I want to tell you how I came to belly time — because it wasn’t through curiosity or careful research. It was through pain.
My back troubles began when I was around twelve. I’m not sure how I found the words to tell my mom, but somehow I did — and she sent me to a chiropractor. This was 1978, deep south Texas.
I remember the anxiety of being alone with a man I didn’t know, and receiving a treatment I hadn’t been prepared for. Everything turned out fine. He was professional and kind. But I don’t think I ever went back.
What I didn’t understand then — and wouldn’t understand for years — was that my body was already developing patterns I’d carry into adulthood.
As a self-conscious young girl, I figured out that if I tucked my pelvis, I could create the appearance of a flat belly. It worked aesthetically, in the way that only matters when you’re young and insecure. But I was quietly training my body into a habit: over-recruiting the superficial abdominals, flattening the lumbar curve, gripping where I should have been supporting.
By the time I found Pilates, that pattern was deeply wired in. I loved the work-and God love her, everytime I saw Romana in NYC she had me over the spine corrector— but I brought that ingrained tucking habit with me onto every apparatus. It caught up with me during a full hang off the Cadillac.
The injury stopped me in my tracks and sent me on a deep dive I hadn’t anticipated. I found myself studying. Florence Kendall’s work on muscle testing and posture was one place I landed https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshallfame/html/kendall.html , and then the McKenzie Method — a systematic approach to understanding the spine and directional movement https://www.mckenzieinstituteusa.org/method.cfm
Slowly, something clicked. My spine didn’t need the things that tended to make it feel “good”. More flexion, more gripping, more holding. It needed the opposite. Lying on my belly became one of my resets. For hip pain. For back pain. For the accumulated tension of a body that had been bracing for years without knowing it. That was the beginning of my love affair with belly time. And that’s when I started paying attention — not just to my clients’ bodies, but to the deeper patterns beneath the movement.
The floor doesn’t lie.
When you lie on your belly, the ground gives you immediate, honest feedback. You feel where you grip. Where you hold your breath. Where you’ve been bracing without knowing it. Not to mention the first small victory: simply getting down to the floor! There’s no inner dialogue about whether I am doing it right, no performance to manage. Just sensation—and what the floor reflects back about how you’re organizing yourself. I had been moving through life—and through my work—with a body I thought I understood. Injury asked me to start over. Belly time was one place where I started.
Most of life pulls us forward.
We sit, scroll, drive, carry. We round forward into our phones and our desks and our worry. The front body shortens. The back body goes quiet. And we stop sensing what we’re doing, because we’re too busy doing it. Lying prone reverses that. Not forcefully — not as a “fix” — but as an invitation. The spine remembers extension. The back body begins to breathe. The skeleton settles, and when the skeleton settles, the muscles that have been overworking finally get the message that they can let go.
Your breath changes on the floor.
When the belly meets resistance, breath has to find another way. It moves into the ribs, into the back body, into the sides. Breathing stops being something that happens in the background and becomes something you feel. For many people, this is the first time they’ve experienced the back body breathing.
It’s subtle. And it’s significant.
The nervous system notices. When the body feels supported — truly supported, from underneath — something in the system downregulates. The vigilance softens. The body stops bracing for what’s next and starts noticing what’s here.
This is what I needed after my injury and use as a way to head off what I can feel building. No stimulation. No correction. Just Ground. Presence. Release.
Before we strengthen, we first learn to sense.
This is something I say at MatWorkz often, and belly time is where I mean it most https://www.matworkz.com/about/pilates-body-awareness-winter-park/ .
We live in a movement culture that rewards doing more, going harder, loading heavier. But the body organizes more efficiently when it begins by listening. Prone work reveals the patterns we move too quickly to notice. The jaw that tightens. The breath that holds. The shoulders that rise toward the ears the moment we try something unfamiliar. These aren’t problems to fix immediately — they’re information. And information is where real change begins.
The floor is one of our first teachers.
As infants, we learned everything from it — weight, support, extension, rolling, the first tentative reach away from ground. Somewhere in adulthood, we stopped going back. We stopped treating the floor as a resource.
How To
1. Lie face down on your mat or the floor.
2. Stack your hands on top of each other, palms facing down, and rest your forehead on them.
3. Rotate your thighbones and feet slightly inward-“pigeon toe” helps opens up the lower back.
That’s It!
Belly time is a return. A slowing down. A re-acquaintance with a body that has been carrying you faithfully through everything, including the hard things — including injury, including recovery, including all the ways you’ve had to rebuild.
Sometimes the most meaningful practice doesn’t begin with doing more.
It begins with feeling more clearly.
Deborah Watson is the owner and founder of MatWorkz Pilates & GYROTONIC® Studio in Winter Park, Florida. She has been teaching Pilates since 1997, with certificates spanning the GYROTONIC® Expansion System, GYROKINESIS®, Somatic Movement, and Mindfulness Meditation through Dharma Moon and Tibet House US. Her teaching is rooted in Joesph Pilates authentic system as taught by Romana Kryzanowska, deepened by nearly three decades of study, and guided by a simple belief: awareness comes first, technique follows, and integration is the goal.
