Why the Pole?

People are often curious about why I kept the name Poleosophy after deciding not to pursue it as a pole fitness business. It was inspired by an Instagram account where I shared my experiences with pole dancing. At first, I considered Poleology, a blend of pole and my love of psychology. It made sense intellectually and stayed in my head, but my intuition never settled around it.

Then Poleosophy arrived.

I tried to build a fitness concept around the name, yet that never felt quite right either. Fitness was part of the story, but it was too small for what the name was holding. There was something more underneath it. Something I could feel long before I knew how to explain it.

Years later, creating this website pushed me to ask what the name actually means and why it has stayed with me for so long.

What way of living has the pole revealed to me, and what wisdom have I found there?

Following that question took me back to a time long before there was a pole. Growing up, music was more than just the soundtrack of my life. In many ways, it raised me. It gave me language, ideas, identity, and somewhere to place what I was feeling. I danced, moved my body, and immersed myself in creative expression wherever and as often as I could.

One of my earliest memories of movement lives in a basement on the East Coast, where I learned to "tick-tock-stamp" in tap shoes and perform pliés in a leotard in front of a mirror during private lessons.

After moving to California, I continued exploring that love through ballet, gymnastics, and creative dance classes at the local community center. When my family no longer had the resources to continue the classes, I stopped waiting for a studio and turned whatever space I had into one.

I put on performances for my classmates and people in my community at local parks. I choreographed my younger siblings into routines in our living room and staged nighttime shows for my mother and her girlfriend. I took the work absurdly seriously. My younger siblings became my reluctant dance team. I rehearsed them for hours, correcting every step, entrance, and expression until the routine was finally showbiz-worthy. My sister in particular paid a steep price for my commitment to excellence. (Sorry, sis!)

Many of those routines were set to the provocative lyrics of Madonna.

I was in first grade when her songs took over my life. I copied her style, cut up my second-hand clothes to recreate her looks, and wanted to belong to the world she represented. Madonna was singing about sexuality, spirituality, gender, power, race, and the refusal to stay inside the role assigned to you. I did not have language for any of it.

In a life shaped by scarcity, I moved to the abundance of her music and absorbed the radical permission to Express Yourself! Hey! Hey!

I did not yet understand the weight of what I was hearing, but Madonna's music carried a charge that lit a fire in me. Dance gave that fire somewhere to go.

When I discovered pole dancing in my late teens, I was drawn to the sensual energy I saw in the dancers. I wanted to experience that same freedom and intensity in my own body. This was long before pole dancing had the visibility it has today. Pole studios were virtually nonexistent, and there were no instructors or tutorials readily available to me. Most of what I had seen came from strip clubs or brief scenes in movies like Showgirls, Striptease, The Players Club, and Dancing at the Blue Iguana.

A couple of years later, I bought my first black-coated Lil' Mynx pole and taught myself at home. It was expensive, especially with shipping added, and I did not have much money then. Buying it felt like a serious commitment.

I remember being ridiculously excited when it arrived.

I also remember being majorly disappointed.

I could barely spin. I couldn't climb. I couldn't sit on the pole the way I had seen other women do. What looked effortless required strength, coordination, trust, and a tolerance for discomfort that I had not yet developed.

I trained myself nearly every day in front of a large mirror propped against the wall of my dingy little townhouse in Sunnyvale. At first, the movements were small. A slightly stronger pull. A little more height. A few extra seconds holding myself up. None of it felt significant enough to be changing anything. The pole hurt. My skin burned where it gripped the metal, and I had no idea that the pain would lessen as my body adapted.

I was also hyperfocused on my reflection. I watched every movement, looking for what was awkward, stiff, or wrong. I wanted the dance to look fluid and effortless, but what I saw in the mirror felt like more proof that I would never be able to make it look good. Between the pain, the slow progress, and the way I judged every reflection, I was losing hope that pole dancing would ever feel possible for me.

My body was learning through repetition long before I could recognize the change.

Over time, those small movements built strength. I experimented with increasingly daring tricks. I learned how to lift myself, swing around the pole, and eventually hang upside down. The first time it happened, it felt magical. I wanted to experience that feeling again and again. Not because I had completed a trick, but because my body had done something I had come to believe it could not do. Each one forced me to confront how often I had mistaken not yet for not possible.

At twenty-two, I danced at a local bikini bar, and the stage gave me a different kind of education. I became bolder, more expressive, and more at home in my sensuality. The shows I had always loved creating as a child had a real stage and audience. Performing also allowed me to support myself, provide for my daughter, and help carry my family. For someone who grew up without much, that felt enormous. People judged me. My family was ashamed. Still, I was finally feeling in myself what I had admired in other dancers: the ease, confidence, fluidity, and unapologetic pleasure they seemed to bring to their performances. The shame and judgment surrounding my work could not compete with how alive I felt onstage. Madonna's command to Express Yourself was no longer something I danced to. It was something I was living.

I have not always been consistent with pole dancing. Responsibilities took over. Injuries interrupted me. Energy disappeared. At times, I stepped away from it completely. Each return carried its own grief. The strength I had built was gone. Movements that once felt familiar became awkward again. Still, I returned. Sometimes that meant learning my way around the pole all over again.

After a 2019 car accident forced me to stop pole dancing, I wrote on Instagram that without it in my life, I felt like a piece of me was missing. I was longing for something I did not quite appreciate then.

