Welcome to this week’s Newsletter — I hope you have had a great week, and starting to enjoy the sunshine and blue skies we have been blessed with this week. I also hope you have remembered to put your clocks forward!!

The week at JTP base has been a little more settled, the website got sorted, and after a lie down in a dark room for a couple of hours, I have let go of the anxiety caused by that episode. 

Made me think about how easy/difficult it is to let go of feelings when things happen like this, that are basically out of our control? More of these thoughts in Your Whole Self this week.

This week is the final week of this block of Face-to-Face Classes before we take a break for Easter. There are normally exceptions to this of course, and this week it’s Jane’s classes at Woodhouse on Friday mornings — they are having a rescheduled class on Friday 11th April to make up for a previously cancelled class. 

Remember to book your Catchups with the online Catchups System, but also — even if you do not want a Catchup — please book your absence so that other members of the JTP family can find a space when they need.

Online Classes continue this week as normal.

This week I am looking at the exercise known as Swimming in the Joseph Pilates repertoire, as we are in Week 5 of March and looking forward to a new level of energy for April when Spring really takes off. 

Swimming is a fantastic exercise for strengthening the posterior chain of muscles. One of the other great things about Swimming is that it can be modified and challenged in different positions, and I demonstrate a few of the alternatives in this week’s video.

Remember to keep away from pain, and work appropriately for your body, and message me if you have questions.

Two weeks ago when I returned from looking after my granddaughters — oldest had chicken pox so I was lending a hand — Keith announced that the JTP Zone website had gone down … which meant that no-one could access the website, the recorded classes housed there, or the live links to ongoing classes! It took just over 24 hours to get the website up and running again, but in that time I was working on making the live links available without having to use the website … something which I did without much success. 

Yes the problem was resolved, and yes it was just 24 hours of disruption … however the stress/anxiety that the situation caused me was a lot because initially we didn’t know how long it was going to be down, and there was radio silence from our webhost. 

The situation was resolved, but my problem was the after effect of this stress. It came towards the end of what had been a tricky week with one thing or another, so I guess I couldn’t just blame this, but it was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ as the saying goes.

I’m sure you have all had occasions when this has happened, you know those days when life just messes with you. Nothing major in the grand scheme of things, but enough to throw off your mood, your plans, and sometimes the whole day. 

It’s easy to get stuck in frustration, replaying what went wrong, wondering why, but the truth is when these things happen they are normally completely out of our control, and yet, we let them take up so much of our energy.

So it’s time to practise ‘letting go’ — not ignoring or dismissing, but simply choosing not to carry the stress longer than necessary.

It’s about resetting the balance in our minds; it’s not easy, it takes practise, but we can do it together, next time life throws testing things at us, we will pause for a moment and do this:

• Breathe deeply and count to four
• Hold for a second, and on the exhale imagine physically letting the stress go
• Roll the shoulders back, shake out the tension and say (out loud) ‘this is annoying, but it won’t take over my day’

Because things will come back — my website came back, the tech glitch got sorted, the spilt coffee can be wiped up, the meeting can be rearranged, the printer will eventually work. Life will go on — it’s the peace of mind that’s worth holding onto.

I’ve already said, it’s not going to be easy because it’s a habit that we have practised over a period of time. But next time things feel like they are  conspiring against you, think of me and other JTP-ers all taking a deep breath in and counting … laugh and let’s breathe it out together, and let it go before it steals the whole day.

I’m wishing you a good week — keep looking, moving, and feeling good.

With love

Jane xx