I am honored to introduce the author of today’s guest post, Marcia Polas. I “met” Marcia through twitter and regularly enjoy her honest, passionate writing on Pilates and life as a woman who lives and breathes the practice of Pilates day in and day out. When I thought about showcasing what a Pilates-inspired lifestyle means to indivdual people, Marcia was one of the first people that came to mind. I think you’ll greatly enjoy her story….

What a Pilates-inspired lifestyle means to me:

“There is little that brightens my day more than learning that someone read my blog and it resonated in some fashion. A few weeks ago, Robin paid me the ultimate compliment by not just reading, but asking if I would be interested in writing a guest post. She offered I repurpose something appropriate or write specifically to her theme, What Living a Pilates-Inspired Life Means to Me.

Horrid at repurposing, I began writing and got nowhere. You see, I’m not capable of anything but a Pilates-Inspired life. Every ounce of my being (I was going to say at my very core – but too corny even for me) is steeped in Pilates. Every thought, the solution to every problem, all my coping mechanisms, and the way I find myself are all in some fashion tied directly to my Pilates practice – or shall I say, the practice of Pilates. But digging into what that means to me is a tougher nut to crack. If something has become such a part of you that it is has attached itself to the essence of who you are, can you find words to describe what it means?

So after failing at writing anything that felt real or true, I thought back to late November when I had to examine my life before Pilates. I was honored to be invited to speak at a Tedx Women event here in Denver last December on “How listening to my body changed everything.” As I went through draft after draft in preparation, telling myself my story over and over again, I found myself recognizing that I had found the strength, power, and courage to seek all that I needed in life. My Pilates practice changed my life – it changed everything about me – or maybe it just allowed me to find out who I really am. Either way, my entire life is a study in living a Pilates-inspired life….which means continuously growing and learning, accepting my flaws and shortcomings, recognizing my power and beauty, opening my heart and listening – to myself and to others, and making it my life’s work to give what I can to those who seek what I have to offer. My Pilates-inspired life is about allowing myself to both succeed and fail, about giving and learning to receive, and about having a positive impact on the world around me whenever I have the opportunity. It’s about understanding that if I am strong and true and focused, I can prop others up and help them find their way. But it took me many years to become this person who (I’m happy to admit) I really like. So if you don’t mind reading a bit more, I thought I would share with you my Tedx talk – this is the only time I shared it outside the venue on December 1. If you want to understand how I found this inspired (and on a really good day – I hope inspiring) life that I get to live, this is the journey that got me there.

I want you to think of the person you love most on this planet. If you were completely responsible for taking care of his or her body, would you care for it the way you do yours? Would you feed it, rest it, exercise and protect it the way you do yours? Would you speak to them the way you speak to yourself?

I am the sixth of seven children. Born into a noisy, affectionate, achieving family. I cannot remember a day of my childhood when someone outside the family didn’t compare me to one of my sisters.

My parents raised us to be strong, independent, and successful. In fact, when I graduated from high school, my dad offered to pay for college or my wedding. I replied that I would pay for my own wedding if he paid for college. It was the right answer.

So off I went to college and four years later, I was embarking on my professional journey. By my early thirties, I was a successful marketing and advertising executive, living the life I was raised to live. This included an enormous amount of drive to be the best and an even greater amount of stress.

The stress manifested itself in all kinds of ways…headaches, rashes and hives, and these tumor-like knots right up here caused by the way I held my head, neck and shoulders. In many ways, I was playing a role I thought I was supposed to play. And that too added to my stress.

Someone suggested I should try Pilates. I had never heard of it, but I needed something. So on my 32nd birthday, some friends gave me my first Pilates package. I can remember the first time I got on a reformer. I could feel something inside me say, “This is for me.” And so it began.

On my birthday the next year, I moved to Northern Virginia to rebrand a company. This was the BIG job. There wasn’t Pilates nearby, but there was a lot of stress at work. There was also the Pentagon on fire, 4.5 miles from my office, on September 11, 2001. And everything began to change.

