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A pilates witch, a healer and a trip to California

I remain unmoved, bundled up in coats, and with a highly ambivalent relationship to the West Coast that can probably be detangled only via a mental health professional.

I remain unmoved, bundled up in coats, and with a highly ambivalent relationship to the West Coast that can probably be detangled only via a mental health professional. California holds no mystery for me. It’s filled with people I went to high school with and people who complain about 60-degree weather, and my parents.

But all the meditation and the green juices and the yoga and energy healing that so permeate my New York life — and have become increasingly normal across the country — owe a great deal to California’s notorious openness to New Age pursuits. New York may have its own flavor of high-intensity workouts and stringent cleanses, but that willingness to dabble owes a great debt to the West. It was time for me to return to my home state and see what it had to offer.

My first stop was Nonna Gleyzer, a Pilates teacher with a fairly indistinguishable, appointment-only studio on the Sunset Strip. She is known for working with celebrities, including the cast of the Tom Ford film “Nocturnal Animals.” The very idea of working out on the same reformer as Armie Hammer was enough to bring me in.

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Little did I know that Gleyzer, a former Olympic gymnastics hopeful in her native Ukraine, was a kind of Pilates witch. Within 30 seconds of my arrival, she announced that my right hip was higher than the left. She knelt down and started touching my foot.

“You injured your right ankle,” she said. I had, three years ago, after tripping on the sidewalk in a pair of high clogs. How did she know?

“I have Kabbalistic rabbis in the family,” she said and shrugged.

Gleyzer led me to the Cadillac, a large table-shaped piece of equipment found in most Pilates studios, and she asked me to bring my knees to my chest to check my pelvic floor alignment. My right knee was stiff and higher than the left — a sign, she said, that my foot had never healed properly.

“I noticed as you were walking, you were subconsciously babying your foot by applying more pressure on your right hip,” she said. She spent 10 minutes doing bodywork on my ankle, kneading at the tendons, then spent another 10 minutes on my calf muscle. The 60-minute session was like that, with a few basic moves on my part and a lot of diagnosis and hands-on work on hers. I didn’t break a sweat, but I felt so much more flexible and at ease as I left her studio. My only wish was that she would consider a New York residency.

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I took an Uber to Culver City to the newish WMN Space, a chic, hushed very white studio where one can go to a Moon Circle or see a doula or have the brow guru Jimena Garcia sculpt one’s eyebrows with a side of something called “energy resurfacing.” I was there to see Alexandra Roxo, a healer (and occasional actress — she was on “The Knick”) who was recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend for her work around love and sex. If I was going to go full-on Los Angeles-style woo-woo, it might as well be about reclaiming my feminine power.

We started by talking about how much I live in my head and how difficult it is for me to be tender and vulnerable and simply exist in my body. Roxo has curly red hair and the vibe of someone who has seen and heard enough that opening up to her was easy.

Then I lay down on a massage table and we went to work, with me murmuring and growling. Sage was burned, reiki was administrated, and after about an hour I felt as if I had had a cathartic emotional experience not by talking but by following Roxo’s coaching to tune into my own energy and desire. My homework was to tune into my chthonic goddess energy daily, which I often do on the subway. I wonder if anyone can tell?

The next morning, my last in California, was more familiar ground: a morning class at Love Yoga in Venice. I had met Kyle Miller, who owns the studio with Sian Gordon and Jeff Schwartz, last summer when she taught at a yoga retreat and had loved her classes, which usually incorporated breath work, holding poses for a long time and a lot of Drake as soundtrack. It was Saturday and the class was at capacity as we made our way through a sweaty but not especially fast-paced vinyasa and Katonah-based class.

Later that day I picked up my dog and met Miller and her dog, Smokey, for a walk to the beach. We stood on the beach, sharing a pack of M&Ms and watching our dogs play in the sand.

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“This, for me, is all I want,” she said. I think she was referring to the picture-perfect moment with the sun setting over the Pacific, and also the pace of West Coast living.

“I get it,” I said. “I don’t really want to leave.” In the moment I meant it. But at least you can get a good chia bowl in New York these days.

MARISA MELTZER © 2018 The New York Times

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