Waking Energy 7 Timeless Practices Designed to Reboot Your Body and Unleash Your Potential

to deliver, creating a kind of new extraordinary belief in your own potential.
Catching Fire
A childhood spent in ballet studios finally paid off during the summer of my thirteenth year. Not only
was I accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet, where talented young dancers are
groomed to one day join the New York City Ballet (NYCB), but I also signed up for a conditioning
class using an approach then called “Contrology.” The class was taught by the late Eve Gentry, one of
Joseph Pilates’s protégées who was a guest teacher that year for NYCB’s summer dance intensive.
I remember the first day I stood at the door with fourteen other young ballerinas, our hair
obediently pulled back into little chignons, eyes wide, mouths closed in expectant, dutiful silence,
barely breathing. Our teacher, Eve, seemed to float into the room: a slender, elegant woman with a
twinkle in her eye, the embodiment of effortless grace.
She told us that we were there to strengthen our bodies—our center or core muscles—so we
could become better dancers and prevent injury. She told us that the class we were about to do had
been invented by her mentor, Joseph Pilates, a friend of Mr. Balanchine. Designed to use the body as
an integrated whole, this exercise system would help us increase our competitive edge. She said it
would enhance our overall performance and have us jumping and turning like Mikhail Baryshnikov in
no time. At the mention of Baryshnikov, I was sold.
I dutifully followed Eve’s instructions. I stood at the head of my mat and crossed my arms in front
of my chest as she directed us to do. I lifted the crown of my head upward so that my reflection in the
mirror across from me made me appear taller than I ever thought I could be. I used my powerhouse,
the belt of muscles extending from the buttocks up and around through the abdomen into the upper
torso, to lower myself gracefully to the floor.
I was told to lie down, lift my legs up to the ceiling, and then lower them down to an angle where
my back was held flat against the mat only by the strength in my abdominal muscles. At the same time
I was to pump my arms up and down at a rapid pace by the sides of my body for ten ten-count breaths.
“Pumping” felt like flapping to me, because it was so foreign and difficult for my gangly young body
to do. I was cued to keep my upper body lifted and my eyes on my navel while my legs were
extended. It felt nearly impossible.
By arm flap number twenty-five, I was in agony. I didn’t think I’d make it to fifty, let alone one
hundred. I felt my abdominals burn for the first time: they were on fire! I could barely breathe, never
mind keep my legs up or smile, as Eve mercilessly commanded we do. “Keep those arms pumping.
Get the blood moving. Keep the oxygen flowing. Inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three,
four, five!” I thought I was going to die.
After I finished the workout, I called my mother to complain bitterly about the strange exercise
class I’d just taken in which I had lain on my back and flapped my arms up and down a hundred times,
after which I got severely punished for the next forty-plus minutes by having to perform gymnastic
movements that made my stomach ache in ways I’d never known it could. Instead of indulging my
complaints, she told me she was sure that the class would prove to be very useful and important to me
and that I should attend as many of the “strange exercise” sessions as I could. She had a good feeling