Mission, Vision and Values

Our mission

Our mission is to help people bring their best self forward. We do this by guiding our clients in a variety of life practices designed to strengthen and energize both body and mind. We set these practices in an inspiring physical environment, and in a culture aimed at fostering optimism, empowerment, and clarity of purpose.

Our vision

To be the refuge, proving ground, and local social nexus for those who intend to enact positive life change for themselves.

Values

Our practices, our mission, and our vision are built upon a series of core values that are shared by members of the Practice community. These values inform the choices we make, the words we speak and the way we strive to conduct ourselves inside and outside the studio. At Practice, we value:

A commitment to the four fundamentals of practice

We propose that practice might encompass many things, but there are at least four things a practice can't be without -

1. Systemized Repetition

• Repetition: If you run a mile on a track every day for a month, without any intention to run faster, with headphones blaring loud music so that you are less inclined to think about what you are doing while running, would your pace increase? Would your average heart rate decrease over time? Most likely yes, but only to a point. Beyond this, we argue there is a great deal of problem solving required to continue to progress and this is where systems become an integral part of practice.
• Systems: The systems piece includes all of the components of any good training regimen or business plan: vision, goals, baseline, benchmarks, and rewards for achievement (intrinsic and extrinsic). Like any good scientific experiment there is also hypothesis, a method for testing the hypothesis, deductive analysis, and revision.

2. Awareness – To know that you are dancing when you are dancing is a fundamentally different experience than dancing mindlessly. We argue that our experiences, when permeated with awareness, are richer, deeper, and more meaningful. Awareness is also fundamental to the process of generating insight. Through awareness of a particular behavior of body, speech, or mind we can determine its usefulness, the degree to which it aligns with our life goals as well as our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. It is with awareness that we can catch ourselves in the act of creating habits or possibly addictions and steer ourselves to make healthier choices.

3. Creativity (or novelty) - We hold that the world is a very creative place, and within it, we are a very creative species. Physically, cognitively, emotionally, we are in a state of flux. Change is one of the defining aspects of our universe, and all change, even entropy, is creative. This creativity occurs around us, within us, and comes from us. It’s fascinating then the way we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are the same from day to day. We can become deeply entrenched in this illusion of changelessness about our bodies, our relationships, and the events of our lives. Even in the face of serious health issues some people refuse to acknowledge the need for change. But then, sometimes, the light of awareness shines. This refusal to wake up to our own impermanence generates an enormous amount of suffering. If awareness is the key for recognizing those aspects of our body-mind that have become stuck, then creativity is the doorway leading to future possibilities. It is vital for so many things in our lives, from problem solving to lovemaking, to cooking, to writing, to playing, to dancing, and even to grieving. Creativity can be directed towards a particular activity, but it can also be a lens through which we view our reality. When combined with awareness it can be a powerful vehicle for insight and a catalyst for transformation.

4. Intentionality - Where awareness is like a light bulb in the center of a bare room that shines indiscriminately on everything, intentionality is like a laser-beam, highly focused and directed at a target. Intentionality has two components:

• Attention – The cognitive capacity for focusing on a sense object, thought, or emotion. Research on experienced meditators supports the hypothesis that attention can be trained. The ability to sustain attention on the body is fundamental to building a strong mind-body connection.
• Interest – Interest, or motivation, is the thing that helps you to answer the question of why you do what you do. Generally, we move toward the things in which we are interested. You may have noticed it’s not always easy to attend to something in which you have little interest. There are different types or levels of interest, ranging from interest in a thing based on a felt sense of obligation, to interest born of pure inspiration. When interest and attention come together, there is an extraordinary opportunity for learning a development.

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk 

Simply put, this means that everyone at Practice practices. Like our clients, we train continually to develop as practitioners within our chosen modality, and we also train continually to be better and better as instructors. While we prefer verbal instruction over demonstration in order to maintain focus on our clients, we are always prepared to model sequences for those who are visual learners because we teach what we have practiced.

