The Imagination Shapes The Truth

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.  The mind is everything, what we think, we become.” - Buddha

Recalling a happy moment in your life can bring feelings of joy, as reminiscing on a challenging period in your life can bring feelings of pain or suffering.  You can smell something that makes you remember a moment, place or person from you past.  When listening to music a song may bring back very intense memories!  Through our senses we experience thoughts that provoke both emotional and physical feelings.  At Polestar Pilates we spend a lot of time observing what thought-provoking images we use while we help restore and improve movement. 

There are many schools of thought that have contributed to the field of imagery and what is called 'Ideokinesis'.  This form of somatic training was first conceived by Mabel Todd in the 1930s and it refers to the use of visual and tactile feedback that is meant to guide students, either during static postures or physical movements.  Many have contributed to this body of work and along with the understanding of neuro-linguistic communication, we at Polestar have developed effective imagery and communication skills as a vehicle to improving movement.  

If you take a moment and reflect on how you and others physically react to feelings like fear and anger or happiness and love, it will not take long to notice that what we feel is directly reflected in how we hold ourselves physically. When we are afraid we tend to crouch down.  When we feel rage we tend to feel a rise in our body temperature and an accelerated heart beat and breathing pattern.  When in love we feel light and hold our heads up high.  We can use this increased awareness when we are guiding others through movement, especially when we are helping restoring movement after pain or injury, to bring about a positive experience. The thoughts that we hold while we are moving or teaching will make all the difference in how the nervous system responds.  It will also make us better able to communicate and find empathy with clients who are in pain or are having difficulty moving. 

As we become aware of how our emotions effect our posture and the functioning of our involuntary systems, like our respiratory and circulatory systems, we can really start to appreciate how important our choice of words are as movement teachers and healers.  

Visualizing the movement within the mind’s eye (either as movement within the body or in space), without any conscious muscular effort, primes neural pathways and reprograms unnecessary and unwanted muscular tension.  We allow our body’s unconscious intelligence to pave the way for the desired movement.  Brent Anderson often speaks about cueing the nervous system rather than the muscles, which makes complete sense when analyzing animals and children in nature, as the ancient yogis and our more contemporary Joe Pilates did.  When you go about your day, when a child plays in the park, when an animal hunts for its' prey, it does not solicit conscience muscle activity in order to perform its activities.  These activities in a natural environment occur unconsciously.  With this understanding, if our training is to be 'functional' and prepare us for real-life activities, we should train in a way that mimics and promotes what we will need in order to safely and efficiently perform our tasks, namely healthy unconscious movement coordination.  So how do we do this?  We rely heavily on meaningful imagery cues!   

“Physical practice combined with mental practice can lead to more improvement in motor performance and strength than either physical or mental practice alone.  Physical practice combined with mental practice can lead to more improvement in motor performance and strength than either physical or mental practice alone.” 1

If you regularly teach and take classes, and even if you tend to practice or work-out on your own, observe your thoughts and the feelings that arise and ask yourself if they are helping or hindering your performance.  Keep a journal on your experience and notice your transformation!

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1http://www.iadms.org/?248

If you'd like to read more about Polestar Education's approach to teaching movement visit this blog:
https://polestarpilates.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/how-imagery-changes-the-way-we-move/

That's not Yoga!

When ever I hear someone say, “that's not yoga”, I always chuckle inside because they remind me of an earlier version of myself.

Yoga, Pilates and GYROTONIC® have become a sort of trinity for me. These mind body techniques have one main thing in common: they all ask you to be present.

These practices guide the thinking part of ourselves inward into a space of focused attention that transcends time and space. When we are fully present there are no words, lineages or traditions, there is the lack of all that has been or will be, so that the here and now may reveal itself. The traditions of yoga, Pilates, Qi-Gong, etc are vehicles that transport our psyche out of the time space continuum into the present moment; the eternal now. Nowadays when I hear this type of comment of, 'that's not yoga' or 'that's not Pilates', or my favorite, 'you teach Pilates like a yoga teacher,' rather than defending why it is or isn't a certain thing, I realize that we are all struggling to name and categorize the nameless, which is the experience of being whole and not separate from our source. Through the repetitive practice of visiting this internal space of awareness and communion with source energy, the illusion of separation begins to fall away.

This practice of being in the now is like peeling an onion with an infinite center. There is no where to go, the whole point of the practice is just to peel the onion of the Self for the sake of simply being present. As we aspire to align with That which is ideal, optimal, correct and appropriate, we are reminded that we are in constant flux. What felt 'correct' one day may not feel that way the next. What was 'correct' for one body, may not be for the other. This is absolutely fascinating and humbling if we can let go of our desire to be 'correct´. The ability to perceive our own physical, mental and emotional daily changes and to develop the sensitivity to see them in others requires the discipline of time.

Teachers and practitioners of mind body disciplines hopefully live and teach based on personal sweat, tears and time spent in awareness, as opposed to time spent repeating ideas they have never experienced. As teachers we have the privilege of sharing and guiding others into this sublime experience of being through movement. When we are able to clearly communicate an experience of awareness to our students they, sometimes unknowingly, enter into this space of being here now and become inspired, excited, joyful and grateful... hence, the healing is occurring.

As we grow in our practice, we become the practice itself and ideas like, 'that's not yoga' become silly as we realize everything is yoga. Yoga literally means to yoke together, from the root yuj, often defined as "to add", "to join", "to unite", or "to attach." As we cultivate the experience of being in the now, whether it be on a reformer, mat or airplane, we create unity within ourselves and the need to define what it is that makes us feel connected begins to fall away. The world becomes the yoga mat as we grow into the practice, and as we grow into the practice, it becomes us...and it never ends so you're constantly being given opportunities for conscious change and living!