"Just go to Youtube and search for hoop dance." As the unofficial 'hoop girl' of my small Midwestern town, I make this suggestion at least once a week. Folks often respond with wonder, disbelief, or confusion upon learning that a grown woman spends hours each week dancing inside a plastic circle. For those folks who haven't seen hoopdance, those who don't have a reference point, it must seem ridiculous. Do they imagine I stand for hours just keeping the hoop up around my waist? Do they translate hoop dancer into stripper in the round. Sometimes it seems that way, so if I don't have a hoop on hand to demonstrate, I send them to Youtube.
Later I wonder what videos they found. Is Shakti Sunfire's performance at O Dance studio in Boulder still the first search result? (I checked, it's farther down the list now.) Will they stumble across some gal rocking a bikini and fishnets and instantly doubt my promise that hooping is for everybody and every body? Will their digitized glimpse reveal the transformative magic, the healing, and the joy that hooping creates? Or will they see just another pretty dance?
In the video collection below you'll find hoop dance videos that delve a little deeper. They explore the process, the practice, the philosophy, and the sublime magic of hoop dance. Though the skill and grace of these hoopers is mind-boggling in its own right, these videos also reveal a bit of the emotion behind the motion.
Like many solitary, rural yogis, I fulfill my yoga-fix online. Other than a handful of classes at local colleges, I’ve predominantly studied asana at the feet of a digital guru. You might call me a Youtube Yogini. Most days I’m contented with my practice. Feedback would be nice, but the flexible scheduling, almost limitless choice of sequences, and absence of witnesses suit my needs perfectly. The best videos combine accessible but challenging poses in creative sequences. The instruction is clear with a focus on anatomy and transitions… with a bit of Sanskrit scattered in between.
One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that most videos cut straight to the asana sequences. When they do focus on breathing and setting an intention, I find myself distracted. I struggle to breathe naturally when someone instructs me to breathe naturally. I can’t find my center when someone asks me to find my center.
So rather than following the instructor’s centering exercises, I find my mental comfy spot before I begin the video, and then I skip ahead to the asana sequence. This simple change has deepened my practice considerably, and I hope it can deepen your practice too.
Tips for sweet centering:
Rest your hands open on your knees. Palms turn up to welcome energy. Palms turn down to ground energy.
Breathe a few rounds of Ujjayi, then ignite your lungs with a round of Kapalabhati. Breathing, ironically, is my biggest struggle in yoga. I tend to over think it, and then loose my rhythm. When I take a moment to breathe slowly, then quickly, I somehow sidestep that mental barrier. Kapalabhati just sounds, and feels, so crazy, my mind can’t help but relax.
Stretch out your neck, shoulders, hands, and feet.
On the final round of your mantra, bring your hands, folded in prayer, to your heart. Open your eyes. Speak your intention, exhale, and begin your asana sequences.
It also helps to pause the videos occasionally. For example, I adore yogayak’s Grounding Afternoon Sequence, but that gal flies through her sun salutations. I need a minute or two to center after each salutation and I take it….with a click of the pause button.
Tips for a sublime savasana
Some videos include savasana at the end of their videos. Others encourage the viewer to take it on their own. Either way, turn off the video. If you’re impatient like me, dash into the kitchen and set the oven timer. It’s oddly liberating to sink into relaxation without having to guess when my time’s up or without listening to a digital guru breathing across the computer speakers.
If my mind’s still wild, I tame it with more singing. I know technically savasana is a self-contained pose, but I’d rather have a mindful, energetic experience than no experience at all.
The heart of yoga is a personal, moment-to-moment practice. When we rely on videos or pod casts to guide our practice, we must take time to modify them. Singing Tool in savasana may not be traditional, but it heals my mind, so I create space for the song. I create space for my own sublime experience instead of accepting a pre-packaged substitute.
Technology is the tool. The practice is individual. How do you modify your yoga? What other healing paths and sources of inspiration do you incorporate? How does your unique approach inform your practice?
One of my summer goals is to create and share a mandala every Monday. These geometric patterns, inspired by ancient Tibetan artwork, are an act of conscious creation. They clear the mind and reaffirm cosmic order, unity, and transformation. For me personally they are meditative tools that resurface in my life when the desire to doodle momentarily prevaials over the need to write lists.
Today's digital mandala was created by Lori Beaty. According to Beaty, "Meditation on this mandala promotes clarity and ease of movement to and from different levels of consciousness. It is, in essence, a cosmograph of the path to enlightenment."
