« October 2007 | Main | January 2008 »
The Up Stretch on the Reformer is one of the hardest to do and hardest to teach. The key control is to stay in a dynamic flexion from the hips to the ears, while you articulate your femurs off a stable pelvis. The flexion expands and contracts through the course of the movement.
Subscribers can now see two video clips here.
You spark the fire as the first to sign up
for the solstice to come.
Here in the pit of darkness,
survival only comes from defiance.
That's why
intentionally triggering instinctual inspiration
is so pleasing--
because it's so defiant, and the response is so utilized.
December 21, 2007 Friday 8:43 AM
What matters? You choose. No choice is a choice. You cannot escape the choice of your attitude.
December 21, 2007 Friday 8:21 AM
Better, the journal was running an hour later than it really is here in Boulder, Colorado.
You ask if I’m ready to be brilliant today. I don’t know, that’s pretty daunting. I’d just like to show up, do my job, and go home and not worry about it till I come back. But that’s not me, is it?
When you have unlimited time without distraction you get a lot of room to listen, you almost have to listen or go mad with all the thinking. Thinking rides shotgun, but it doesn’t drive. That makes a connection to your feelings all the more important. Your sensations connect you to the world out there. They are your feedback from which you gain control. Control the "you" that is the complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit.
Your sensations can be real or imagined. Pilates focuses on the real sensations that directly relate to the realm in which we exist—gravity. Not spirituality, gravity. Forget the interpretations, let’s go with what we know for sure. Acknowledge that. Pilates is survival training for the gravity jungle.
You do pilates when you need to. You understand the target. You know how to get there. It’s a conditioning method. Conditioning is putting into a higher state of readiness. Getting ready…for whatever comes up. In your body, in your mind, in your spirit, completely coordinated.
Is that being brilliant enough? Pointing to pilates as the refinement of the wick, to burn as needed.
Gravity is why we do pilates.
Pilates is survival conditioning in the gravity jungle.
Being heavier than the medium through which we move (a fish is made of water and swims through water; humans are made of water and move through air) gravity forces the issue of alignment.
Alignment is more than a personal issue of survival. For instance, from the local paper:
"...what's going to happen in 2012--in particular on the winter solstice, Dec. 21.
Here's what is known: the ancient Mayan long-count calendar--a calendar that spans more than 5,000 years--comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012. This coincides with a galactic alignment in which the sun will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an event that occurs once every 26,000 years, which could have potentially catastrophic consequences. The galactic alignment has the potential to create a shift in the Earth's poles, which could cause disastrous environmental events."
Gravity forces the issue of alignment.
Alignment is perceptible via tension.
Tension requires two endpoints
to trigger fluorescence.
Fluorescence is the uniform usage of the body,
in order to get the uniform development promised by Joseph Pilates.
Victor Frankl, in Man's Search for Meaning says that the only freedom you have that is inescapable is your choice of attitude.
