Welcome to this week’s Newsletter and the end of the first week of flaming June!!! 

Flaming June is a famous painting by Sir Frederick Leighton, of a sleeping woman in an orange dress …. It is supposed to be the personification of summer heat … let’s wait and see. It doesn’t quite feel like it yet, but I’m ever hopeful.

I hope you have had a good week, it’s been lovely to catch up with everyone in class, having lots of chats about how Pilates makes them feel. The things that keep coming up are:

• better Posture
• my Hips need it
• I hear your voice telling me to lift my chest, drop my shoulders
• I feel stronger
• my gluteals are better
• it’s nourishing for my body
• Pilates makes me who I am
• there isn’t one part of the body that Pilates doesn’t reach.

So let’s keep going folks — feel the benefits, listen to your body, and keep moving.
 

I have chosen Swimming for June, and as this is Week 1 I am looking at the foundation level. 

Swimming is a superb exercise to strengthen the posterior chain of muscles, you need core strength and stability, you need stamina, you need mobility in the hips and shoulders so this exercise is a ‘keeper’. I show an upright modification if you don’t want to be on your knees. 

It’s important to work appropriately for your body, ao keep away from pain in order to fully benefit from the exercise.

Thinking, doing, being — according to Dr Joe Dispenza we have three brains: simplified we have the thinking brain, which leads to the doing brain and this leads to the being brain.

The thinking brain is the seat of your conscious awareness — gathering information, listening, and connecting. As we take in information we change. As we change and develop we have new experiences, our behaviour changes, our actions change, our emotions change.

Just by thinking we can turn on the stress response. We might remember something that happened 10 years ago that hurt feelings or resulted in a difficult experience, and this in turn stresses us. As soon as this happens our body starts to respond because the body doesn’t know if it’s real or imagined. This is our physical stress response.

However, we can observe who we are being, we can observe our old self and change those thoughts, and even silence them. If you start to think about how you want to be, you can train your brain and start to plan your actions. You can begin to think about a new way of being, you can start to change your mind because you are starting to get the brain firing with new sequences and new patterns. The mind is the brain in action so when we are thinking differently, we start to do things differently, then we start being different.

As we start to change our mind we start to change the memories — the memories of those difficult situations, or the negative emotional feelings of hurt from before. By working on changing those thoughts, our actions start to match the changed intentions and our behaviour matches our thoughts. We are starting to feel compassion. Knowledge is for the mind and experience is for the body, and when we start to apply our new way of thinking into doing and being different, we start to change our physical response.

We have to practise and practise this in order for this to become innate and automatic, but when this starts to happen we have moved into our being brain.

So the more we can change our thoughts, the more we start to do things differently. Then we begin to be different.

Have a great week practising — keep thinking, doing and being different.

With love
Jane xx