私はピラティス・コミュニティの長老として60年間このメソッドを生き、56年間週ごとにレッスンを受け、44年間教えてきました。このためこの記事に返答しなければならないと感じました。この記事はジョセフとクララ・ピラティスが創造したメソッドの本質を矮小化し、歪めています。
（以下、段落ごとに日本語訳が続く）
ピラティスにスピリチュアルな側面がないというのでしょうか？
ピラティスは常に精神的高揚を伴うものであり、身体は精神の住まいです。
ピラティスは単なるエクササイズではありません。
人生のあらゆる行為の中で身体に意識的に存在する方法です。
ピラティスはムーブメントの哲学であり、
呼吸・健康・生活のすべてに関わります。
ジョセフとクララはホリスティックな生き方を提唱していました。
『Return to Life』は人生全体のためのメソッドなのです。
ピラティスは自己管理を学ぶ教育です。
自分の身体を扱い、癒し、学ぶ方法です。
ピラティスは年齢と共に深まります。
それは老化ではなく成熟のプロセスです。
慢性症状やリハビリにも大きな力を持ちます。
個々に適応される創造的なメソッドです。
マス向けの画一的なピラティスは本来のピラティスではありません。
ジョーは決して固定的ではありませんでした。
彼は創造性を常に奨励しました。
ピラティスは本質的に
一対一の深い個人的プロセスです。
ピラティスは自己への旅です。
内的探求です。
直感型の人にとって
身体への旅こそ自己成長の道です。
このメソッドは
1920年代から100年続き
これからも人々の教師であり続けます。
ピラティスを単なる規則的エクササイズと呼ぶことは
成長と充足の機会を奪うことです。
メアリー・ボーエン
ピラティス最上級長老
ユング派精神分析家
Subject: Mary Bowen’s response to the LA Times article on Yoga and Pilates
“MIND-BODY BENEFITS
YOGA AND PILATES FULFILL DIFFERENT WELLNESS GOALS”
– Los Angeles Times by Jeannine Stein
As an elder of the Pilates community who has lived the Pilates Method for 60 years, taking weekly lessons for 56 years of that time, and teaching it for 44 years, I felt I must reply to this article. I find this article to be a dumbing down and bastardizing of what the Pilates Method was created to be (and has been experienced to be by myself and many, many others) by the founders Joseph and Clara Pilates. I will respond point by point.
First, the article states that Pilates is without a spiritual component or holistic approach and is simply a strength and conditioning system done with mat work and apparatus. Pilates without a spiritual component? Pilates has been practically messianic in its spirit and still is for those who understand it. Joe was trying to change the world! We, his followers, were referred to as his disciples. That’s how avid the spirit of the method has been. As I have experienced the Pilates Method, as I practice, teach and observe it, there is always a spiritual uplift and buoyancy that comes from the work. Moreover, spirit is everywhere, isn’t it? The body is a house of the spirit. Joseph and Clara Pilates knew and lived that.
Pilates without a holistic approach? Is there any method comparable that addresses the whole body at every moment in every movement whether in the studio or out of it? Pilates is not only exercises. Pilates presents a conscious way of being in your body for your whole life in everything you do.
The Pilates Method is a philosophy of movement. It is a commitment to total body health and breath, whether exercising in a Pilates studio, walking, sitting, eating, feeding your pets, cleaning out kitty litter, working, performing, skiing, shopping, swimming, shoveling snow, typing, climbing stairs, gardening, riding horses or bikes, watching TV, making love, getting in and out of or rolling over in bed, sitting on or standing at the toilet or any other activities of life. Pilates principles impact everything you do.
Further, the article gives only to yoga an emphasis on good nutrition and inward focus and to Pilates simply a series of regimented exercises that focus on using the core muscles. Not to diminish the importance of the exercises, Joseph and Clara Pilates always had a holistic and nutritional approach to living. They did not profess to be experts in nutrition, but it was included in their overall idea of total health. In his book “Return to Life” Joe meant that his method was just that – for your whole life. In this book Joe expressed his holistic approach – although the word holistic was not in use at that time. He called his method Contrology.
