well as the hip flexors to keep us upright. We sure are fans of sagging and hanging because let’s face it, it’s easier. Until the structures of your back start to wear out (discs!), your body signals pain, and then you head to the Pilates studio for help.

Walking Pelvis

The result of the way we align our bones is that we don’t use our glutes well. If we don’t use them to stand, then when we start moving from standing to walking, we aren’t going to use them either. Rather than truly extend our hips with each step, we shuffle by pulling forward with our quads and hip flexors. I used to stand and walk this way myself. And when I touched my backside, it was always cold. Cold because I wasn’t using it and bringing blood, circulation and warmth via muscle contraction.

So where did all the butts go? We aligned our bones so that we don’t use the muscles of our backside properly. We clench them to tilt our pelvis rather than use them to extend our hips. Or said another way, we use them to shove the pelvis onto the femur, rather than hold the pelvis up and move the femur in the pelvis.

Can glute exercises solve this?

When you notice the disappearance of your backside, you may head to the gym to try to train these muscles into a nice shapely rear. Yet your biomechanical habits remain and as soon as you leave, you’re back to using them as you always have. A movement coach like a Pilates teacher may point out that your pelvis is posteriorly tilted or tucked, but unless you unwind these patterns well, you may arch your lumbar to pull your pelvis into neutral, which ultimately is very tiring for the low back.

Get Your Butt Back

First we need to align the bones, release the clench that shoved the pelvis under, find the core stability to keep the pelvis neutral, and use the hamstrings and glutes to extend the hips as intended. And voila, before you know it, you may find your butt resuming its shape (and along with it, happier, less tight hamstrings and a pelvic floor that is aligned to do its job).

But don’t come complaining to us when you need new jeans. Or better yet, toss the tight jeans for clothes you can actually move in so that you can continue to use your new strong butt to get you from here to there.