The Stretch
Life lessons on a Portuguese Pilates mat
I joined a new gym in Madeira, Portugal, and I walked into my first Pilates class this week, knowing no one and still speaking and understanding muito pouco (very little) Portuguese.
I have wanted to become more flexible for years, but I never could commit to the practice.
Honestly, I’ve never been good at stretching in general, and I believe it’s because I keep bumping up against something within me about the slowness of it.
The resistance.
The way it asks me to stay when every instinct says move.
Which means there is probably something here for me to learn…
Which is why I am writing about it and going back next week.
As a lifelong athlete, I have always been disciplined: up early, dedicated to some form of exercise, and it almost always involved heavy sweating and real exertion. That was the goal, I thought.
Go fast. Now go faster.
Speed was the currency. Everything else was secondary.
It was me against the clock in pretty much every sport I’ve touched over the past thirty years as a triathlete… running, biking, swimming. Repeat. You even acquire the gear to shave off time: the aero helmet, the carbon frame, the lighter wheels, the shoes engineered to spring you forward, the skintight clothing to reduce drag. All of it in service of making you faster.
And so here I am, realizing that all that speed and the quiet neglect of my balance and flexibility have brought me to a reckoning. While I still bike, swim, run, and lift, I have always used the same logic: break a sweat, go fast, finish.
But Pilates is asking something different of me.
Something akin to what life is asking of me right now, too.
It’s time to stretch, strengthen, loosen, and learn to be flexible.
So why do we resist the very things that would help us grow?
This is not a small question. It is, I think, one of the central questions of being human.
The body has an answer.
When you try to stretch a muscle that has been held tight for a long time, it contracts. It actually pulls against you. This is called the stretch reflex, a protective neurological response designed to prevent tearing. The muscle senses the threat of the unfamiliar, and it braces. It tightens against the very thing that would lengthen it.
We do the same thing with our lives.
Psychologists call this psychological homeostasis - the mind’s deep preference for the familiar, even when the familiar is limiting us, even when we can clearly see that change would serve us. The brain is, at its core, a prediction machine. It has built a model of who you are, how the world works, and what is safe. Anything that disrupts that model gets flagged as a threat, and the system responds accordingly. Not with logic. With resistance.
This is why you can know you need to change a habit and still not change it. Why you can see the new path clearly and still hesitate at the trailhead. Why we so often choose the familiar ache over the uncertain relief.
The resistance we experience isn’t weakness. It’s protection. But it’s protection that has outlived its usefulness. It is the psychological concept of change and growth, of holding on and letting go - the tension between who we have been and who we are becoming. For many of us, especially those who have built an identity around performance, the hardest thing isn’t pushing harder. It’s learning to soften without feeling like you’re losing something.
That’s precisely what the mat is asking of me.
I feel called to answer.
Just like in life, right now, living as a nomad in my 50s in foreign lands.
Although I am unable to understand a single instruction, I am trying to learn Portuguese and can decipher these two Portuguese words: “inhale “ and “exhale,” inspire (in-SPER-ah), and expire (es-SPER-ah). The beautiful language reminds me to breathe, which is all I need to understand right now, as I watch the other students for cues on the movements I should make.
And oddly, not being able to understand the spoken word might be exactly the point in my ability to surrender.
Because I have to surrender. I have to pay attention in different ways. I have to listen with new ears, watch body language, and read nonverbal cues from the instructor and the others in the room. On this mat, I am alone within myself.
It’s oddly peaceful.
I am in my own world, and my mind is very quiet as I stretch and strengthen my body on my mat in a room full of strangers.
There is a concept in psychology called beginner’s mind - a term borrowed from Zen Buddhism and taken up by researchers studying learning and openness. It refers to the capacity to approach something without the weight of expertise, without assumption, without the need to already know. Children live here naturally. Most adults have to fight their way back to it.
Stripping away language does that. When I cannot understand the words, I cannot fake understanding. I cannot pretend competence. I have to actually feel my way into the room.
The language barrier has become an unexpected gift, like a forced reset into presence. I am watching more carefully, sensing more finely, dependent on the instructor’s eyes, his gestures, the warmth in his nod when I find the right position. Communication stripped down to its most honest form: energy, intention, and the body itself.
There is research suggesting that when one sense is reduced, the others sharpen. That is what this feels like. I am noticing things I would normally rush past. I am receiving information I would normally filter out.
I am being stretched - in the most literal and figurative sense - simultaneously.
The slow, steady intentionality of the class is causing me to meet another part of myself as an athlete. A quieter part. One who is not measured by speed, but by balance, strength, and flexibility.
Which is exactly what is being asked of me in life right now.
There is nothing fast happening. It is quite the opposite. There is an invitation …gentle, persistent to step off the fast track, to find a patch of something softer, and settle into stillness for a while.
Psychologists who study transitions describe what I’m experiencing as a liminal phase - the threshold space between who you were and who you’re becoming, which I write about a lot these days. It is uncomfortable by design. The discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It is the sign that stretching is actually happening.
Muscles elongate not through force but through patient, sustained attention. You breathe into the resistance. You don’t fight the tightness; you wait it out, gently, until it releases. The body knows what to do when you stop insisting.
It turns out, so does the rest of life.
Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is, itself, a practice.
Finding my balance on one leg in class is the same as finding balance in the movement that has become my life. Not a destination. Not something you achieve once and possess. A practice, meaning you return to it repeatedly, and each time it asks something of you.
The Pilates room in Portugal, taught entirely in a language I don’t speak, is one of the most potent growth mindset laboratories I have ever stepped into. Every single session, I have to choose, resist, and retreat inward, or lean into the uncertainty and see what I find.
Most days, I choose to lean in.
And each time I do, something releases. Something in me stretches.
The class is a microcosm. That is what I didn’t expect.
The letting go in class is the same letting go I’ve been practicing in everything else. The willingness to be a beginner again. The willingness to not know. The willingness to receive help without words. The willingness to jump into life with both feet, let go of what the world tells you to do at this stage of life, and trust.
Joseph Pilates, who developed this method in the early 20th century, believed that the mind and body were not separate things to be exercised independently but a single integrated system, and that true fitness was not about speed or strength alone, but about conscious control, breath, and the gradual, deliberate expansion of what the body could do. He called his method Contrology: the complete coordination of body, mind, and spirit.
He was describing a kind of internal athleticism that I have been ignoring my whole career as an athlete.
I am seeking strength, flexibility, and balance in that Pilates room in the same way I am learning to seek them in real life. Not as goals to be conquered but as qualities to be cultivated …slowly, with attention, breath by breath.
That is what stretching really is, after all. Not a warm-up. Not an afterthought.
It’s the whole practice.
And perhaps the bravest thing this athlete who has spent thirty years chasing the clock can do is finally, willingly, slow down - and feel what has been waiting in the stillness all along.
XO,
Jada
Definitely can relate to this! I’ve been trying to incorporate yoga into my exercise routine for the longest, and I would want to do more than one session a week. But my brain would always say to do something that burns more calories or gets in a ton of steps, when what my body really wants is yoga 🙈 I am definitely a work in progress on this but being flexible as I get older is very important to me and I really do enjoy yoga, so a mindset shift is what I am continually moving towards 🩵
The is a lovely post! Thank you for sharing. (I love Pilates but think it’d be even better in Portuguese!) I have practiced yoga for almost 30 years, but what my body seeks, does, needs…is different in my 50s compared to my 20s. The beauty is in the practice, and in keeping one’s beginner’s mind even as the years pass turn into decades.