According to Ralph La Forge, spokesman for the American College of Sports Medicine and exercise physiologist, Pilates is not for “lifestyle management” – not for overall health and lifestyle goals – i.e., someone who has had their first heart attack or has high blood pressure or diabetes. For this he would choose yoga. Pilates not for lifestyle management? Not for overall health and lifestyle goals? What does he think Pilates is about? Unfortunately, Pilates is being taught more and more as just a series of “regimented exercises” and losing the scope and meaning of what the Pilates Method is. It is being seen as just a commitment to the special class. As a Pilates person you learn to manage yourself. You learn how to handle your body and what to do with it. You learn how to partner with, correct and heal your own body. You learn from your body. Pilates is an education about you and your body.
Ralph La Forge again: Pilates will not help manage chronic symptoms or improve the quality of one’s life. Quite the contrary, the Pilates Method can transform your life and has done so over and over. You are never done with improving with it. You partner better with Pilates the more you mature. We grow into Pilates as we grow deeper into ourselves. Pilates is thus a function of aging, not just an ego effort using intelligence to grow strength and flexibility, although it does do that. You are more when you age, not less. You have more wisdom, fall prey to less bullshit, have more integration and capacity to focus on essence. You can do and live Pilates better as you age.
Far from not being helpful for chronic symptoms, Pilates is packed with particular exercises for chronic joint problems, chronic muscular tension patterns and on and on. Pilates is rehabilitative for all states of injury from broken bones to breathing incapacity to brain damage. Pilates can be creatively adapted to each individual’s needs and condition. The Pilates Method is not fixed. It applies to everything in one’s life. Each of us is different and individual as will be our application and internalization of the Pilates Method. A Pilates person is not homogenized or cloned.
Again, in answer to La Forge, the idea of Pilates not being for rehabilitation is preposterous. Pilates has been a major source of rehabilitation, honored as such by many physicians for decades. A large part of what a Pilates teacher does is rehabilitative. Often my lessons are focused entirely on rehabilitation depending upon the condition the client is in and what is needed. This is not to diminish the importance of the whole repertoire of Pilates exercises. It is to address the needs of the person. This narrow view of exercises only is not what the writer sees as simply “helping people bounce back from injuries.” Many clients and teachers are working with a special problem for their whole lives with Pilates. Pilates is not a quick fix!
This article is continually exasperating to an evolved professional Pilates person. Do these people think they know what we are doing Pilates? They must be speaking at the level at which they practice Pilates. We know no more than we are and no more than we do. If you go to these regimented, mass market semblance of Pilates, be aware of what you are getting – a watered down, dumbed down, collectivized, Not Pilates.
Now for Leigh Crews, a Georgia based yoga instructor & former Reebok program developer. She sees Pilates as done in sets and reps, ordered, structured and teachers sounding out numbers. That is a limited view of Pilates for years. This is more like aerobics or some dance classes. This is supervised Pilates for years. Pilates watered down again because it is so excellent. The name is used, many of the forms are used and then anything goes!
For Leigh Crews there is no free form in Pilates, no freedom for either client or teacher to go one’s own way in any session. No room for experimentation or creative ideas to be Pilates. There is no end to creative ideas one can try within the apparatus and the scope and principles of Pilates. This depends upon the talent and potential of the individual practicing Pilates.
Joe was not rigid. In the 6 and a half years that I was at his studio twice a week I created exercises and variations in his presence which he always encouraged. He was also open to have forgotten this. Joe’s reminder to me was “Just be sure that you are always aware of the whole body at all times no matter what you do. The Pilates Method is about whole body.” The writer of this article should have consulted deeper sources of Pilates experience.
If Joe and Clara were alive today, they’d be aghast at the myriad of mat classes being taught by inexperienced teachers to masses of people. This is a disgrace. It diminishes what Pilates essentially was and still is. Pilates is primarily and exquisitely one to one, in depth, geared to each individual’s needs and condition, taking in the whole body, supporting as deep a journey into the body, mind and spirit as each person is capable of. There is plenty of room for creative expression. Pilates as an education is even more so now as biomechanical knowledge has joined and integrated with it.
