There is no limit to what you can expect to achieve when your mind-body concentration is total and honest.   Your entire view of yourself, physically / emotionally / mentally, will improve and you will reach that summit of ‘wellness’ where the mind-body-spirit positively connect.

Pilates: The Doorway to the Spirit

By: Andrea Jackson

Published in PMI's Pilates news letter
 

When I turned fourteen, my world seemed to close around me in darkness. I grew up struggling with depression in many different forms, each one named by a new medical diagnosis. My condition appeared to change over time.

The first diagnosis, at age seventeen, was simply clinical depression, and I was put on my first of many anti-depressants. I was stable, but also numb to any range of emotion, and the medication left me with a dry mouth and physical weakness.

As a young aspiring actress, I found it increasingly difficult to grow in my chosen career, so I stopped taking my meds while at theatre school. I was able to grow on stage because acting gave me access to a wide range of emotions, but off stage I would go from feeling invincible and confident to feeling absolutely worthless and wanting to die, in a matter of seconds. Hence my second diagnosis: manic depression.

I was put on a new medication to stabilize my mood swings, and once again I became isolated in numbness and started to feel hopeless. I began to loathe my mind and body for being defective, and again I wanted to die. I began to seek out experiences that would make me feel something, but I didn’t feel worthy of happiness, so I would put myself in relationships and situations that were fast, furious, and superficial. All the while, I was working “unsuccessfully” as an actor-singer-dancer. I was good on stage, but difficult to work with because I was so angry and self-loathing all the time.

Acting also taught me how to create a different personality to suit each situation. One of these personalities was a smoker, and eventually all my personalities were smokers. This became very exhausting and catastrophic when my different worlds or personalities collided, as they inevitably did. The next diagnosis to befall me was borderline personality disorder, and I surrendered once more to newer medications that again just made me numb to everything.

All through these years of medications and psychotherapy, I was physically ill, lethargic, weak, and in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals just to be told there was nothing wrong with me. I was caught in the trap that is Western medicine, which had trained me to need a diagnosis of something to validate how I was feeling in my body. I knew nothing about nutrition or about the connection of mind, body, and spirit. After several nervous breakdowns, I finally went home to rest. I tried many times to make a living outside of theatre or the arts, but this led only to more depression and anger.

I also noticed my body changing with age, and I wasn’t ready for back pain at thirty, joint aches at thirty-five, loss of bone mass at forty, and all the other so-called age-related illnesses that the pharmaceutical industry has labeled medical conditions.

January 1, 2000, is the day everything changed. I was sitting on my bed writing in the evening, feeling physically and mentally fine, when all of a sudden I felt the need to be sick. Over the course of three hours, I depleted all my bodily fluids through vomiting and diarrhea. The paramedics found me crumpled up on the bathroom floor, cold, paralyzed, and terrified. All I could do was move my eyes.

At the hospital, I was given an intravenous and put through numerous tests. They were looking for anything and everything. But I knew they would find nothing. I had chosen to be sick. As I lay in my hospital bed looking at my mother in the chair across the room, I made a silent promise to myself and my family: “Enough is enough! I will not live the second half of my life as I have lived the first! My parents will not die fearful about whether I will be okay! I will take responsibility for my own wellness and heal myself of everything I have suffered!”

I began taking Yoga and learning about the pharmaceutical industry, nutrition, and the body. I became certified to teach Bodyflow, which combines Yoga, Thai Chi, and Pilates, and I fell in love with Pilates. I noticed the profound change in my mind and body — and therefore in my whole life. I began to meditate and learned to breathe. I was hungry to learn more. I took a course in Matwork and knew that I wanted to help heal others of the illnesses rooted in our Western conditioning. I began teaching right away, knowing that through teaching we continually learn. I took many more workshops, and soon I had completed my Pilates equipment certification. I read everything I could find on the healing arts and put them into practice. That was another promise I made to myself: “If I teach it, then I must practice it daily.”

By 2003, within three years of resolving to take responsibility for my wellbeing, I had become physically healthy — and I went off all medications. I used the principles of Pilates to retrain, or rather to reprogram, my neuronet (my mind and thoughts). I quit smoking. I had begun to live fully in the magic of life.

Today I own and run the inaugural Pilates Contrology studio in northern Ontario. I assist approximately 250 dedicated clients ranging from the elderly, the terminally ill, and the mentally ill to NHL hockey players. I am the head of movement for the Theatre Arts Program at Canadore College in North Bay, teaching the way of Contrology to those embarking on a performance career. I am also acting and performing more than ever and am currently working on my own one-woman show, using Contrology as a basis for theatrical character development. And I am in the early stages of writing my first book.

Pilates Contrology has become the foundation of all that I do, and I learn more each day and will continue to love and enjoy my life. I now know, as do all my clients and students, that there is nothing — no ache, pain, illness, or upset — that can’t be healed through the intelligent exercise of Pilates, combined with meditation, the art of breathing, the practice of positive affirmations and journaling, and proper nutrition. Your body is your temple and the doorway to knowing the spirit of you and all that is.

This I know for sure: when you learn about the body, you make better choices about its care; when you do that, you enjoy your life more; when life is joy, you treat others with respect and compassion; when this becomes your way, you are likewise treated; when this is your experience, you reach out to nature and treat the earth in the same spirit; and when this comes to pass, everything flourishes and grows in the positive radiance of love. After all, we are each made up of the same energy. We and all that exists are working under the same law. Pilates is the practice that will continue to profoundly change my life for the better.