More Hula, Less Hoop ~Vacation Schedule for May


Posted by Jodi

I’ll be traveling to Hawai’i, one of my favorite places on earth in just over a week and wanted to make sure that everyone looking for classes knows about the change of schedule.

The regularly scheduled class will be held this Saturday, May 12th from 8:45-9:45 AM. Please come if you can. I’d love to see you and it is the last chance you will have to catch a class before June.

There will be no class on May 19th or on May 26th. I will be lounging on a beach on Oahu recharging my batteries and getting a jump on my summer tan.

Regularly scheduled classes will resume on Saturday, June 2nd from 8:45-9:45 AM at Two Left Feet in Danville, CA.

I have a couple of travel hoops that I will be packing and plan to do plenty of beach hooping while I’m there. I used to live on the North Shore of Oahu, so this is something of a homecoming for me. I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends and turning them on to hoop dance, too.

So though there will be no class the last two Saturdays of May, I hope you will still make a point of getting outside and into the hoop on these gorgeous spring days.

 


Practice Makes Perfect or At Least Happy


Posted by Jodi

So, I’ve been back to my daily hoop dance practice, which I renamed ‘regular hoop dance practice’ last week when, after eleven days of consistent practice, I skipped three whole days because I was just too overwhelmed by the stuff going on in my life to hoop. I know, that sounds pretty pathetic, doesn’t it? How much resolve could I have actually had if I threw in the towel on day twelve?

Instead of writing off the whole thing I dusted myself off, got a couple of good nights’ sleep in and got back into the hoop. It’s easy not to hoop. As much fun and as rewarding as it can be, it doesn’t take much to start skipping it. And yet, now that I have experienced how good it feels to push through the lethargy or melancholy or exhaustion and get hooping, I know I will feel so much better in just minutes. When I don’t hoop, the day is whatever the day is. I go to bed with the day’s stress and tension wrapped around me. If I have managed to hoop, my practice will have spun all of the this’s and thats of the day out of my energy field. I am renewed, revitalized and HAPPY.

Once I’ve had my thirty (or however many minutes) in the hoop, I feel like myself again. Hoop practice is like a reset mechanism in my life. I come away feeling grounded and connected to myself and the things that matter most to me. And that’s what keeps me coming back to the hoop over and over and over again.

If you don’t have a regular hoop practice, I encourage you to give it a whirl. You won’t know what it can do for you until you have given it some real consistent time. It takes at least three weeks to establish new habits. So maybe your ideal practice is more like fifteen minutes a day than thirty. Do that. Do what works for you, but do the thing you promise yourself you will do. Regular practice of anything is going to change your relationship with it. If you choose to practice hoop dance you will also discover an element of playfulness and tap into a reservoir of joy. Whatever you choose to do for yourself, make sure it lifts your spirit. Otherwise, it is just another weight on your shoulders, and who needs more of that?

If you’ve committed to a hoop dance practice, I’d love to hear from you. What have you learned about yourself? How has your hooping changed as a result? Have you noticed that you feel differently about the other things in your life?

As always, I wish you happy hooping.


The Many Virtues of Daily Hoop Practice


Posted by Jodi

I’m going on vacation to Oahu in mid-May and decided to reinstate my daily hoop dance practice as a good way of getting back to looking and feeling my best in those warm weather clothes that I packed away last fall.

For the first couple years that I hooped, I practiced pretty much every day. For me, it was a no-brainier. The daily ritual of hooping month in and month out was a sweet refuge from the mundane musts and shoulds of life. The more I hooped, the more I wanted to hoop. Personally, I loved having this new creative outlet and watching my body respond and re-form so quickly. I was also taking a lot of classes to learn all of the basic moves so I could teach them with a measure of confidence and grace. I had a million reasons to make time to get into the hoop and no good ones not to do so.

Eventually, some life-changing things happened that broke my daily streak, though I still held on to the hope that I’d get back to it when I could. In December, I started working forty hours and commuting another ten every week. Since then it’s been something of a miracle if I find any time at all for practice. Most weeks the only time I hooped was when I was teaching.

Last weekend, with the days getting longer, the weather finally warming up and knowing I was going to want to tone up a bit before getting back into my Hawaii clothes, I decided to kick-off a new daily hoop practice. My plan: To hoop daily, (at least until we leave for Hawaii) ideally, for a minimum of thirty minutes. So far, I’ve hooped all nine days. Many of them for more than thirty minutes, because once I get going, I rarely feel like stopping.