I was miserable. I hated my job. I hated my life. I felt trapped by a big salary and by the fact that I didn’t think I had a calling in life. I had no talents as I saw it. I was stuck.

The Universe unstuck me by firing my ass from my job a week after I received a big bonus and a big raise. The marketing department was being dissolved so to speak and I was out. It took ten months for me to find a job.

In October 2002 I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to work for a Toronto-based ad agency. I threw up immediately after accepting the position. This was not the life I wanted. Then I packed the dog and moved to Cincinnati.

Upon driving into the city, I stopped and got some Cincinnati magazines. I knew nothing about Cincinnati. The first magazine I paged through had an ad for a Pilates studio. “They have Pilates here. I’ll be okay.”

The Sunday before I started work, I got online to research Pilates studios. At 10 o’clock in the evening I called the first one that popped up to listen to the message. Stacy Sims answered the phone. We spoke for an hour about Pilates and scheduled a private the next Saturday.

{Stacy Sims}

On that first day, Stacy taught me to breathe and even though I had taken Pilates for years prior, for the first time I felt my core. Turns out I had found a home.

I began taking Pilates 2-3 times a week. Some weeks, I would have to go back to the office at 8:30 after class, but I found a way to get to class. For the first time in my grown up life, I was putting something important to me ahead of work. I began to thrive a little and my body began to change.

I can remember the first time Stacy had me hold a plank. I was sure I couldn’t. She was sure I could. I held it for a minute.

Strange things started to happen. I seemed to be able to forget everything outside my body. My teachers were trying to get me to focus on five or 10 things at once and there was no room in my brain for anything but that. I started to have what I now call light bulbs going off in my body. The first was while doing a set of something or other with my legs in tabletop. My entire body started shaking. I had my hands in straps and my legs in the air with a ball between my legs and I was visibly shaking. I thought, “Oh shit. Now I’ve developed some kind of palsy. What the hell am I going to do about this?” I was deep in my core for the first time and you can’t fake the shake.

One night I was in my friend Kate’s class. She had us doing about a million slow and deliberate leg extensions and lifts. My overtaxed hip flexors were screeching in pain. I really thought, if she makes us do one more of these, I’m going to rip my leg off and beat myself with it. And then somewhere in my head I heard something else. I heard a whisper. There was still the screeching of my hip flexor, but there was this tiny whisper in my abdominals. I decided to focus on the whisper. And each time we did that horrible single leg work, I made a decision to ignore the screeching and focus on the whisper. And eventually, I didn’t feel my hip flexor any longer, all I felt was my core. I was onto something.

I was in Toronto about four days every other week and wanted to be able to teach myself. I spoke with Stacy about going through her teacher training program. My big concern was that I would be horrible.

“You have to promise me that if I suck at this, you’ll tell me because there is nothing worse than a bad class or a bad teacher.” She said, “Well if you suck, I won’t let you teach. But Marcia, the fact that you are this worried about it means you won’t suck.”

I never intended to be a Pilates teacher. I wanted to teach myself on the road and planned to work for Stacy a few hours a week in exchange for free classes. Pilates was my escape from my life. It was my joy. I could see how my entire being changed in the midst of a Pilates class. I was as close as I had ever been to that person I wanted to be. My best self. People responded to me differently when I had just taken a class. But I didn’t dream I could get that from teaching.

As it turned out, teaching gave me even more joy than doing Pilates. There was more to think about. I had a hundred things I was looking at and those weren’t even the things I was verbally cueing. It was like a drug. And I didn’t suck.

So I asked Stacy to add classes on the weekend when I had time to teach and spent the next year teaching with a net.

During that year, I practiced as much Pilates as I taught. And as I got deeper into my practice, I started to have to listen to not just my body, but also to my heart and my soul. I was really unhappy. I was trying so hard to be something I wasn’t and it was ripping me apart. I had to recognize that I wanted something else in life and have the guts to seek it. On my desk at work at the time was a card that has become one of my mantras in life. “Leap and the net will appear.”

