Vania is an acrobat and Stott certified Pilates instructor. Her energy, imagination, tenacity, and hypermobility are what drew her to the circus arts. She began training in Pilates when she could no longer simply work through her pain. She came to a point of either giving up the circus arts that she loves or rehabilitating to be able to train and perform again. Despite her innate flexibility and athletic background, Vania struggled enormously with Pilates because it concerns exactly what she’s not naturally good at: stability, coordination, proprioception, listening to verbal cues and translating that into movement, and accessing  deeper body awareness and vulnerability. Dedicating time to learn weaker pathways gave her practice and daily life much more dimension and depth. While there is redundancy in the body, we optimize success and promote sustainability/ resilience if we cultivate the ability to recruit deep, small, often underutilized, stabilizing muscles to accomplish a task rather than solely doing all the work from our global mobilizers that are often superficial and large and thereby setting ourselves up for burnout and injury. Beyond the physical benefits, Pilates balanced out Vania’s personality by bringing out the underbelly of her personality– which is concentration and a love for details. In movement and character, Vania values integrity. Despite not being a natural at Pilates, she was encouraged to become an instructor herself because struggling often gives you the experience to help others get beyond their own blocks in practice. Learning unfolds gradually and often in an unpredictable way. There will be times to question, examine, and analyze, as well as times to notice, then let go and maybe laugh. She believes that teaching in itself is a continual learning experience. Vania tends to come off either as overly serious or zany; her explanations about joint alignment and muscle patterning and why they matter are sometimes interspersed with imaginative cues. Before becoming a Pilates instructor, Vania also had careers in ecology and immigrant community work. In her circus life, Vania mostly trains tumbling and contortion and is a healthier and more skilled acrobat because she was willing to revise her movement strategies with patience, adapt in respect to what her body is willing to offer her moment by moment, and know she is not scarce on time to learn and develop. She finds enormous satisfaction in revisiting simple movements and positions to refine and deepen her practice. She draws from other methods as well to enhance her goals. Vania was diagnosed with Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome/ Generalized Hypermobile Spectrum Disorder– which explains much of her struggles with unstable joints and makes keeping up with a Pilates practice and education vital to her well-being and in regard to her athletic and artistic dreams.