Here are a few things I’ve realized after just nine days of daily practice.

Reconnection
When I hoop every day–even when I’m tired, even when I’ve had a terrible day and just want to space out, even when I don’t care at all about plans or repercussions of not following through–I reconnect with my Self aka my inner Goddess, the part of me that is creative and instinctive and wise and responsive and ALIVE.

Revolution
I have always had the heart of a rebel, bucking the system in my own quiet way for much of my life. I was always a ‘road less traveled’ kind of girl. I don’t particularly care for most rules. From the beginning, the hoop facilitated an amazing revolution in my life. It gave me a vehicle through which to express the part of myself that needs to experiment and challenge the status quo–that will only be satisfied when I know for myself. The revolution of the hoop around the body has demonstrated to me, time after time, that by getting into my center and acting from there, the choices I make are aligned with my core values. When I push against the edges of that which feels comfortable and ‘safe’ the hoop is an instant feedback loop, showing me where I’m out of alignment or out of rhythm and need to make corrections in order for what I’m doing to work.

Rejuvenation
Just a few moments in the hoop and I feel like a kid, again. I don’t know about you, but lately the stuff going on around me feels pretty intense and some days the pressure is unrelenting. Stepping into the hoop spins all of that stuff out of my energy field and I feel my joyful spirit surfacing. I become ageless and buoyant and free.

Resilience
Hooping strengthens the core and increases the body’s responsiveness. The benefits of this alone makes hooping one of the best exercise options known to wo/man. A strong core affords the body a beautiful, natural posture and good balance. In a regular hoop practice we become increasingly aware of our own rhythm and attuned to the rhythm of the hoop (or what is going on around us…). We dance with the hoop as we dance with life. In order to respond rather than react, we must develop our ability to feel our body from the inside and so we know when it is time to push and when it is time to let go, when to straighten and when to bend, when to hit hard and when to return to flow. Our ability to respond gracefully to life increases in kind.

Strength, resilience, patience, flexibility, grace, power, right action and fun. These are just a handful of the rewards of a daily hoop dance practice. You can do it. If you do, you will see for yourself a beautiful difference in your body and your mind. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with daily practice. Until then, hoop on!


Middle School Girls Hoop It Up at She’s All That


Posted by Jodi

I joined my local Soroptimist group, Soroptimist International of San Ramon Valley a couple of years ago and for the second year in a row taught a hoop dance class to Middle School girls at our annual signature project event, She’s All That.

It is always a treat to see the girls light up in the hoop–even the ones who are shy at first–and forget about everything but having fun. I have learned over decades of being at war with my body when I was younger, that if you want to feel good in your body you must do things that you enjoy–make that LOVE–and look forward to doing. Back at the peak of my personal struggle to starve and excessively exercise my physical form into ‘shape’ I had never heard of hoop dance. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would have believed it could possibly deliver the goods… With age comes wisdom. I eventually learned to trust my body to show me what it needed in order to comply with my wishes. I would never, ever have imagined that hoop dance could make such a profound difference in my body, heart and mind. But hey, I’ve lived it. Bodies are wise beyond our imagining. Truly. Hoop dance opens the door to creativity and self-expression, promotes grounding in the body and for many of us, sends the spirit soaring. I don’t know any girl or woman, young or old, who couldn’t benefit from exposure to more of those kinds of experiences. So many of us grew up with issues about our bodies and it seems that today the girls are bombarded with negative messages about how they look and what they are going to have to do to simply be acceptable. Yikes.

Maybe some of us who have lived through the hell of hating our bodies (particularly certain parts–you know what I’m talking about) and come out the other side can model a positive, healthy alternative for these girls. I know that a hoop is not the answer to everything but it does offer hope that we can all find our way back to feeling the joy that is always right there within us and spread it around.

She’s All That happens every year in February. There are workshops and classes for Middle School girls and their moms, designed to inform and enlighten them about topics that are helpful in navigating those challenging tween years with a little more grace and wisdom.

As I look back on this video a couple months down the road I can still feel how sweet is was to be hooping with the girls. Have you hooped with a girl, lately? If so, you know that they will show you more than you can show them. If not, why not give it a whirl.


Goddess Hoop Dance is Two Today


Posted by Jodi


I taught the first Goddess Hoop Dance class on April 3, 2010. Since then I’ve held class pretty much every Saturday morning, give or take the odd (that is to say rare) trip to Hawaii, or the Saturdays that fall around the end of year holidays.