In 2004 I left my marketing/advertising career and began teaching Pilates full-time. I loved my job, but I was still putting everything and everyone before me. I still didn’t care enough about myself to love myself as much as I loved others.

Over the next few years I learned a ton and allowed my instincts to lead me. I started trusting my gut in all areas. As a result, I opened my heart and leapt again. This time the net didn’t appear and I fell hard enough to break.

The process of putting humpty dumpty back together again was hard. And nobody but me could do it. I had to work through all my garbage and learn to love myself. The big lie was that before that, I thought I had finally figured that part out. I thought I was all that and a bag of chips. Boy was I wrong. I beat myself up. I put myself last. I was looking for validation in someone other than me. I still wasn’t really listening.

Two years later I woke up on my 42nd birthday and it seems I had become someone different. There was a song running through my head that morning. It was the remix of the David Cassidy/Partridge family “I woke up in love this morning.” I found it on my iPod and danced around my bedroom naked. And that’s when it hit me. I was madly, truly, infinitely in love. With me.

That began the year of dancing naked. Every morning I would wake up and dance naked for at least two minutes. Dance with abandon. And I didn’t always love everything I saw, but everyday I would find something beautiful in the mirror. And I was listening to my heart, my body, and my spirit

In my job as a Pilates teacher, I get to watch people find their strength and power. And I spend a ton of time preaching about taking care of ourselves.

I have four rules I require new clients to agree to:

1. Never allow me to put you in a position that feels wrong in your body

2. You can’t hold your tummy in and do Pilates

3. Pretty quickly, if it doesn’t feel like hard work, you need to tell me so we can find the work.

4. Don’t say bad things about yourself in front of me

I’ve found that I have incredible strength and power, but some times I am an absolute fraud. I have learned to love the quirky things that make me Marcia. I’ve come to recognize that I’m beautiful both on the outside and on the inside and that my heart is incomparable. But when business isn’t going well or something goes wrong in a relationship, all of that love and respect is tested. And can fall back into that old trap of being pretty mean and hateful to me. But when I do, I can hear something inside me screeching.

So I’ve created these rules to try to keep me on track. Maybe they’ll resonate with you.

1. If something feels wrong to you, heed and change it.

2. Don’t close yourself off. If you open your heart, to yourself as well as others, the world will present itself to you in the most beautiful ways.

3. If you can’t feel anything, you are phoning it in.

4. Don’t say bad things about yourself in front of you.

So this is what I’ve learned. When I listen to my body, my heart, and my soul, I know the answers. I can be true to myself. I can make good decisions. And everything simply works. My body can tell me right from wrong, good from bad, truth from lies. And when I listen, I take care of myself the way I would the people I love most

And as I’ve gotten better at this, I learned that my body screeches at me when things aren’t right. I simply have to be willing to pay attention.

So this is what I would like to ask you to consider. If some part of you is screeching in your ears, take a deep breath and listen for the whisper. I promise it will change everything.”

So there it is – what I think of as the beginning of the work in progress called Marcia. I hope it might inspire you to listen to yourself and live your Pilates-inspired life.

A little about Marcia… Marcia specializes in a Pilates in the Workplace program. She brings classes to her clients in their places of business, working to help clients who don’t have the time or inclination to go to a studio to increase their balance, strength and flexibility. Each class takes into consideration the class’ professional use of their bodies, tailoring work to chefs, engineers, dancers, painters, physicians, attorneys, and (close to her heart) marketing professionals. She is also the editor of the Pilates Method Alliance (PMA) newsletter

She can be found at www.polaspilates.com where she blogs weekly about life, Pilates, and the things that connect the two. She also writes a monthly column on her experiences as a Celiac who loves to eat. Follow her on twitter and Facebook @polaspilates