How do you define strength?
Is it the amount you can lift?
The way your body has repaired itself?
Is it the mass of your past?
Or the way you simply make it through a rainy week?
A friend of mine processes their thoughts over days, and I have considered this processing a form of strength.
Another has moved through intimate relationship hurdles this last year with integrity and clarity that I would find hard to leverage, and I consider this strength, too.
Since the start of October I have stood with my metatarsophalangeal joints pecking on a charcoal mat at the bottom of a Brooklyn brownstone. Head bent down. Fingers arched. The tiniest invisible thread tethered between my heels, my core, and the top of my head at all times. What I had carried the day-of was nearly immaterial—the mat was there, and I had to greet it.
Before moving the smallest muscles in my body I’d sift through particulars, like an ungracious analyst sorting data: that information gets stored in that compartment to the left. That stuff goes in that compartment over to the right. Whatever was left was sloughed off in a pilates shake as a finale.
I have been practicing Pilates/Movement for some time on and off for the last seven years; entering the space almost always when I had time. Doing it when I needed it was secondary (although that was true during the pandemic days at home). Preemptively committing to it? Never. The need was different this past October though when I set it as a weekly commitment—I had been uncomfortable and at once deeply moved by something stirring in me, and I wasn’t sure how that would manifest.
The Birth Of Core
Months ago I saw a viral video of Lori Harvey laminating how pilates (and later admitting the addition of a low-carb diet (i think)) was the source of her sizzled abs. Before Lori (yes), there were plenty of rooms where Black women like myself existed and found healing in the practice. Beyond the core (although it is the center of it all), pilates provides the most steady avenue of elongation, flexibility and meditation for me. The more I do, the more I realize that at any given moment, as I am told to breathe and move slower, I am at once ridding myself of that pre-indexed data. It is just the mat and I.
Many of the Black women (including myself) who lean on the efforts of this at once powerful and at times, excruciating task, have Kathy Stanford Grant to thank. Kathleen was a trained dancer, and a visionary whose work single-handedly brought pilates as a form for Black women (many dancers) to the wider masses. She studied directly under Joseph Pilates, as only one of two he taught, becoming one of the firsts (and the only Black woman) to go forward to teach under that direction.
It has taken all of these years of threading and movement to realize who Kathy was, and to synthesize my relationship to pilates as something that was essentially made for people like me.
Here’s what Diversity in Pilates wrote about Kathy:
“In early 1970s, Kathy became the Executive Director at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She subsequently ran the popular Pilates program at Henri Bendel. She was the first African-American Panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a distinguished member of the New York Council of the Arts.
In 1988, she began teaching Pilates at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Kathy created her program, Before the Hundred, to prepare the body for the Pilates exercises. She taught by cueing through “song” that consisted of strong images to help students understand. For example, “zip tight jeans” meant connecting to your abdominals. Over time she cued in short-hand “zipper”. “
Kathy’s specific and individualistic approach made her legendary. Known for knowing the intricacies of a person’s body intimately, that at once allowed a person’s relationship with themselves to grow in a way that seems too difficult to ascertain. It is my understanding that Kathy only granted blessings to a couple of people she taught. It seems as if she harnessed a sense of purity in her teachings, our learnings, and too, in the strength possibly one would gain in that pureness.
The more I Google the history of pilates, the more rehabilitation circulates as a common word. Which is strange to note now, since it was several tears in my knee that led me to physical therapy, and then to pilates. This past fall and winter, and now early spring—five months to be exact—has been a weekly practice of restoration. Rehabilitation, if I am being technical. If it weren’t for the mat, the teacher and I, things would have folded into me. More than the thirst-trap physicality of the nearly four-pack peeking out above my underwear and below my bra, pilates has kept me well, mentally. Sticking with a definition of strength, although I felt weak. Incredibly so. Not even in the ways I would have once written it— a sort of foreign land kind of weak. Expanse and rough terrain. Golden light and all that jazz peeking through. But nothing—as it turns out—fully blinding. A weakness that is uncomfortable and new. Loving, and later, a weakness that comes from a morphing of that to be its own truth. A truth that well, is quite literally more morphing. Or am I learning to be just like pilates, smoother, smaller, slower, stronger? Certainly.
With Love,
L
"How do you define strength?" This is such an important question, and as you note, the answer can be different for all of us. Does our strength lie in our "resilience, " in our physical core, or in the core of who we are as a person and our ability to speak out about those values. Husband and I have been building our bodily strength after joining a rock climbing gym almost a year ago. At ages 75 and 69, we are both enjoying this new physical and mental challenge. We are getting stronger, and, if you have a magnifying glass you might even be able to see the teensy two-pack I am developing under my bra. It's nice, it feels good.
But I am finding that the other kind of strength -- the kind needed to push my neighbors to imagine a world that allows all of us to be who we are, eat good food, live in safety, have access to medical care and education rather than be satisfied staying within their own comfy, status quo -- can be more challenging than scaling that 45 foot wall. After all, climbing feels pretty safe when I know the guy at the other end of the rope will always and forever hold me up.