I remember preparing for that first class, worrying about whether I had the right music for the very basic waist hooping moves I would be teaching. Rob even helped me put a playlist together. He played the music on his computer and I grabbed my hoop and tried it out each song to see how ‘hoopable’ they would be…

That first class was the first class of a four-class series. The women who signed up for the class learned a new move each week. The picture above is of my dear friend, Sally, who helped out as my assistant for almost a year, (until her pregnancy made it impossible for her to keep hooping) and her mom, Sue, who really just wanted to have some fun and learned a few moves in spite of herself. In this shot, she was about to bring the hoop from above her body, in what we, in the Hoop Girl circle call Wild West, back down to her waist, into what we Hoop Girls call Pump, for the first time. It was fantastic to be able to capture the moment with Sally coaching and cheering Sue on to victory. I can still see the look on Sue’s face when she realized she’d actually done it!

I love teaching hoop dance. It is my passion and my joy. I wish I could spend more time doing it but have learned to be content with introducing women who come in weary from the work week to something different. Something that allows them to relax and get some exercise at the same time. Something that is as unique as they are and that allows them to express something there may not be room for in any other area of their lives. I love being able to offer them an escape and a refuge by way of the hoop.

For so many reasons, I am honored to be able to share something that means so much to me with other women. I feel like I have just scratched the surface of what is possible with Goddess Hoop Dance. I talk to so many women who don’t know how to come home to themselves. They don’t know how to connect with who they are and what is important to them. I was that woman for so many years. It was more than hoop dance that helped me find my center. But without hoop dance the journey would have been infinitely more bleak. My inner Goddess is alive and well and shows up every time I step into the hoop. I hope to introduce a lot more women to their own inner Goddess and watch them soar. There is everything to be gained and nothing to be lost except maybe some excess baggage you don’t need anyway. Bring your inner Goddess out to play! And let me know what happens when you do.


The Hooping Life


Posted by Jodi


Last Saturday night I met up with some friends to attend The Hooping Life documentary movie that was being shown in the Bay Area for the first time. I’ve been hearing about the movie for years and was so excited to finally be able to see it. And not only see it, but see it with so many of my friends who share my passion for hoop dance. The movie tells the story of the evolution of modern hoop dance and features three people with whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and studying hoop dance: Anah Reichenbach aka Hoopalicious, founder of Hoop Revolution; Christabel Zamor–who partnered with Anah in hoop dance performances around the world, wrote the book Hooping, (which launched me onto this extraordinary path of hoop dance) she’s one of the original hoop dance stars and founder of Hoop Girl; and Jonathan Livingston Baxter, hoop dance guru extraordinaire and founder of The Hoop Path. I can’t say enough about this documentary, which started filming in 2002 and just finally received approval to include one of the songs that had held up completion for some time.

If you get a chance to see The Hooping Life I highly encourage you to do so. I was impressed and inspired on so many levels. The hoop dance we have today would not be possible if these and other bold souls had not held fast to their dreams and made the hard decisions necessary to move it forward and available to the rest of us who, at that time, had no idea what we were missing.

Here’s the trailer:

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve seen the movie or plan to see it some day. Until then, hoop on!


Return to Balance ~A Tale of Two Kitties


Posted by Jodi

For those of you who have been wondering where I’ve been for the past six months and why this blog about the hoop dance that I love so much, has lain dormant, I have a story to tell…

Last August, my eleven year old kitty, Winston, who had been more child than pet to me, started losing weight and energy at an alarming rate. Six weeks later he was gone. Rob and I were beside ourselves with a grief unlike anything we’d ever known. For the eleven years of our relationship Winston had been there. His energy was woven through every day of our lives. Losing him felt like the end of the world. It was certainly the final curtain on the way we had lived until then.

Day by day, week by week the loss became a little more bearable. It became possible to take a deep breath without crying. The heaviness lifted a little bit. We talked about him, what we loved about him, what we missed about him, the adorable things he’d done, how smart he was, how lucky we were to have had him share our lives and how, though we knew we would have another cat, we didn’t know when we’d really be ready for one.