As my relationship with the pole changed over the years, so did what it revealed in me. When I returned to the pole, I could no longer rely on my former mobility, strength, or range of motion. I was trying to find out whether I could trust my body again after the accident. Moving with more caution and intention felt foreign. I posted about watching videos of myself dance and noticing the thoughts that surfaced: That looks stupid. That's too sexy. People are going to judge me. My body isn't toned enough. Slowing down made it harder to avoid what I was saying to myself as I moved. I believed I was writing about insecurity and learning to define myself. Now I can see that I was noticing the shame and judgment I had absorbed and carried with me.

The pole was not creating those beliefs. It was exposing them.

The pole became one of the few places in life where I could not perform my way around the truth.

In my early phase of pole dancing, I moved quickly. Fast, rhythmic, and constantly in motion. That was how I expressed myself then. It gave the anger, urgency, grief, and energy inside me somewhere to go. It was cathartic, much like dancing had been when I was younger.

As my relationship with the pole evolved, I practiced moving more slowly. But slower did not mean fully present. I still shifted through poses before I had settled into them. I reached for the next movement before I had fully experienced the one I was in. Even when my body paused, my mind was often somewhere else.

The return has never meant going back to the same place.

It took time to understand that I was not yearning to return to the dancer I had been. I was yearning for the power of staying. Slowing down enough to feel the shape I am making. Holding it long enough to notice my breath, my grip, my fear, the moments I trust myself, and the impulse to move on.

I miss having a place to explore sensuality through my body, not as something to perform for someone else, but as something to experience for myself.

"The pole is the missing piece."

Originally, I thought I was talking about dance. But I was talking about missing a practice that helped me remain present inside my own experience. That realization exposed a pattern much larger than pole.

At various points in my life, I knew exactly what needed to change, but I did not yet have the resources to make that change possible. In the circumstances of my upbringing, the missing resources were obvious. I did not have financial stability. I did not have guidance. I did not have the kind of support that allows growth to feel held rather than fought for.

I grew anyway.

At this moment, my body cannot go where my mind keeps urging it to go. After months of recovering from a serious health issue, I have found myself wondering why I don't just push harder. Why I don't exercise at the intensity I expect from myself. Why I don't get back on the pole and become the version of myself I keep imagining. I stopped and noticed that I was asking the same questions I had asked myself for most of my life. The question was not: "Why don't I make myself do more?" It was: "What is my body actually able to do right now?"

The problem was not motivation. It was capacity.

We spend so much of our lives assuming that if we are not doing something, we must not want it badly enough, or that our inability to reach it says something about our worth. Sometimes motivation is part of the problem. Sometimes it is not. Often, the mind keeps searching for a way forward while the body is quietly telling the truth about what it can sustain.

The pole is not the missing piece itself. It is where the missing piece becomes impossible to ignore. It asks one question every single time I touch it:

What is true in your body today?

Not yesterday. Not the body you remember. Today. You may be able to convince someone else that you feel steady. You may be able to push through a weak grip, unstable balance, or fear and make the movement look more controlled than it feels. But you cannot hide that experience from yourself. Your hands know when they do not trust their hold. You feel when your breath becomes restricted. Your body knows the difference between balance and bracing. Your nervous system knows when fear is present, even when you are trying to look composed.

The pole meets you exactly where you are. That is why I keep coming back to it. Not because it is exercise or a performance. Because it is honest.

At the same time, other parts of my life are opening up. My children are older, and more of my life belongs to me again. My energy is returning. I have ideas that excite me, creative projects I love, friendships that are growing, and a career I am finally finding my rhythm in.

My body still needs me to slow down.

I understand that slowing down does not have to mean stopping. It means smaller movements. Shorter practices. Less intensity. A relationship shaped by the body I have in the present moment and the wisdom I have gained. The challenge is not only accepting what my body cannot do. It is learning to remain connected to myself without submitting to my mind's demand that the practice should look the way it once did.

This version is guided by curiosity instead of an automatic verdict. Do I force? Do I abandon myself when my body gives me an answer I resist? Can I remain present at a pace I did not choose?

I often believed I should just be able to get right back on the pole, as though returning were a matter of will. When I couldn't, I judged myself as unmotivated or too out of shape. In my mind, "getting back" meant picking up where I had left off. Strong enough. Consistent enough. Ready to really dance again. That all-or-nothing idea is part of what kept me off the pole entirely.

I realized the next step is much smaller. Cleaning out the garage. Creating space. Installing the poles again. A few minutes of movement. A stretch. A single turn around the pole. I know from experience that small movements become strength, skill, and possibility when I keep repeating them.

For much of my life, I charged forward into action before support arrived. Today, I am learning how to prepare the ground before asking something new to grow.

Beginning again used to mean I failed to remain consistent. Now I see that beginning again has been one of the most consistent things about me.

I return. I relearn. I work with the resources I have instead of measuring them against what I think I should have. I'm constantly finding a place to re-enter.

The more I've reflected on all of this, the clearer it has become that the pole was never the main point.

Truth was.

The pole became one of the places where I learned that intellectualizing a truth is not the same as living it. Truth cannot be performed. It can only be lived. That is what Poleosophy means to me: becoming conscious of the philosophy I am already living, the beliefs revealed through my choices, patterns, and relationship with myself, not merely the ones I can explain.

There, I can feel what is settled in me and what is still asking to change.

That damn pole! It has been patiently waiting. Not for me to become stronger, thinner, or more impressive. Not for me to arrive with anything to prove. But for me to return honestly.

That is what any meaningful practice asks of us. Not perfection. Presence. And the willingness to notice what happens when we stay.