On how Pilates is like social change

Okay, so having undoubtedly whetted someone's appetite for this topic, I figured I would share my musings with you all.

The other day as I was doing my Pilates exercises I noticed for the umpteenth time how much weaker the left side of my body is than the right side. While I have noticed and worked on/with this imbalance for at least 15 years, lately I have been working a new angle. Instead of just trying to get the muscles on my left side to do more and grow stronger, I am trying to train the muscles on my right side to do less. Huh. Building one’s “core strength” can also mean learning new habits of letting go, of doing less rather than more.

I was also sitting in a group recently checking in about the impact of the somatics training my colleagues and I organized and hosted for Wisconsin social change leaders in December. One participant, a woman of color, shared that she and her white co-worker, who also attended the training, realized that in order for the woman of color to take on more of their shared work, the white woman had to actually interrupt her own habits of doing too much. Huh. Increasing the core strength of an organization may mean unlearning things, not just “building” capacity.

When it comes to transforming my own body, these old & deep habits of some parts over-functioning and others under-functioning are nearly impossible for me to understand by myself. Although they cause me pain and suffering, it takes a skilled coach who can see and name aspects and patterns of the complex puzzle that is a human being, for me to begin to sense them. I need kindness and support to not make parts of myself “the enemy,” and encouragement to not give up when I find I have fallen back into my old habits yet again. And cheerleading to keep going with lots and lots and lots of practice to create new channels of action.

How much more necessary, and even harder to come by, are such supports in social transformation? Who will help us unlearn our old dysfunctional cultural structures? Who will be kind to us when we snap back into our old habit patterns out of unconsciousness or fear? Who will mediate when the right side continues to assert dominance over the left, and help us not make each other the enemy? Maybe this is part of why we wish for an all-knowing and all-powerful god; the parent to mediate among the siblings, or the social body’s illusory equivalent of the individual’s illusory “self.”

Instead, I think, in our organizations and society, we also need coaches and consultants; peers who reflect our own image back to ourselves; we need leaders, and democratic and deliberative group processes that help us bring to our collective awareness the taken-for-granted / unseen patterns of interaction that make up our culture and its all-too-often oppressively imbalanced institutions.