A little more time passed. There was another cat who needed a home. A cat we both knew and had grown fond of over the years. She’d been found as a kitten, six years ago, eating from a dumpster and one of the guys had brought her to the office. Though everyone loved having her at work, no one was in a position to give her a home, so she became the office cat. When I returned to work there in July of last year (after a few years of doing other things) she would curl up in a basket someone had put on my desk for her and nap and watch me while I worked. We bonded a little. And before I knew it, she’d gotten to me. Pretty soon people started telling me that she was only happy when I was around. (I was working a limited schedule of part-time hours, a few days a week, at the time.) After Winston passed one person after another started asking if Rob and I were going to take the kitty home. “She deserves a good home,” they would say. “She really misses you when you aren’t here.” “Obviously, you both really like her. She’d be a great cat for you guys.”

And though it seemed like it was too soon and I thought long and hard and had a few long conversations with Rob–were we ready for another cat so soon after losing Winston and, if so, was she the one–it became harder and harder to watch her get upset as I packed up my laptop for the day to go home. Before I knew it, the idea of leaving her there alone for yet another weekend seemed crazy. So we packed her up in her little kennel and brought her home. It took a little while for all of us to adjust to this new arrangement. Sweet kitty had a new home, a new schedule, new food, two people instead of twenty, and a new name. They called her Cat 5 at the office. I called her Fancy, short for Fancy Pants, the name I’d given her when I first met her in 2007 because the fur on her legs was ruffly and when she walked away she looked to me like she was wearing old-fashioned white, frilly pantaloons.

What does this have to do with hoop dance? Well, the hoop dance practice that had seen me through many different ups and downs no longer did it for me. When Winston became increasingly ill I no longer had any desire to hoop. For some time after he passed, the grief took me to a place where I didn’t care about anything. Eventually, I did start to hoop again, just a few minutes here and there. It didn’t transform my mood like it had before but it helped me to be more connected to my body. It helped me to start finding my rhythm again. It started waking up something in me that had gone into hibernation. When I hoop now I am a different person than I was before. I’m easier with myself. I don’t need to push myself when I practice. I give myself space to breathe and be perfectly imperfect.

I don’t hoop for the same reasons today that I did last year or the year before. The joy has come back into my life by allowing myself to experience life’s richness of emotions. If we open to it, hoop dance can be an avenue for creativity, expression and embodying our essence. At the beginning of my love affair with the hoop I thought I needed to learn all of the tricks and be able to keep up with everyone in the hoop dance community. I had great expectations for myself as a hoop dancer. Today, I realize that what I really want from the hoop is that place to reconnect with the magic it allows me to access, whether I am hooping well or total crap. These past six months have shown me that it really is possible to come back from even the darkest times. The hoop is just one path through which rising from the ashes, but it has sure worked for me.

To all of you wondering I’m still teaching the Saturday morning classes, the answer is yes. Though the blog went dormant for a while, I’ve taught just about every Saturday morning from 8:45 to 9:45. If you are in the area, I hope you can join us one day soon. Until then, I thank you for visiting and wish you all a good measure of balance in your day to day.


Hoop Dance Empowerment


Posted by Jodi

The first weekend in August I attended the Hoop Girl Empowerment Retreat in Mill Valley, California. There were about 32 of us including the workshop instructors and Hoop Girl, herself, Christabel Zamor. This picture is from my friend, Julie Greicius’, (aka Aviatrix) workshop on a variety of cool ways to jump through the hoop to spice up one’s hoop dance. Julie was my first-ever hoop dance teacher, whose patience and warm-hearted encouragement made all of the difference for me when I was in the first weeks of training to be first a hoop dancer and then a hoop dance teacher.

The retreat went from late Friday afternoon until late afternoon on Sunday. My friend, Stephanie, and I drove over together not sure what the weekend would hold but excited about meeting the other women and learning some new things about ourselves and hoop dance.

Several of my friends who live out of the area were there, too, so it was a treat to reunite with these women that I have kept in touch with on Facebook or through email, and have time to hoop together, again, share a meal and catch up.

The retreat included a good variety of hoop workshops, a wonderful laughter yoga session, and a couple more non-hooping workshops. There was time for napping, hiking, and shopping at the Hoop Girl Boutique for hoop clothes, accessories and hoops. The food was great and the company was even better.

I’m not a big retreat-goer. In fact, I pretty much haven’t done retreats in my adult life until the Mermaid Retreat that Christabel put on in Kauai in November 2010. I knew I wanted to be at the first Hoop Girl Retreat, and it was great to have it so close to home. It was a real treat to be surrounded by women who share a love of hoop dance and have the time and space to really focus on hooping for an entire weekend. By the time we said our good-byes some of these strangers had become sisters. I left feeling more connected to myself as result of having communed and hoop danced in nature with these gorgeous goddesses.