(Music for yoga, not for Pilates. Vocal sounding for yoga, not for Pilates. Talk for yoga, not for Pilates. Meditation for yoga, not for Pilates.) I can knock down these four silly duck pins easily. In my studio over 33 years in Northampton, Mass., clients chose their own music out of a range of discs. As long as the rest of us went along with the choice, that was fine. And often silence was chosen in order to find one’s own inner music and rhythm.
(Vocal sounding not for Pilates?) Vocal sounding is often encouraged in Pilates as a way to enter the experience the core – a way to access deep breathing, especially in the allowing of nature’s fullest breath in uninhibited yawning. The yawn with its natural sounds can remarkably help to release chronic tension patterns. I use sound at some point in every lesson.
(Pilates not verbal?) Try telling that to most Pilates teachers. The voice will give out in a Pilates teacher in a short time if they are doing endless talking and explanation. Some lessons require so much verbal instruction that one could ask where is the movement! There is an enormous amount of teaching one does that requires verbal explanation in Pilates. The important thing to learn to do is not to teach too much at once.
(No meditation in Pilates?) Meditation can be a way to access the mind/body connection. I have clients who do Pilates to connect more deeply with their bodies. Pilates was and always will be an enormously deep inner journey for me, as it is for all intuitive types.
This brings me now (if I still have you with me) to what I consider the worst blasphemy and myopia in this article.
Leigh Crews again:
“Yoga is a journey of self and experimentation, not Pilates.”
Elizabeth Larkham: Pilates teacher and spokesperson for the American Council on Exercises.
“Yoga for the contemplative, inwardly focused person, Pilates for the outward, externally stimulated person.”
In other words introverts will do yoga, extraverts will do Pilates. In the first place each of us is both. One or the other predominates in the first half of life, receding as the other comes forward in the 2nd half of life. But let’s just look at “Pilates not about inner focus.” This is just plain crazy!
While speaking at annual Pilates Method Alliance conferences and while giving smaller workshops around the country, it has been my observation that the largest number of Pilates teachers are introverts. I would have supposed that there could be more Sensates, people comfortably in their bodies. Quite the opposite I found to be true.
For an intuitive to reach and connect with the body at all requires an inner journey to the deepest experience of the conscious itself. That is where the body lies in the intuitive. You can’t go any deeper than that in inner focus – than to the farthest and darkest reaches of your psyche. If a teacher (or it could be a client) is making conscious and bringing through knowledge and inner authority from that place to teach from – then you will know, feel and hear the difference. That dark journey through difficulty and resistance requiring enormous patience, perseverance and faith will produce a uniquely inspiring teacher. Whether it is with a client or a personal journey, this is the path of the most experienced teachers in the Pilates community who know for certain that Pilates has been and is a journey to the Self.
Why would so many Pilates teachers be Intuitives? Choose to be? Because the journey into the body for them is the way to their own development. If you’ve gone that far down and come back up with something, you have a gift to share.
I hope this lengthy response will be read and possibly printed. I hope that it will allow in some light and consciousness about a brilliant method for partnering with your body throughout your life whether you are so called normal, injured, fat or thin, coordinated or uncoordinated. The Pilates Method created by Joe has been around and growing in depth since the 1920s when Joseph and Clara arrived in N.Y. It will continue to be a great teacher in anyone’s life. For 100 years the Pilates Method has been and will be.
This is the essence to be found with the Pilates Method. To call it regimented exercises on mat or apparatus without need or call for inner focus and all the other inaccuracies of this article which I have addressed is an abysmal watering down and loss of the great opportunity for growth and fulfillment given to us by Joseph and Clara Pilates who lived their lives for it.
Mary Bowen – Pilates most Senior Elder & Jungian Psychoanalyst
(Mary has lived Pilates and Jungian Analytical Psychology for 60 years since 1959, teaching Pilates for 44 years since 1975, practicing as a Jungian Psychoanalyst for 49 years since 1970 – combining the two professions for 24 years since 1995 which she calls “Pilates Plus Psyche” – addressing the whole person in Pilates, conscious and unconscious.)