I love you Joseph Pilates

By Joselyn Hitter

When I began practicing Vipassana, or Insight Meditation regularly, I noticed immediately how much I relied on my core to sit upright. My first love was the abdominal series. So when Iattended my first long silent Vipassana meditation retreat in 2016, I committed to doing the abdominal series every day while on retreat.

28 days of the abdominal series. I had never done any form of physical exercise thatcontinuously. I had been doing Pilates semi-regularly for about 12 years before that retreat, but I had never done it every day. For 28 days, I sat cross-legged and upright on the floor for 12 hours a day and had zero back pain. If I didn’t have the abdominal series, I would have been dumping in my low back, and that would have led to back pain, a common malady for meditators.

When I came back from retreat and started taking Pilates classes again, I noticed that I was absolutely stronger. It seemed like I did everything more from my core. I also kept meditating every day and it just seemed natural to continue doing the abdominal series at home.

Almost 2 years later, in February 2018, I returned for another month-long retreat and ended upbstaying for 6 weeks. I did the abdominal series every day, but my body wanted more, as I wasc stronger. I added in any other mat exercises I could remember, even though I had no clue as to their order. I kept getting stronger, and I could sit for 12-16 hours a day in formal meditation practice without back pain. I knew I had Mat pilates to thank for this.

After that retreat, I ordered the Return to Life book written by Joe Pilates and planned to take it with me on my next retreat. During the first week of my next 6 week retreat in the Fall of 2018, I found myself on my mat with my book exhausted. Simply doing the exercises I knew took 50 minutes, and I had to constantly check the book for the order and the instructions for each exercise. Inhale to come up? Exhale to roll back? How many repetitions? After 2 weeks, I stopped being scared. I began to trust my body. At the start of week 3, I committed to doing the Mat series every day in order, teaching myself the new exercises as they came up in the book. By the end of week 4, I had learned the full series and could do it in 45 minutes, only occasionally checking the book. The last week of retreat, I was flowing through the whole series in 35 minutes without looking at the book. I had fallen in love with the Mat series, and I had fallen in love with my own heart. I felt like I had just met my real self for the first time.

The Mat series brought me visible physical changes, and the continuity of my mindfulness practice created invisible emotional changes. The Mat and the mindfulness met in my center. I knew it would be a difficult retreat for me emotionally, and I was correct. I had an intuition that having the Mat series would be supportive, and I had no idea how much it would actually benefit me.

A year ago, during the early part of the pandemic, it seemed as if the whole world joined me on a very long meditation retreat. I knew immediately that 2 things would be reliable supports for me: mindfulness and the Mat series. Alone in a cabin in a forest in Mendocino, California we started again: me, my mat, my breath and my Contrology book. I know we all had our own individual experiences of the pandemic and I know that I am not alone in acknowledging what an amazing support having a strong and reliable center is during difficult times. Thank you Joseph Pilates, I love you.