Meet Ani
Epiphany Movement Center’s website has a new (semi) regular feature!
Pilates is a journey, as the expression goes, one that changes every person who experiences it. Whether it’s helping with posture, body awareness, or just making your muscles do something after sitting at a desk for eight hours, it’s rare for those who take up the practice not to feel like it fundamentally alters something, even if it’s just how you think about the experience of exercise.
For me, it was an eye-opening experience.
Like everything in my life, I stumbled butt-over-teakettle into Pilates and the GYROTONIC® method, totally by accident, without a clue what I was signing up for. One of my oldest friends, a fellow ex-bunhead, had recently landed a job at a high-end DC gym and was learning how to teach Lagree Fitness (a fitness form loosely based on the principles Pilates and the Reformer repertoire). Unfortunately, she found herself with classes that only included the most hardcore practitioners, and she needed to get hours teaching someone who had never seen anything like a Reformer before. I agreed to be her guinea pig and found myself tossed into the deep end with a “Megaformer” and no idea what I was doing.
Five minutes later, somehow it had been an hour, and class was over. An hour after that, my abs were still burning, and I was already absolutely certain I had found the greatest workout in existence. But I also knew I desperately needed to find whatever the fundamentals version of that insanity was, and sign up for classes so I could start at the beginning. My friend laughed and directed me to a Pilates Fundamentals class within walking distance of my office.
That was back in 2014, and a dozen years later, I’m still taking Fundamentals classes, because you can always dig deeper into your Pilates practice. (I also decided that Lagree was not for me after accidentally falling off a Megaformer. Ouch.) Thanks to Epiphany Movement Center (which I joined post-pandemic), I now also take GYROTONIC® classes, which I am practically evangelical about.
Some people who become as dedicated as I am decide to become teachers; Epiphany Movement Center’s Leanor is one who took that route. (We’ll cover her experience in a forthcoming article.) But I am a writer, not a teacher, and the idea of standing up in front of a class makes me break out in hives. So instead, I’m doing the next best thing: Writing about it.
Like Pilates, I also became a writer by stumbling over backwards into it, creating a little blog in 2010 to write about HBO’s forthcoming series Game of Thrones, based on a (still) unfinished book series I loved and that none of my friends had even heard of. Of course, by 2014, everyone had heard of the show, and my Pilates journey wound up running parallel to my new career, which began with being hired first to write about Westeros and then to launch female-oriented websites. All through it, I kept myself sane and centered by making sure I went to Pilates at least twice a week. On the internet, people tell you to go outside and touch grass; I prefer to go to the Movement Center and grab Reformer loops.
I also started writing for WETA’s Telly Visions, which we just relaunched as an independent venture following the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (Hence, the absence of posts for February.) With the site now up and running, I’ll be back to evangelizing more about the GYROTONIC® Method and explaining why Pilates is damn near a necessity for anyone who lives their life terminally online. Go touch loops.
Ani Bundel
Ani Bundel has been blogging professionally since 2010. This is her second major independent site launch. A DC native and Keyboard Khaleesi, she spends all her non-writing time photographing her cats. Regular bylines also found on MSNOW. Subscribe to Telly Visions here if you are interested in her British TV coverage.