The Hidden Power of Awareness
When you slow down enough to feel, your body learns to organize itself.
If you’ve done countless core exercises and still feel disconnected from your center (or you feel your neck and lower back taking over), you’re not alone.
In fact, I and most of the people I’ve worked with have started out feeling frustrated that we just can’t seem to “engage our core” — despite how easy our instructors make it sound!
The Problem: You Can’t Strengthen What You Can’t Feel
The reason we can’t engage our core is often that there’s some “miscommunication” occurring in our mind-body connection.
Your brain is the control center. Every muscle is innervated by nerves that come from the brain — and this network makes up your nervous system.
The nervous system needs clear, sensory feedback signals to and from the muscles and joints to know what’s working, what’s overworking, and what’s completely offline.
Over time, those signals can get distorted or fade altogether. This happens from unconscious habits and postures — favoring one side, leaning on one hip, rotating to one side — or from chronic stress, emotional heaviness, and even old injuries.
It can also come from misunderstood cueing picked up from group classes, trainers, or well-meaning friends.
When that communication breaks down, the brain does its best to compensate. The result is a disorganized system that overuses superficial muscles and underuses the deep stabilizers — the muscles closest to your skeleton that give you real support.
The symptoms are easy to recognize:
Tight neck and shoulders
Low back tension
“Ab work” that never reaches your core
Without awareness, effort is just compensations building on top of compensations that NEVER actually get us the results we want. When you can see and feel these patterns clearly, the next step is understanding how they show up in your body.
Ready to understand your body on a deeper level?
Take the Body Quiz and discover your unique compensation pattern.
The Shift: Awareness Before Effort
Here’s the truth: you can’t force control. You have to feel your way into it.
Strength doesn’t begin with effort — it begins with awareness to establish and strengthen the mind-body connection. Movement awareness drills help you learn how to sense what’s happening inside your body before you add the additional challenges of resistance, speed, or complexity.
That’s the foundation of my 3C Method: Concentration, Connection, and Control.
Before you can control anything, you have to concentrate enough to connect with it.
When your brain receives accurate information about where your spine, ribs, and pelvis are through my unique body awareness exercises, it can start coordinating the right muscles automatically. You don’t have to “squeeze your abs,” your nervous system organizes the movement for you.
You will start to truly feel your body and begin to recognize that it isn’t just a collection of muscles — it’s an intelligent, tension-based system. I often describe it as a living suspension bridge, where balance, load, and alignment determine how well you move through the world.
How I Teach People to Reconnect with Their Core
When I start working with someone privately, we don’t jump straight into core exercises.
We start with sensation.
I guide clients through simple sensory drills that wake up the nervous system and help the body remember where things are. We build awareness layer by layer, from the inside out — beginning with the breath.
Breath: We start by learning how to feel the ribs expand sideways and how to connect the breath to the body’s internal organization.
Sensory & Proprioceptive Work: Then we do small, subtle drills that help the brain locate the pelvis, spine, and ribcage in space.
Pelvis: Learning to stabilize and sense the tailbone without gripping or tucking.
Spine: Rebuilding segmental awareness and coordination.
Ribcage: Finding breath-supported control — not bracing, not flaring.
Outward Integration: Once the center is organized, we extend that connection into the limbs, translating it into strength, balance, and ease.
This process helps people finally feel their core — not as a muscle to tighten, but as a living system that organizes every movement.
Once that foundation is in place, everything changes. Movement becomes smoother. Breathing deepens. Strength feels natural, not forced.
A Simple Example
Take something as common as an abdominal curl.
Most people lift their head and shoulders first, tightening the neck and bracing the belly. The ribs flare, the lower back presses flat, and it feels like work — but not the right kind of work.
When you rewire the sequence and start with awareness instead of effort…
You exhale first.
Your ribs soften and glide down.
Your pelvis stays anchored.
Then your head follows the movement of your ribs — not the other way around.
Suddenly, the curl feels light, easy, less like straining and struggling and more integrated with everything. You feel your core flatten inward (not bulge outward) and your neck release.
Once you can sense the system clearly, breath, not strain, becomes the tool that teaches your deep core how to respond, stabilize, and organize from the inside out.
Why It Matters
If you continue to train or practice Pilates on top of old compensations, your results will always be limited at best.
At worst, you will reinforce compensations and poor movement patterns that can lead to long-term issues:
Chronic neck or back pain
Hip or shoulder instability
Joint wear and tear that can eventually lead to degeneration
When you layer effort on top of disorganization, you’re teaching your body the wrong habits. It might feel like progress in the short term, but over time it’s exhausting, frustrating, and potentially damaging.
Awareness (thinking about what you are doing before you do it + knowing the technique to do it + knowing what it should feel like and where) is what prevents that. It’s the safeguard.
When your body is organized, every rep becomes information, not strain.
And that’s how you build strength that actually supports you.
I work privately with clients in the Glen Cove and surrounding North Shore communities and virtually with clients everywhere.
To explore whether this approach is right for you, begin by booking a free 15-minute consultation.