Degrees of Freedom & Fullness

• Freedom means having the courage, the strength, and the peace of mind to choose freely, which isn’t always as easy as it seems. For example, a sixty year old man who has never exercised a day since grade school is only marginally free to jog today. His freedom is constrained by his habits. Habits are repetition without awareness and with very little creativity. Habits are patterns that deepen over time, the way a rut in a dirt road will get deeper with repeated wear. Is it possible to drive down the dirt road without the tires falling into the rut? Sure, but it takes a lot of effort. It almost feels like there is a force compelling the wheels toward the rut. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it is simply easier not to think about it, and to follow the groove that is already there. And our sixty year old man can hold a vague and passive belief that he is free to choose to exercise any time that he wants. But if he should try, he will find that freedom constrained by the habits of his body, his thoughts, and his emotions.
  
  Practice is a very effective way we can increase degrees of freedom in our lives. By bringing our awareness and our creativity to our systematic efforts in exercising, for example, we can affect incredible influence on our habits. Through body-mind practices like Pilates and Yoga we can achieve freedom of movement. Freedom of movement is one aspect of a deeper and more comprehensive physical freedom, which is the freedom to experience our physical form unencumbered by mindless habits and limiting self-talk. This does not imply the eradication of habit or self-talk, but rather describes a way of relating to these, where both habit and self-talk recede, allowing awareness and clarity of purpose to move to the fore. The idea of freedom can be applied to almost any activity we engage in regularly, like eating (nutritional freedom) or talking (conversational freedom).
• Fullness describes the degree to which, and the quality with which, we can inhabit our experience. Eckhart Tolle, in his presentations online with Oprah Winfrey, describes in great detail the richness of experience that one can derive from living fully in the present moment. That presence can be directed into one’s body, one’s thoughts and emotions, or one’s daily activities. In the U.S. we give high marks to those who can multi-task, and this is great as far as it goes. But when engaging in a practice like Pilates, it’s in our interest to bring as much of our attention and our appreciation to the task of moving our bodies in space, not because it’s the “right” way to do it, but because there is a joy there waiting to reveal itself, if only we can stay in our bodies for a little while without flying off into daydreams or our daily to-do list.

Profit 

Practice is a business, as yet still in its infancy. We see profit as the oxygen that our baby business needs to breathe, move, and grow. To that end, we strive to do what we do very well, so that one day our baby will grow up to be strong, wise and well oxygenated.

Development

When we practice, something happens. Maybe we get stronger, or leaner, more flexible or more resilient. In other words, we change for the better; we develop. This is good news for those of us who are interested in experiencing our potential first hand. What does it mean to develop in Pilates, or yoga, or meditation? We ask all of our instructors to explore this question as they continue to progress in their practices, and to articulate their discoveries to the Practice community. Similarly we invite our client-practitioners to engage in their own exploration and development.

The Means and the End

Goal setting and benchmarks are proven ways of increasing the likelihood of our success in an endeavor. Practice is usually seen as a mean to an end, the thing we do between the benchmarks or the thing we do to get you to the goal. But as we develop in our practice, the means begin to take on a more prominent role, so that in time the practice becomes as meaningful as the goal. With enough practice the means becomes the goal, in the sense that joy is found equally in both the process and its ensuing result.

Tolerance

At practice, we like people, many different kinds of people. We feel diversity makes life at the studio more interesting. Maybe you disagree, and are inclined towards intolerance. That’s okay; we won’t ask you to change what you privately believe. But to participate in activities at Practice, your behavior must reflect the principle of tolerance for race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation and political views. This means that if you can’t speak nicely about a person or population, it is best to return your focus to the activity at hand.

Mutual Understanding

Very much in the spirit of Stephen Covey’s second habit of highly effective people, “seek first to understand, then be understood,” we emphasize inquiry, active listening, and articulation as aids in building mutual understanding between our clients, colleagues, friends and family.

Compassion

There are two parts to compassion. First there is the experience of compassion, which is being able to look through the eyes of others and resonate with their feelings from their perspectives. Second, is the application of compassion, which, simply put, requires knowing when to offer a gentle helping hand and when proffer a kick in the seat. Both the experience of compassion and its application are easy to talk about but much harder to master. Compassion is itself a practice, which, when developed over time, yields an increasingly refined appreciation of the human condition and cultivates a series of skilful means for handling the challenges of life inside and outside the studio.