#42 Pain And Pleasure — Elena Bartley

No pain no gain?

Gotta be smarter than that! Being softer requires true strength. Conquer desire through pleasure. Try high heels as a starter. 

 What You´ll Learn With Elena Bartley At “Pain And Pleasure” Episode #42 Of The Sensual Sessions Podcast

00:21 Welcoming Elena Bartley. Elena is the Founder of the Pilates Center of Las Vegas, creator of tupilates.video App, she was the first dancer of the Harlem Theatre of New York Ballet Company, she´s a pioneer in Pilates Teacher Trainings in all Latin America and Spain, she´s Certified in Pilates by Romana Kryzanowska, she teaches Pilates at the Cirque du Soleil and is a special person for Candia Raquel because she was her first formal Pilates teacher and become a Certified Pilates Teacher with her.

01:34 Elena knowing the Pilates Method after a ballet injury.

01:41 What´s with the connection between pain and pleasure training in high perfomance.

02:00 How the idea of molding, changing, adapting your body to whatever you need at a time be it moving in a beautiful and effortless way as a dancer or becoming better, faster, stronger as an athlete, can give you tremendous pleasure and adrenaline when you achieve it even if it hurts. Which shouldn´t happen but it happens.

03:25 The toxic idea of seeing injuries as medals of honor.

04:03 The challenge of being patient so you don´t destroy yourself.

05:01 No pain, no gain? Gotta be smarter than that! Instead learn how the body works so it moves the way you want.

05:26 How understanding you limits will help you moving them further away so you achieve what you want without injury.

07:08 Why for the softer lyrical more sensual White Swan you have to be even stronger than the Black Swan.

07:25 Understanding that to be softer you need to be stronger.

08:14 Elena´s first pointe shoes in Mexico where the “Miguelitos” filled with cement and her teacher told her ton to pad her toes. That experience as a 10 year old was horrible specially for being in a culture where that was the price to pay to dance on your tippy toes.

09:26 How pride and that feeling that you´re conquering what you want makes you go back again and again.

09:42 How after a long journey pointe shoes doesn´t really hurt that much even.

10:34 Elena as a principal dancer getting her point shoes custom made to Fritz in London.

12:53 On Joseph Pilates creating apparatus even for the toes.

14:08 Finding another pleasure, a sensual one, in the discipline of experiencing the process. Like discovering new muscles and deeper layers of sensations.

15:26 Agreeing with Marilyn Monroe in that we don´t know who invented high heels but we owe that person a lot because of the pleasure that happens through the psoas.

15:36 How wearing high heel stilettos is the closest version of wearing pointe shoes.

15:43 On why you need to have a body for wearing high heels due to the workout that represents safely moving in that position.

16:00 Wearing high heels as an example of pleasurable effort as intense as the equivalent of pain when there´s no prior training process to wearing high heels.

17:00 Surrendering to the discipline of training with awareness shouldn´t be painful but rather tender.

18:23 There´s something so sexy in heels, everybody looks beautiful but many women say they hurt, Elena disagrees and says that “first of all if you´re gonna wear high heels, wear good ones so they don´t hurt and secondly you need to be strong in your body so you feel it”.

19:40 How Mr Mitchell, Elena´s creative director, left an unbelievable legacy and he would actually show all girls how to walk on high heels because that´s the same way that you work on point shoes and really high demi points so you´re always presenting yourself.

21:20 Elena Bartley´s exclusive lesson on walking on high heels as a prima ballerina.

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About Elena

After graduating from Escuela de Danza Ana Pavlova in her native Mexico, Elena traveled to New York City where she joined The Dance Theater of Harlem, and later became a principal dancer. Elena has performed in most of the major opera houses around the world; the Metropolitan Opera House in NYC, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Covent Garden in London and Theater du Chatelet in Paris, to name a few.

Elena started learning Pilates in New York with Romana Krysanowa in 1993. Elena furthered her studies of Pilates with such personalities as: Ron Fletcher, Kathy Grant, Pat Gayton and Bob Liekens to name a few, and now she is the owner of Pilates Center of Las Vegas. Currently, she directs the Pilates Teacher Training certification program in Mexico, Valencia Spain, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil and Paris. She is also the founder of SOHAP Pilates Association in Latin America.

Elena has taught dance, dance education and Pilates for Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet Hispanico, Ballet of Chile, Ballet Met, Maumee Country Day School, Toledo Ballet and Lexington Ballet. She served as the head of the dance department at the Performing Arts of Metropolitan Toledo for 5 years, until she moved to Las Vegas.

Currently, she graduated from the program “The Work” taught by Jay Grimes, first generation Pilates Teacher. Elena is a Master Trainer and she teaches workshops and certifications all over the world. Elena is the owner of the TuPilates.Video, the first video library in Spanish with members all over the world. She is also the founder of The Feria de Pilates and The Marathon of Pilates.

Get Elena Bartley´s App: tupilates.video

What´s Next

Go to The Sensual Sessions Podcast Episode #43: Movement, Pleasure And Expression with Theo Clinkard

Learn more with resources on: Sensual Confidence

Discover: The Ecstatic Breathing Practice