The Jennifer Kries Blog

For a while now, I have had this Rudyard Kipling poem on my mind, and when today arrived, I knew that I had to share it …

This poem for me, is one that makes you just stop and think and truly consider your life.  It is so simple and yet so profound.

It makes me think of the Runes — it reveals uniquely different and important messages and insights to each person who reads it.

It inspires tremendous self-reflection, and leaves you with the quiet gift of asking you to continue to take stock of how you feel about yourself and the world around you long after you have finished reading.

I have always treasured things like this that continue to move through me after I have physically left them–because they possess a subtle power that wield their weight like the ocean tides, washing over our consciousness and whispering undeniable, essential truths to us in the face of chatter and chaos, truth that rises up out of the foam and the fray like a lighthouse beacon, illuminating the path of purpose ahead.

My mother was the one who sent “IF” to me many years ago, and during this Mercury Retrograde, I chanced upon a photo of the two of us when we were on a camping trip when I was just three years old. The photo, to me depicts the freedom and peace of mind we can all feel when we practice non-attachment and gratitude for all that we are and all that we have– for all that we cannot hold in our hands.

The best things in life are the things that cannot be captured, that are ephemeral and that leave their indelible mark on our hearts changing us and moving us towards embracing what it means to be truly alive!

I can think of very few other poems that better express the Buddhist idea of non-attachment as well as this one does and reminds us to acknowledge what is truly important in life; for each one of us, I’m sure there are a variety of answers, but as spiritual beings living a human experience, I know from what I have observed over the years, that we all share this in common: we all care (to varying degrees, of course) about evolving and becoming better people, more aware, more mindful, more generous, more patient, more kind, and that we all know that our health, our loved ones, and nature are truly the most important things in life.

So why then, are we all given so easily  to attaching ourselves to what really doesn’t matter at all?  And I could list a plethora of items of course … but instead I will ask this question:

What is most important to you? And how do you make what is important to you a priority in your life for the short time we all have here on this planet?

I know for me that stillness is the way in … movement and meditation are the winning combination, and I want to hear from you about what you do to become purposeful and authentically empowered, so that you can manifest the things you wish to create in this life of yours.

More on non-attachment tomorrow- for now, please enjoy this brilliant pearl of a poem, and see what kind of gift it gives to you …

IF

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

*OR “-you’ll be a Woman, my daughter!”

Today, I want to thank Molly Napolitano for her very gracious and inspiring article on her first Pilates experience, by making her the subject of today’s Blog entry!

I invite you all to visit Molly’s site: www.mollynap.com, a site dedicated to something very near and dear to my heart: the art of empowering women.

Thank you, Molly!

<July 28th, 2010 Posted in Exercise Routines ~Injury Prevention & Treatment ~Preventative Health Solutions

By Molly Napolitano

I have resisted Pilates since it became popular in the 90’s. It’s not because I didn’t want to look like all those sexy celebrities who swear by Pilates, I just thought it wasn’t for me. I always believed that running and lifting weights was all I needed to stay fit. Boy was I wrong.

As you know, some things happen for a reason. For quite some time, I’d been thinking I should give Pilates a try to see if it would help alleviate some of the dysfunction in my thoracic spine. One day I woke up and decided that was the day I would find a Pilates Studio and give them a call. Later that morning, I met Jennifer Kries while walking Stella and Jessie in Washington Square. She told me she taught Pilates and I promised I would set up a session with her. After 3 months of emailing each other back and forth, I finally scheduled my first lesson. I knew it would be an educational experience but had no idea:

How much I would learn
How many misconceptions I had about Pilates; and
How incredibly talented Jennifer is
Jennifer is a true healer with an extensive background in mind-body arts and fitness. Her knowledge of anatomy, her verbal cues and her incredible teaching methods impressed me beyond words. She has inspired and empowered women around the world with her award winning Method Series DVDs (which she did not tell me about when I met her).

Read the rest of this entry »

Some new “tools” for strength-training and rehabilitation!

Today, I wanted to share some inspiring programs that can help to make your body feel “new” again–wonderful “private” instructional classes on DVD and audio that you can participate in any time the spirit moves you, so that you can cultivate greater mind-body awareness and reach new heights in your Pilates practice!

