The Story of Sophia

Drinking Ouzo on the Greek island of Sifnos. I am half Greek and love spending time in Europe.

I was born in Boulder, Colorado to an immigrant mother from Greece and an American father.  I was a physically cautious and clumsy child, who frequently got injured trying new things like cartwheels and tennis.  But by my teen years, I was increasingly infatuated with exercise, subscribing to Shape magazine and working out in my bedroom with small weights until I was old enough to drive myself to the rec center or dance classes on the Pearl Street Mall.

I decided to go to college at Pepperdine University in Malibu because at the time I was sick of the snow and wanted the beach.  I studied Sports Medicine and my favorite class was Motor Control and Learning, about how the brain organizes and learns movement.  It spurred me to want to become a Neuroscience professor so off to graduate school I went.  I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, but several years in was learning that a life in a lab looking at rat brains was not for me.  I really wanted to be around more people and make a difference in their lives.  I mastered out (oh the disgrace!) and was planning to do something more clinical, when one month later I learned that my additional human exposure was going to come in the form of a baby.

The next few years were busy growing, nursing and raising three little humans.  I did get to try my hand at being the professor I’d always wanted to be, teaching Anatomy and Physiology at the Community College of Denver and Human Biology at Metro State University.  I became extremely involved in my neighborhood, joining the united neighbors board and working with Denver Public Schools to argue that Central Park needed more elementary schools than they had planned for.  Together with another board member, we undertook counting every child in the neighborhood and sure enough, DPS agreed we’d need another school.

Myself and a handful of other parents (one being the wife of the owner of Aktiv clothing at Stanley!) worked to build what would become Swigert Elementary School.  We decided the school should be International Baccaleureate and helped hire the first principal.  I proposed the school be named after Jack Swigert, an astronaut who graduated from DPS.  I then became the School Accountability Committee chair and worked on the hiring committee for years.  We helped McAuliffe Middle School and Northfield High School become IB schools too and I even sat on a Northfield Hiring Committee for a year.  I’m extremely proud of the nine years I spent adding strong schools to my community.  

My third child had turned out to be quite large and a delayed walker.  Carrying him around was leading to significant hip and SI joint pain.  After eight years of daily pain, I was fed up.  I threw myself into addressing my pain and decided on six ways to support my hip–medical imaging and a traditional medical doctor, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, an accupuncturist, a doctor who practiced a painful and expensive procedure called prolotherapy, and … Pilates.  After 1-2 years of trying all those modalities, I decided Pilates showed the most promise, quit everything else, and dove in.  I decided to attend The Pilates Center’s Advanced Teacher Training program not because I wanted to be a Pilates teacher, but because I wanted to better understand the method and continue to improve my body.

Let’s be clear.  Pilates is not usually a quick fix.  It wasn’t for me.  Eight years of pain cannot be expected to be resolved in a few lessons.  Actually, it took me nine months of multiple sessions of Pilates each week for my pain to disappear.  And it never returned!

Part of my training required hundreds of hours of student teaching.  So I put together a little studio in my home and began training my friends.  Pilates was so popular that before I had even graduated, I knew that I would open a studio and teach.  There were no other classical Pilates studios in this part of Denver/Aurora and I felt that since it had helped me personally so much, I should try to spread its magic.

One year after running Kinesis Pilates out of my home, Stanley was starting.  A 55,000 sqaure foot former jet ejection seat manufacturing plant was becoming a hip new marketplace filled with Colorado based businesses.  I know the guy starting Stanley so I proposed that Kinesis Pilates be a part of the vision.  Only a couple spaces remained to be leased and while I really wanted the space that eventually became June Ruby, I decided on the smaller space just to be safe.  By 2020, I would think that was a very wise decision indeed.  

Kinesis Pilates opened at Stanely in June 2017.  I was the only teacher.  I worked six days a week from as early as 8am to as late as 7pm.  It was completely unsustainable.  Within a couple months, I had found a few teachers (Kim Zachar and Jennifer Clayton) to join the studio.  Demand was high and Pilates was a hit in Central Park!

In 2018, the unimaginable happened.  A teacher who loves people and who talks all day was unable to talk.  I completely lost my voice.  A visit to an ENT had me more paniced than I had been on my own and I was scheduled for vocal cord surgery on my birthday of all days.  The surgeon declared his procedure a raging success but after my recovery, I found it hurt to talk.  It hadn’t hurt before the surgery.  This is one experience that has led me to be very cautious of surgery.  To this day, I regret rushing in because a surgeon scared me.  

Before and after 3.5 years of Face Pilates practice.

Our greatest challenges can lead to our greatest successes though.  My hip pain had led to the opening of a Pilates studio.  And soon my throat pain would lead to Face Pilates, a face exercise and massage program I created and taught for four years.  Years later, long haul covid would lead to a Lymphatic System and Pilates workshop that I would eventually teach at an international Pilates conference.  Do not fear your challenges.  Some of the greatest things in your life will come out of your pain and dark moments.  

After almost nine years of teaching Pilates, an observation was starting to bother me.  The exercise and good alignment I had been teaching wasn’t quite as potent as it had been in the beginning.  Clients were more complicated than ever before.   The lists of illnesses, injuries, specialists, and issues was quite staggering, to be honest.  How is it that even the people who prioritized the right things–a good diet and exercise–were struggling so much?  I have researched and read about health for decades and even used to run a blog called Health Taken Seriously.  I felt like everything I had been told was important for health was failing to deliver on its promises.  I was frustrated.

Like every good scientist, I had made an observation.  I was researching.  I was formulating a hypothesis.  What had humans done in the past that supported health?  What did multiple cultures around the world have in common that might be some clue to what the body needs for optimal functioning?  How had our modern world changed those things?

And the glaring answer was light.  Sunlight.  Artificial light.  Our relationship to light has changed more quickly and dramatically than most other things.  I considered other possibilities as well, like our water and food supply, toxins in the environment, a reductionist model of thinking about science and the human body, a failure to see the forest through the trees.  

I began paying attention to my light environment as much as food and exercise.  I’m not going to say it was an immediate change.  Just like Pilates took nine months to heal my hip, changing my light took a while to make noticeable changes.  But they came–in the form of the best sleep of my adult life, the clearance of brain fog, more mental and physical energy, the disappearance of small nagging things like cysts or the need for glasses.  Seriously, after 30 years of nearsightedness, I suddenly didn’t need glasses anymore.  I began sharing what I was learning with clients and the feedback was positive.  My hypothesis that our separation from nature–the sun, the earth, untreated water–was at the root of so many illnesses was starting to gain some supporting data.  Maybe it was N=1, or N=2 or 3, but when you’re that N of one  and your life changes, you don’t care if your evidence is anecdotal.  Pilates changed my life and I went on to help almost 1000 people take over 40,000 lessons, without a shred of scientific data.  I don’t intend to wait for science to catch up.  When people have good ideas that make a difference in their community, it’s time to share them now.  

So I realized that running a Pilates-only studio in a commercial space and my personal mission to improve lives with all the information I’ve gathered were no longer aligned.  I do think Pilates is the most potent form of exercise I’ve ever encountered and I absolutely love doing it and teaching it.  But it’s still just exercise.  And alignment.  And mechanics.  And the body is so much more.  For our best health, we just need more.  That is why I’m opening a new studio with a new model to share this newest information I’ve learned.  I will still teach Pilates but I will include all that I think is necessary to help my clients optimize their lives, health, and well-being!