As much as macramé is the art of tying knots, it’s the art of untangling them too. Carefully twisted loops and coils become necklaces, bags, and sandals, while snarls of misbegotten twine become a life metaphor. Macramé reminds me that parallel cords never tangle. They needn’t be bundled or even kept separate from one another. The longest strings can lay harmlessly side by side in what appears to be a completely chaotic mass of twine. Yet gentle tugging reveals each cord has its own path. They slide easily into the knot work.
The trouble begins when one cord wraps around itself. When I look at the source of the biggest snarls, I invariably find a tiny noose where one cord encircled itself and caught other cords in its circle. A person who’s “wrapped up in herself” enact a similarly destructive narcissism. She looses sight of others in the glamour of self. Their stories become merely an extension of her story. The naturally parallel, though still intimate and cooperative, threads are caught up in a loop of hurt feelings, ego, or fear. As more and more cords get snarled, the knot expands, until that first tiny noose is lost in the mess it created.
Yet macramé has taught me to follow the threads back to their beginning, back to the free end where change and tangles are made and unmade. All it takes is loosening that one circle to free the others. If I’m lucky, the caught cords haven’t formed their own snarls. They return easily to their original purpose. Other times, they’ve formed a whole series of interlocked nooses and tangles. Yet the most impossible knot forms when the other cords escape and the looped cord is pulled into a tight, lonely knot. Life, like a knot, needs space to uncoil. Though the circle may hold and protect, it can also entrap when I endlessly reenact my mistakes or replay my frustrations, rather than weave them into life’s knot work. Thus macramé is the art of tying and untying, repetition and innovation, tension and patience, making and unmaking, --the art of living.
After many days of struggling, I finally passed two cords through the tiny, irregular hole in Beth’s holy stone. Yippee! The feeling is even more blissful than nailing a new hoop trick, because the stone need only be strung once and the completed necklace is visible evidence of my accomplishment. This necklace is more than a feat of cord-squeezing, however. It is a marvel of the imagination. Ever since Salali sent me her dangly bear-pendant necklace, I’ve been in love with long, tribal jewelry.
I made my holy stone necklace intuitively, just choosing beads along a color theme and string them in clusters. The idea was to create a necklace worthy of prayer and meditation, with texture and diversity. I left space between the knots so that the beads can be regrouped and rearranged. I love it! I love Beth’s necklace even more, because I was able to take my new design and share it. What makes these patterns even more special is that she and I found our holy stones on the very same day as we each enjoyed creek stomping adventures.
The energy around our house is strange this month. Both my husband and I are busy, busy with our projects. He’s building a Playstation 2 mod and I’m crafting like mad, working on this blog, and immersing myself in a number of on-line networking endeavors…in addition to school and raising children. I’m happy and proud of my work, but beneath this feeling of well being is a layer of tension that explodes into directionless anger or drops into despair when things go wrong.
I feel the specter of self doubt warning me to beware beginning so many projects at once. He argues that I’m notorious for abandoning my work, not to be trusted. Yet I feel that’s changing. Maybe I say that because of the moon or the momentary prosperity granted by a sizable tax refund. Maybe it’s true.
I look back at the woman of last winter. She and her husband were at war over feelings neither fully understood. She took off her wedding ring and vowed to make a new life for herself, only to discover herself pregnant with a second child. She cried a lot that winter and sketched sad-eyed woman with round bellies, gazing thoughtfully into space. She constructed a belief system that allowed her to place all the blame for sadness and wrongdoings on someone else. “Reality is made of a multitude of perspectives,” she told herself, “Some people have more passionate perspectives than others. These domineering, strong willed people overpower the stories of passive people like me. Passive people are bullied into living lives that fulfill the stories of others instead of their own.”
So she lived a story that she told herself belonged to someone else, only to realize a year later that she is the one who wrote the tale of mix-matches realities. Winter melted into spring and she found herself a tiny place among the stone circles up top Cumberland Church Hill where the old witches live. She asked the Hill how a woman might best live. She asked the Hill how to balance Motherhood with Self, Wife with Woman, and the Hill answered her with wind moving among the dappled sycamore branches.
I don’t fully understand how the thoughts of last winter and my thoughts on today connect, other than an observation of February. February is Brigit’s month and tells the story of secret spring.
"Just go to Youtube and search for hoop dance." As the unofficial 'hoop girl' of my small Midwestern town, I make this suggestion at least once a week. Folks often respond with wonder, disbelief, or confusion upon learning that a grown woman spends hours each week dancing inside a plastic circle. For those folks who haven't seen hoopdance, those who don't have a reference point, it must seem ridiculous. Do they imagine I stand for hours just keeping the hoop up around my waist? Do they translate hoop dancer into stripper in the round. Sometimes it seems that way, so if I don't have a hoop on hand to demonstrate, I send them to Youtube. 