I am especially excited to announce the release of New Body Pilates III, and the upcoming release of New Body Pilates Toys (Fall, 2010)!

The long-awaited, New Body Pilates III, is now available on my website, and is the most advanced installment of the New Body Pilates Series and features my dear friend and Senior teacher, Kim Reis, Pilates devotee extraordinaire!

For all of you advanced students and teachers out there who want to experience an inspiring advanced session, I wouldn’t miss it.

*Includes the “Bonus Feature,” The PhysioBall workout; learn new techniques for increasing your overall core strength and balance, as well as bringing your mind-body awareness to a whole new level! The Physioball workout, though it does appear in this Advanced DVD, is suitable for All levels, so if you find yourself working out at home and you have a friend visiting who is new to Pilates, you can invite him or her to join you for this section- fun!

Read the rest of this entry »

The magic month of May, is a magic I never really knew until this May, when I came to truly understand what union meant in an entirely new way –because this May, I lived it, and I continue to live it now, as my fingers tap out the words to express the boundless love that flows from my heart onto the page.

May is the month when Venus, the ruler of Taurus comes to earth to grace us with love, desire, fertility and creativity of all kinds … The Goddess of love annoints the earth with blossoming flowers and trees and delights the senses with summer fruits and the bounty of nature’s garden. She is celebrated with rituals of fertility and harvest, with fire, which symbolizes the fire that burns within each one of us … in our hearts and in our souls, the fires that keep us alive and urge us forth to bring what we carry inside into the light of day.

May is the magic month of The Beltane, the festival of fires that burn with the light of transcendent love that can blossom here on earth …

The fires that honor all that is sacred and other-worldly.

May is the month of manifestation.

In late April, I had a tarot reading. I was feeling frustrated and lost. I was impatient, more restless than I could ever remember. I had worked assiduously, tirelessly on my psyche and plumbed the depths of my soul, lo the past several years, reaching new hard-won heights of awareness and consciousness and freedom, and I wanted to know where I should be heading with all of this next … and I was done walking this path alone.  I wanted answers, and I wanted them now.

Instead of answers,  I received predictions and advice, which, while heartening to some degree, of course left so much ambiguity and what I got was not at all what I felt I was looking for … I wanted immediate gratification– the opposite of what I knew to be the way– the Taoist path I had been walking. The wonderful woman who read my cards told me that I needed to get back to “ritual”– that I needed to reconnect with the desire to create the time and space to sit and meditate, to speak to the universe and say out loud what I wished to manifest in my life, rather than doing what I had started to do— the very opposite of what I knew would be best for me: plow ahead with great frustration, somewhere in the background hoping that as Rilke said, I would “live my way into the answers… ”  Of course I knew that I needed to give to myself  and return to my rituals … but I had become disheartened; I had been moving through a seemingly endless period of time that felt like dense, dark, hopeless sludge– gray and monotonous, without peaks and valleys, unfamiliar, uninspiring territory, and I wanted OUT. In so many ways I felt rich and ripe, the richest I had ever been, replete with every resource, and strangely energized in spite of my frustration … but I had started to allow my frustration to build to such a place that I found myself renouncing everything I knew and believed in about my own spirituality and connection to the powers of the universe. The big energy I felt pulsing through my veins was turning inward and had no outlet that would match the rising currents within me.  Instead of feeling empowered and filled with faith in my own ability, I felt disappointed, depressed, deflated, disillusioned. The past few years had yielded crucial life lessons, moments in time that brought me to that very reading, that place, that time, where I needed to be reminded of what of course I already knew so well–I needed to hear the words: “Practice what you preach,” and “create time for your own spirituality to breathe, so that your creativity catches fire once again and your life moves in the direction you want it to.”
Hard to believe that I, someone who helps others to cultivate patience and acceptance could not exactly say that patience has been my strong suit over the course of my life so far.
At the end of what was truly a great reading– one filled with hearty laughter, many deep breaths, some stellar advice and new friendship, my reader offered me a gift from her “Goddess Deck.” And said “pick a card, my gift to you.”
And so I did … but instead of picking one card, I picked two– two that slid out of the spread together. And what were they?

