Prenatal Pilates and Birth Education

By Tine Reese

March 16, 2010

I have been reminded, once again, how lucky we are here in Spokane to have so many passionate, smart, skilled and caring people working to educate and empower the women in our community! I recently met Elizabeth Jones, a local Pilates instructor and physical rehabilitation specialist who has focused much of her career on working with pregnant women. As we began talking, something Elizabeth said captured my attention. “Society has lost interconnectedness with families and with birth.” I was drawn to this statement because it encapsulates the core reason that so many of us (midwives, doulas, educators, etc.) do what we do. We are trying to reconnect women and families to the importance of birth in our lives. Elizabeth Jones does this by providing women a way to stay in good physical health while preparing their bodies and minds for birth.

Elizabeth began her career as a dancer in Charleston, South Carolina. Following a severe back injury and two surgeries, doctors told her she would never dance again, nor would she be able to have children. Determined to prove them wrong, she sought chiropractic care and developed her own rehabilitation program that focused on healing through the connection of mind, body and spirit. She embraced Pilates as a means to physical recovery and studied nutrition, meditation and visualization. The perception of herself as a “whole being” as opposed to a physical being transformed her recovery and her life. She did dance again and she also went on to have four children.

Like so many of us, Elizabeth came to realize that she wanted a natural birth during her first pregnancy. Reeling from her doctor’s mention of needing to “cut her” to get her baby out, she began searching for information on birth that better aligned with her intuition that it should be gentle and natural. While browsing in a bookstore, she said Ina May Gaskin’s book Spiritual Midwifery came flying off the shelf into her hands—as if it was meant to be. She sought prenatal care at a nurse-midwifery practice and had her baby in the hospital without any drugs or interventions. She said, “back then I had to get permission [from the hospital] to get the kind of birth I wanted.” Elizabeth went on to have two home births and another hospital birth, all without medication, and happily breastfed all of her children until they were 3 or 4 years old. Through her birth experiences, Elizabeth has learned that “babies are our partners in birth. It is a beautiful dance of listening and feeling. When I was having my babies, I didn’t feel like I was in my body. It was the most peaceful, powerful experience I could have imagined.”

After 17 years running her own private pilates-rehab practice in Houston, Texas, Elizabeth and her family moved to Spokane—a place where they felt they could put family first in their lives. Urged by her colleagues and former clients, Elizabeth wrote the book Exercise for Pregnancy and Beyond: A Pilates-Based Approach for Women and filmed the companion DVD which shows women how to ease the discomforts of pregnancy while gaining the benefits of Pilates exercise. Mothering Magazine’s September 2009 issue said, “if you want a safe way to build strength during pregnancy, taught by an authority, this top-notch DVD is the ticket.”

Currently, Elizabeth teaches private sessions in her home studio and will soon offer small group classes that focus on physical conditioning, breathing techniques and meditation for birth. Elizabeth also recommends that her students take Bradley Method or HypnoBirthing childbirth preparation classes to round out their education during pregnancy. Local homebirth midwife Margaret Lipton has said to Elizabeth, “Give me a Pilates mom any day!” It is her experience that they are better prepared for natural birth than most others.

Perhaps I was most inspired by Elizabeth when she told me that she had written a letter to Michelle Obama with the idea to form a national committee of women interested in the empowerment and education of all women in our country. I’m sure that’s a gross over-generalization of her letter, but perhaps she will share the full letter with us in a future blog post here on Bloom. We should all think and act in such a grand fashion if we wish to change our societal values regarding women and birth!

If you are interested in talking to Elizabeth about her classes or private sessions, please visit her profile page here on Bloom to find her contact information and read more about her practice.

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