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

away any last trace of the pain. In those precious, ephemeral moments of bliss, every single cell in my
body vibrated and pulsated with a transcendent joy. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was
tapping into my life force—the energy of creation, my essential aliveness. It was the energy of truth,
passion, purpose, transcendence. I was harnessing it.
Words fall short in describing the insidious cycle that I willingly sacrificed myself to in dance—
the descent into hell and then the payoff, the indescribable high, the out-of-body bliss I feel when I
rose above the “mirror prison,” when I escaped from the jealous, soul-crushing comments from
teachers and peers. When I took flight, it all went away. I lost myself to the movement, that
unspeakable ecstasy that I created with my body. Sometimes I barely recalled even hearing the
applause when the curtain fell. And somehow it really didn’t even matter, because I was already
inhaling the sweet ethers from the upper stratosphere, floating higher than most humans could ever
hope to fly.
Even now, I don’t understand how to explain this deep, crazy love to someone who has never
experienced this addictive sickness—the sensation of knowing that the moment I stepped on stage, I
had wings. I was a prisoner no more. I was beautiful. I was transcendent. I was free.
To everyone who witnessed my lightning rise as a dancer, it seemed very clear that what I wanted
most from life was to be a great artist. I too was convinced that what I wanted was to be Baryshnikov
in a woman’s body, with the same power and mind-blowing ability. But in truth, unbeknownst to me,
quietly breathing and biding its time in a vault in the deepest reaches of my psyche was another truth:
I was driven to achieve these heights to win adulation and love from a father who had always
withheld it, because in spite of my worldly accomplishments, somewhere inside I believed that
without his love and acceptance I was unlovable, anonymous, worthless.
All along, buried in a place that I couldn’t access, I guarded an all-consuming desire to be loved
—wholly loved—and accepted for who I was. I wanted to be loved for me. But I didn’t know it then.
Or if I did, I certainly couldn’t admit it to myself. When you believe that you’re not worthy of being
loved, how can you admit to wanting something you feel you don’t deserve? What I did know was that
I yearned for the ability to heal the wounds I had sustained on the battlefield of my childhood, look
past the poor choices I had made in partners, and find the kind of compassion and loving-kindness I
yearned for and believed were out there for me.
This truth—that I hid an all-consuming desire to be loved—had me locked into a perpetual cycle
of self-sacrifice and crushing disappointment, pushing me into undermining, self-sabotaging choices
and leaving me depleted and drained. And I buried it so far inside my own psyche that it took a
career-threatening injury—two of them actually, and later a nervous breakdown and near-suicidal
depression—before I would begin to unravel the mystery I had so long denied, before I would embark
on the journey to explore many paths to healing that would change my life.
I sustained my first significant injury while on tour in London and was forced to take a hiatus from
dancing. It was there, while offstage, that I turned to Pilates for rehabilitation and also learned to
teach it. So astounded by its miraculous effects in my recovery, I introduced it to public gym facilities
back in the United States, eventually opening my own studio. An accomplished producer, Cal Pozo,
discovered me there and asked me to cocreate and star in The Method, which became the first-ever
Pilates video in the late 1990s. Though I had been teaching Pilates and yoga (and still actively
performing) for years prior to the video’s publication, its overnight global success marked the
beginning of my career as a mind-body-spirit expert.