In the weeks since then life has taken on a fevered pitch, complete with some pretty dramatic ups and downs. I haven’t had much time to think about anything that wasn’t happening in the moment I was in. I have experienced enough to realize, though, that integration takes place in the dark, below consciousness. It doesn’t need our mind telling it what it all means. So despite my busyness and preoccupation, the integration process has gone on. I know this is true because I’ve noticed that my hooping has changed. It is stronger and more inspired, now. It comes from a different place than it did before. Having experienced the teaching styles of my beautiful friends, I have a greater understanding of my own strengths as a teacher, and I am even more excited about what I have to offer my students who are ready to step into their own Goddessness by way of the sacred circle of the hoop. All in all, the Hoop Girl Empowerment Retreat was one of the high points in my summer. There’s no question that it was an enlightening and empowering event.

Have you been to a hoop retreat? If so, I’d love to hear which one you attended and how you liked it.

I hope you are taking advantage of the warm summer weather, so perfect for hooping. Enjoy!

Love,
Jodi


The Power of Hoop Dance


Posted by Jodi

I am writing this on my Two Year Hoopiversary. It was on August 10, 2009 that I bought my first hoop, a blue and sparkling purple portal to a whole new way of being and seeing and relating to the world. I had no idea of the transformative power of that seemingly simple circle of plastic, though it was the first time in my life that any inanimate object thrilled my soul every time I looked at it.

Once I got my hoop I was a different woman. The self-conscious, anxious Jodi I’d become over too many years of putting myself into situations that didn’t serve me, gave way to a truer expression of who I am that is naturally curious, courageous, grounded and happy. Happiness was something I’d lost track of along the way. I did experience it fleetingly, now and then, but regardless of what I did, the feeling of discontent would soon overtake it and I was back in that emotional hole once again. When I started hooping, though, I was automatically uplifted and felt more like myself than I had since I was a kid. I was content to turn on some music and roll the hoop around my waist for hours. I didn’t care how many times I dropped it or how many bruises I got those first weeks of hooping. The joy and passion I felt overrode everything else, the hoop worked its magic and before long everyone I knew was asking me what I was doing that I looked so good.
Once I started hooping it I just couldn’t get enough. There is something about the hoop that moved me from moment I watched that first hoop dance video. My eyes saw something that my soul recognized. I had no context for what it meant or the power it wielded–as if it were an enchanted spinning machine that in hardly any time at all would spin the straw that was my life into rich, shiny gold.

Almost everything in my life has changed in these two years. My body loves hoop dance so it seemed effortless to get into shape and stay that way. Thanks to all the core hooping my posture is better than ever. My jeans always fit… even the skinny ones. After decades of obsessively weighing myself every morning, these days it is a rare occasion when I take the trouble to step foot on the scale. My clothes all fit and I feel comfortable in my skin, which was what I was really after, during all those years of bathroom scales and measuring tapes. (Compared to the way I lived most of my life, since puberty, this in itself is miraculous!) I am now part of a global community of hoop dancers–people I can relate to on so many levels and in so many ways, though it was our shared love of the hoop that brought us together. Hoop dance has connected me to my own core in a way that nothing else has. All of this happened so naturally that it was some time before I realized just how profound the changes were.

Looking back, I see a journey that I could never have imagined. I looked and searched and sought out countless avenues for transforming my life. I watched and waited for decades to be called by something that felt exactly right and expanded my experience. If someone had told me when I was 20 or even 30 that the answer to my questions and the answers to my prayers would be conveyed through a hoop I would have laughed in their face. Some things you just have to walk through and live before you can know.

I am awed by the grace that has entered my life by way of the hoop; the angels who have appeared on my path by way of the hoop; the miracles that have happened in all areas of my life by way of the hoop. I remember one day before I discovered the hoop going out for a run. It had felt like an effort to get dressed and stretched and ready to go and it felt like I had to spend so much time doing it in order to get any benefit. I thought, I want exercise that is integrated into my life and feels natural. I want it to be fun and look forward to doing it. Guess what? I got my wish. I’d rather hoop than almost anything else. It is such a part of my life that I haven’t thought of it as exercise ever, really.

I still have no words to explain how a simple hoop can be so life-changing, I just know from experience and observation of countless friends who have likewise been bitten by the hoop dance bug. The hoop is powerful medicine. If you are as fortunate as I, when it speaks to you and you answer the call your life will never be the same. And to all of you, I say, Hoop On!