Hello all. Here’s something a bit different. We announced our FusionPilatesEDU.com Scholarship award in January and the recipient, Lindsay O, has agreed to give us occasional insights into the process of training to become a Pilates Instructor. We hope that those of you out there thinking about Pilates as a career will find this useful. 

Congrats Linsdsay!

The Application Process

Hello Hello! I’m new around here, but you’re going to be hearing and seeing a lot from me over the next year. I’m super excited to be the recipient of the FusionPilatesEdu.com scholarship for comprehensive Pilates teacher training through Balanced Body! I’m looking forward to getting to know Jennifer and Casey, to traveling to Asheville, and to committing more fully to a career I’ve been dabbling in for the last few years. I also look forward to this opportunity to reflect, process, analyze, and synthesize my thoughts and experiences along the way. I think you’ll see that I’m a thinker and a writer, and I hope my experience as a scholar and a literature and writing teacher will serve me well here and in the studio, too.

This scholarship had been on my radar for over a year before I applied, and just the process of applying was unexpectedly great. I reflected on how Pilates has changed my body and my mind, how the practice and the body-knowledge it has built now ground me in many endeavors physical and otherwise, how a form of exercise famously associated with “long and lean” ballerinas has actually done wonders for my understanding of and confidence in my thick thighs and belly fat. Thoughtful, deliberate movement has transformed my sense of myself and it has changed how I look at and interact with other people and their bodies as well. And writing about these topics reminded me how much I enjoy writing, a reminder I very much needed as I work on a mostly-unrelated and generally stress-inducing dissertation (more on that another time). I love making connections between seemingly unrelated things, I love devising just the right phrase and finding the most evocative word, and it was so rewarding to do all those things around a topic in which I have invested much less self-consciousness and self-doubt and much more passion and positivity.

I’ve been practicing Pilates in some form or another for something like seven years, not at all coincidentally for about as long as I’ve been pursuing a Ph.D., and I’ve been teaching mat classes for two. I know the work in my body and I’ve long been curious about the history, philosophy, and culture of Pilates training as well. Applying for this scholarship nudged me to talk more with my Pilates teachers about how they came into the profession and what they liked and disliked in their training and certification experiences.  It always feels tough to ask for a favor that I feel I can’t ever return, like, in this case, a letter of recommendation. But Grace Ranson and Kellie Watson at Momentum Pilates Studio here in Charlottesville, VA and Bonnie Grove, the teacher trainer who taught all my Power Pilates mat certifications, each showed me that the familial structure of classical Pilates is still very much alive. I’m excited to be a part of it, and I want to end this short intro with gratitude for these women without whom I wouldn’t have even made it this far. Today as in Joe’s day, Pilates students become teachers, passing down ideas and innovations with ever-accumulating nuance. I’ve been teaching English literature and academic writing to college students much longer than I’ve been teaching Pilates, and when Kellie and Grace and Bonnie greeted my desire to pursue full training and certification with such warmth and encouragement, I realized it’s not that different from when one of my English students tells me they want to become a teacher — of course my teachers are excited for me: my enthusiasm is partly theirs, and my success is their success, too.