Read the rest of this entry »

Wanted to share my morning meditation today that followed my Yin practice:
We are all energy beings–we vibrate with our thoughts; Whatever we think about becomes our reality. When you are in the vibration of hope, you align with the energy of manifestation. How do you create abundance? Imagine how much fun it would be to have it, rather than thinking about what you do not have. Feel appreciation for the tools you possess, your natural gifts … How do you get where you want to be? Look in the direction of where you want to go and never look back over your shoulder with regret. Love yourself for your humanity, if you feel frustration or sadness because of the past, allow yourself to feel the feelings, and cry — move the feelings out, and if you do look back over your shoulder, look back in gratitude, for the past is what brought you to this moment of awakening. This moment where you can decide that anything is possible.

This past week I was at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. What a beautiful, gentle place, there in those motherly mountains of Massachusetts … I went for a walk yesterday on the grounds and found myself at a crossroads in front of a babbling brook. I was suddenly overcome with emotion, and the only way I can describe the feeling is by describing what happened in my stomach … I felt it rise and expand in an instant– it swelled with a kind of mini-explosion of joy that flooded my entire system, and then washed over me the way the water in the stream below me was washing over the river rocks. I was immersed in a sensory bath– the sun on my skin, and sparkling through the trees, dappling the forest floor, the pungent smell of winter becoming spring mud, coming alive again, birthing … the gorgeous, calming sound of the brook, playing its way down over the rocks into a larger source, its destiny someplace far away and of course, the breeze blowing through my hair and cooling the tears on my cheeks that were streaming down into my mouth– and then the taste of those salty tears. All such a cycle, all so connected, no separation between my tears and the water flowing through that brook. No separation between my skin and the air around me, the sun on my body, the rich smell of the earth I was standing on.

And my thoughts now go back to what happened inside me when I came to that place — that clearing where I was overwhelmed by the simple, powerful, healing beauty I was a part of … what flipped over in my stomach– what the ancients called “True Mind.”
Never mind what we know as “the mind.” I am smiling as I write this … your true, thinking self is your feeling self, your intuitive self and it resides in your stomach, in your very center.

I attended a talk on “Clearing Energy Blocks,” given by a Doctor of Chinese Medicine, and most of what he discussed was how much of our body systems are controlled by the stomach, or our “second brain.” Whatever we think and feel, manifests in our bodies, and very often, more specifically in our stomachs, of course showing up as digestive disorders of all manner and variety– so many of which would be easily healed alternatively– with mind-body practices, such as yoga, Pilates and my favorites: Yin yoga and Waking Energy.  What most of us don’t realize is that we are our thoughts and our feelings. We ARE physical manifestation of the energy of what we focus on, and very simply, when something hurts us in our bodies, when something causes us DIS-ease, it is our body’s way of communicating that it needs attention. And usually, the antidote to the pain or disease is so very, very simple and obvious: movement!

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Today is the Spring Equinox, the very special time during the year when day is literally equal to night and things are in an almost perfect balance. It is also the day to send out into the universe what you wish to birth. It is the day of new beginnings …

When I look at this awe-inspiring image of the stallion charging down the beach, my spirit soars and all I can think about are new beginnings, movement forward, and manifestation–through energy and intention and motion, what I want to see take flight in my life— what I want to charge ahead with and make into a reality.

And because today presents us with such a unique opening, this equal day and equal night, what comes to mind next is balance— the balance we all seek in our lives– that perfect combination of yin and yang we observe in nature –the very same we strive to create within our own selves.

I love this image of the sun and the moon and the energy that flows between them, the rays that are clearly reaching toward one another, and the harmony of that balance. I also love the fact that the moon, a yin energy is curling inward towards the sun, and appears to be receiving the rays that the sun is emitting … and in contrast, the sun faces away from the moon and projects outwardly, demonstrating yang energy, with its face open to the space around it. Yang and yin; sun and moon. Male and female. Day and night. Open and closed. Light and Dark. Opposites. And together, they create balance. Without one, the other could not exist. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you, but I have never looked forward to Springtime more than this year.

I feel new life rising up inside me, mirroring what’s happening in nature, and I feel inspired, filled with renewed hope and possibility.

