We Speak Pilates

Loosely, the story of the Dragon King’s daughter:

The wise bodhisattva traveled to the kingdom at the bottom of the sea and met the reptilian daughter of the Dragon King. He deemed her ready to be a Buddha, and when he rose to the assembly in the air, she followed. Children and women were not capable of becoming Buddhas, some argued. Reptiles could not become Buddhas, others said. The wisest of the disciples spoke last, and he spoke gently, the way one corrects a child: the path takes lifetimes beyond counting, austerities beyond measure; it cannot be walked in an afternoon by a girl of eight from the bottom of the sea.

The Dragon King’s daughter did not argue. She carried with her a jewel, as dragons do, and this one was worth as much as all the worlds together. She held it out to the Buddha, and the Buddha took it. She turned to the assembly and asked: was that fast?

“Faster still,” she said. “Watch.”

And before the objections could gather themselves into words, she became a Buddha in front of them all, the way the sun clears a hill; not gradually, and not by permission. The assembly, who had spent the morning explaining what she could not be, stood in the light of what she was.

The men who raised objections were not villains, they were the diligent ones. Their rules were the record of their own effort. When they said a child cannot, a woman cannot, a creature of the sea cannot, they were also saying: because we barely could, and it cost us everything. The disqualifications were their receipts. This isn’t about a girl proving the establishment wrong, it’s about the establishment discovering that the currency it had saved so carefully was never the price of admission.

Dragons have jewels, the way bodies have breath. It was hers before the bodhisattva ever descended, before anyone deemed her ready, before the assembly convened to debate her. All the argument in the air changed nothing about what she carried.

Loosely, the story of the Barista-Mat-Pilates-Instructor:

The morning crew got off at 2pm. Rather than bear the hot Texas afternoons, they gathered in the basement of the cafe like lazy sardines around the boss’s desk and binged television on his computer screen. Thin wafts of smoke drifted around their heads, beer bottles on cardboard coasters snagged from the neighboring bar, the discarded couch sagging under whoever claimed it first, the three dogs asleep at their feet. A motley chosen family, it was easy company, and this gal’s favorite way to pass an afternoon before running the dog home and changing into elastane to head off to teach mat Pilates at the gym du jour.

For Christmas that year, her sister-in-law had gifted her a subscription to Pilates Style Magazine. That afternoon, as The Simpsons rolled from one episode to the next, she flipped the pages dreaming about what it would be like to work on the equipment, and turned to an article about a teacher named Shari Berkowitz, a professional dancer who had herniated discs in her neck on stage and had been partially paralyzed, and who had rebuilt herself with Classical Pilates until the body that had been declared finished by the medical community was teaching Pilates for a living.

For nearly two years, our barista had led mat Pilates classes in tiny gyms around town as a side hustle. And in those two years, she’d transformed her body. She knew she was dealing with powerful medicine, and here was the proof. She reread the article and something turned over in her the way a padlock turns. She lowered the magazine and said, over the screen and the chairs, to the boss at his own desk and the whole assembled crew:

“I want to become a fully certified Pilates instructor and teach full time.”

And here the story turns out better than the old one. Nobody in that basement assembly recited the rules at her. They hit the pause button; this was all hands on deck. They gave encouragement, and then they gave more than encouragement: “yes,” they said, “you should do that. And we will all help you write the business plan, so you can get the money to pay for the training.” The dogs slept on through it, but the assembly around the boss’s desk, an assembly of baristas and bosses in the middle of a wasted afternoon, did what the assembly in the air could not manage; they accepted the offering the moment it was held out, without weighing it, without checking.

And with the speed of sincerity, the cause was made, the seed was planted, the process begun.

Eighteen years later, she is sitting at her desk in her very own Pilates studio of her dreams, running payroll for a massively talented team of six and writing this blog entry.

We’re all the Dragon King’s daughter in some way. In otherness or qualification or doubt, we are all the least likely candidate or in the least likely place. Becoming happens at the speed of sincerity, and then takes decades to embody.

Shari Berkowitz tells her own story at The Vertical Workshop; her recovery is also told in The New York Times, “Is Pilates as Good as Everyone Says?” (2022).