Pilates
Your body is your best equipment, especially when your mind is in its movement.That’s what Pilates taught me and that’s what I use Pilates to teach. I don’t use the apparatus because it’s heavy and expensive and like I said, your body is your best equipment and you can take it everywhere you go.
Joseph Pilates and I had some of the same teachers – yoga, acrobatics, aerial work, and in general, performance. I learned more about Pilates through the static trapeze than all the classes I ever took! And though I started my Pilates training in Tel Aviv back in 1999, I’m indebted to my first teachers in NYC – Doris Hall and Despina Stamos – for showing me that Pilates was alive, and that there was plenty of space for exploration and innovation within the form.
I developed a strong following as a Pilates teacher in Brooklyn because I’m passionate about helping people understand what and why they’re doing instead of just delivering a repetitive regimen with military-style cheerleading. At some point early on I departed from the classical repertoire and started to structure my classes around the principles that different movements teach us to embody.
Pilates is a potent and essential teaching of the mechanics of movement. My personal take on things is that Pilates developed his technique at the height – or the fall – of industrial society, so it seems natural that his work gives us incredible insight into the “body as machine”. Because of my own wide range of movement training and the permission I was given early on to question and explore, I’ve really developed my own unique approach to Pilates.
One of the main things that characterizes the Force and Flow approach is that I’ve moved beyond mechanics, which ultimately offer a limited perspective to dealing with a wide range of bodies and needs, to acknowledge and cultivate the energetics, or the quality and intention with which we approach any given movement. This is the reason that I can help people at all levels – from professional dancers to senior citizens and those with various degrees of pain and injury – to experience very tangible improvement in their balance, strength and alignment.
Ten years of experience and the feedback of many students have proven my approach incredibly effective and I’m very proud that Force and Flow recently won the 2013 Best of Brooklyn Awards for Pilates!
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