I feel filled with gratitude and awe at the wonder of nature and all she gives us …

From the first day of the spring equinox forward, winter and the dark time are finally behind us, and spring bursts forth! She arrives and with her, buds force their way up through the cold earth, birds and their sweet songs return, the warm sun shines down upon us, soothing our every cell and we turn our sights to celebrating life and nature.

All I can think of are words that start with “re” …

Renew, reawaken, rejuvenate, replenish, revive, restore, rebirth!

For the first time since the Fall Equinox, the time of light and dark in a single day are equal; “equinox” is Latin for “equal night.”  The idea is that on the first day of spring there are exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. And what comes to mind, is the concept of balance.

This is not only a time for rebirth and revisiting what you aspire to manifest, but how you wish to do it … and the way you approach a new project has everything to do with being in balance– all faculties working together in perfect harmony, all energy systems rallying and moving towards the goal.

When your Mind, body and spirit are working as an integrated whole, anything is possible …

Read the rest of this entry »

At thirteen years of age, as an aspiring student at New York’s School of American Ballet, I knew Pilates was something special. After my very first class with Eve Gentry, I was able to execute movements that up to that moment in time, had eluded me. I performed my first-ever triple pirouette that day after Mat class with Eve. I was astounded and delighted. I was enchanted and inspired.

Since that time, Pilates has been a central part of my life and I have dedicated myself to sharing its inspiring, life-changing brilliance with the world. For over twenty years now, carrying on Joseph Pilates’ revolutionary contribution to the world of the mind-body-spirit, healing arts has been one of my passions.

Since the late 90’s when I released the first Pilates video under “The Method” title, the work has exploded in popularity and continues to grow by leaps and bounds as more people discover Pilates’ genius and its myriad applications. With this popularity comes tremendous benefit and at the same time, a tremendous responsibility on the part of the practitioners. There are so many different training programs available now for people who want to pursue a professional track in The Method, and it is imperative to be discerning and do proper research to locate programs with great integrity. Equally as important is learning that becoming a truly superb teacher takes time, dedication, focus, determination and experience. There is no substitute for life experience and real hours logged “in the field.”

After I graduated from my first teacher training course, I felt that I had a great understanding of the work in my body and had clocked literally hundreds of hours working with a wide variety of people with different body types, and needs; everything from rehabilitative requirements to strength-training and pre and post-natal conditioning. I had confidence in my ability to provide clients with the appropriate exercises that suited them; however, as difficult as this is to admit, what I didn’t know how to do was communicate the work concisely and confidently. I didn’t know how to choose exactly the right words with which to literally transmit what I knew to the client and how to physically interact with the client. I didn’t know the specific hands-on techniques to use in each and every scenario! And I knew that I was not alone in this feeling. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the new moon arrives at its apex this evening, I wanted to write a welcome note to the Tiger who blesses us all with its presence this weekend!

In the words of my dear friend, Maya White …
1) Act decisively and be on time - Tigers hate to wait.
2) Get in shape - Tigers like it when you are sleek & healthy.
3) Speak up & use your voice - a tiger roars!
4) Be playful and joyous - Tigers like to have fun.
5) Adorn yourself with beautiful jewels - Tigers especially like collar style necklaces, and the enlightened ones wear fake fur.
Now is the time to act with your highest intentions and step into the light!
The blazing light of the sun– shine light on the truth– your truth and move into what calls you from the very depths of your heart and soul.
There is no time to waste!

Leap out into new realms, places you have always wanted to go, but never have.

Walk the path you have always been curious about and marry your thoughts and words with your actions … inhabit true integrity and see what manifests as a result!
This is a special, deeply spiritual weekend— the new moon for new beginnings, the new chinese year– a bold, beautiful WHITE metal tiger to leap forward with … and Valentine’s Day!
Today is a day loaded with the most auspicious cosmic energy and love.
Love yourself and see how the doors and windows to your innermost self open wide and how that attracts all that you wish for …
Trust to love and the rest will follow.

Happy NEW YEAR to all!
Welcome, you beautiful tiger! Come on in and hear me roar with you!

Sending my intentions up through the kundalini snake starting at the root and traveling all the way up through every chakra into the universe where the moon smiles from her perch on high in enlightened acknowledgment and celebration!

Love love love ~~~~
Aum Mani Pad Me Hum–
May the lotus of possibility blossom for you this year 1,000 fold!