By Christine Palumbo, RDH
Polestar Pilates Alumni
The word “spirituality” gets tossed around a lot these days, and it can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For some, spirituality is connected to religion or ritual. For others, it may refer more to presence, self-awareness, connection, or the experience of feeling more integrated within oneself. And when it arrives, I’m certain it does not always come wrapped in some mystical awakening experience.
Sometimes it emerges much more quietly through breath, attention, embodiment, and presence.
Through both my personal experiences and my education within the Polestar model, I began noticing a close relationship between movement, nervous system regulation, body awareness, and what I have personally come to understand as spirituality when I began taking reformer Pilates classes in 2021.
Like many people, I spent a long time living primarily in my head. As someone who has struggled with anxiety, panic, chronic overthinking, perfectionism, and rumination, I became increasingly aware of how exhausting it feels to live disconnected from the body and trapped in constant mental noise. Pilates became one of the first practices that helped reconnect me to my body in a way that felt grounding, safe, and strangely sacred.
I often think of the mind like the surface of the ocean during rough water. Thoughts, fear, uncertainty, and endless mental loops constantly move at the surface. The mind is incredibly important for reasoning, creativity, and survival, but left unchecked, it can also pull us away from the present moment. Bringing awareness back into the body feels more like moving beneath the surface of the ocean, where things become quieter, steadier, and more regulated.
Modern life often encourages disconnection from the body. We spend our days multitasking, consuming constant stimulation, and functioning within chronic states of stress. Over time, many people lose connection not only to movement itself, but to the intelligent system continuously communicating through breath, tension, sensation, and physical patterning.
Then we enter a Pilates studio.
For one hour, we slow down and pay attention.
We begin noticing unnecessary gripping, breath-holding, or compensation patterns. We notice where the body feels rigid, unstable, or disconnected. Gradually, the body stops becoming something to criticize and instead becomes something to listen to.
One of the most fascinating things to me as both a student and instructor is that the body is constantly communicating information, whether we are consciously listening or not. Movement often reveals things people cannot access cognitively alone. A person may intellectually understand they are stressed or exhausted, yet the nervous system frequently expresses those patterns physically long before the conscious mind fully recognizes them.
In many ways, the body reveals truth.
The body adapts intelligently for survival, protection, and efficiency. Sometimes those adaptations are helpful. Sometimes they become the very patterns that keep people stuck in tension, fear, or disconnection. Pilates gives us an opportunity to observe those adaptations with curiosity rather than judgment.
Interestingly, research within neuroscience and psychology increasingly supports the importance of embodiment and interoception — the ability to sense and interpret the internal state of the body. Studies suggest interoceptive awareness plays an important role in emotional regulation, self-awareness, decision-making, and mental health. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, known for his work exploring the relationship between emotion, bodily sensation, and consciousness, wrote that “the body provides more than mere support and modulation for the brain.” In other words, the body is not simply carrying the mind; it actively participates in perception, emotion, and awareness itself.
Research surrounding breath regulation and autonomic nervous system function has also demonstrated that slow, intentional breathing can influence stress physiology, emotional regulation, and feelings of safety within the body. From both instructor and client perspectives, this becomes incredibly relevant inside movement practices like Pilates, where breath, concentration, coordination, and body awareness are continuously integrated together in real time.
As instructors, I think we are often observing far more than movement patterns alone. Sometimes we are witnessing the effects of chronic stress held within the nervous system. Sometimes we are observing protective patterns that developed after injury, pain, or prolonged stress. And sometimes, we are witnessing a person fully experience themselves for the first time.
For many people, the studio becomes one of the few environments where they are fully present within their own experience. There are no external distractions demanding attention. There is only breath, sensation, concentration, movement, and awareness unfolding in real time.
Perhaps spirituality, at least in part, can be understood as the experience of becoming more connected to ourselves through awareness and presence. Through movement, many people begin recognizing that the body is not merely something to control or criticize, but an intelligent system worthy of listening to and understanding.
Ultimately, if we pay close enough attention, we can witness the subtleties of transformation within this work: someone taking a full breath for the first time in years, moving without fear after injury, or softening out of chronic defense patterns.
Perhaps that is part of the deeper power within movement itself: the experience of reconnecting to the sacred intelligence already existing within us.
You can find Christine on social media at:@christine_palumbo_pilates
References:
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666.
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York, NY: Putnam.
Mehling, W. E., et al. (2011). Body awareness: A phenomenological inquiry into the common ground of mind-body therapies. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 6(6).
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York, NY: Norton.
Zaccaro, A., et al. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psychophysiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353.
