3. Pilates Met Me There

On being lost, and finding something that holds you anyway.

It happened to me professionally first — though looking back, it started before I even knew it was happening. When I opened Seed Studio, I opened it with a business partner who was the Pilates person. She was more experienced, more deeply passionate about the method, and she was the one leading the teaching. I was the other half. The business half. And for a while, that worked. Then, within that first year, she left. And suddenly I was the one holding it.

I hadn’t been teaching for very long. Within that year. I definitely didn’t understand Pilates at this point. I knew the exercises, great. But nothing deeper than that. What I understood was business. And what the business seemed to need, I thought, was what I was seeing everywhere online: the social media version of Pilates. The aesthetic. The reformer content, the curated feeds, the perfectly lit studios. That sold. I knew how to sell. So that’s the direction I pointed us.

But somewhere in the middle of all of that — the marketing, the growth, the performing of confidence I didn’t actually have — I started to feel it. A quiet, creeping lostness. Because I was running a Pilates studio and I didn’t actually understand what Pilates was. Not really. Not in my body. Not in any way that felt honest. And integrity matters to me — deeply — which meant that gap was loud, even when I wasn’t saying it out loud to anyone.

What I didn’t see clearly at the time was that the professional drift and the personal one were happening at the same time, tangled up in each other. I was a mother. A wife. A business owner. A teacher. I was showing up for all of it — really showing up — and I was doing it for everyone but myself. I had lost the thread of who I was underneath all those roles. I felt disconnected from my own body, from what it needed, from what I needed. Connection is one of the things I value most in this life, and I had quietly lost it with myself. Family is everything to me — and yet I was so busy running on empty that I wasn’t fully present, not really, not in the way I wanted to be.

It was all tangled together. The not-knowing-Pilates and the not-knowing-myself. The performing at work and the disappearing at home. And underneath it all, this slow erosion of something I couldn’t quite name yet — but that I now know was my own sense of integrity. The feeling that what I was presenting to the world didn’t match what was actually true inside me.

That feeling — that gap — is what finally made me stop and get curious. Not defensive. Not louder. Curious. Curiosity has always been part of who I am, even when everything else felt foggy. And it was curiosity that cracked the door open. I needed to understand what I had built my studio around. I needed to understand myself again. And that is what led me to classical Pilates — and to everything that came after.

Because here’s what I know about myself: when friendship stops feeling right, when connection is off, when I’m not showing up in a relationship the way I normally would — that’s when I know I’m lost. Those things aren’t small signals. They’re everything. They are my core values, doing their job, telling me I’ve drifted.

Family. Loyalty. Curiosity. Integrity. Connection. Five words. Simple ones. But they are the thing I return to when life gets noisy. When I feel lost. When I don’t know which way to go.

And here’s what I’ve learned: the moments I feel the most lost are almost always the moments I’ve drifted furthest from them. A friendship that stops feeling right. A connection where I’m not showing up the way I normally would. A season where I’m just going through the motions. That’s when I feel it — that quiet, uncomfortable feeling of being untethered. Of not quite recognizing myself.

I want to say something about that feeling, because I think we spend a lot of time running from it.

It’s okay to feel lost.

It’s okay to not know. To sit in the discomfort of a season that doesn’t make sense yet. Because the moments when you finally feel found — those are the most profound moments of your life. That’s not just relief. That’s growth. That’s you becoming someone a little newer, a little better, than who you were before.

You can’t get there without the lost part. That’s the part nobody tells you.

When you know your values — really know them, really live by them — you always find your way back

That is why I write. That is why I live out loud.

The moments I feel the most lost are almost always the moments I’ve drifted furthest from them. You can’t get there without the lost part. That’s the part nobody tells you.

— Dani