I started 2013 with a 30/30 hoop challenge, hosted by Hooping.org. The idea being to hoop for at least thirty minutes for thirty days in January. Once I completed that I was on such a roll I decided to continue it through the year to see how many days I could rack up. I checked in and posted every day that I met the challenge, on the Goddess Hoop Dance page on Facebook. By the end of the year I’d hooped for a total of 207 days. That’s almost seven months worth of hoop sessions. Though I was challenging myself I did not push myself to hoop when my heart wasn’t in it.
When all was said and done, I hooped more days than I didn’t. And came away from the experience with so much more than I had when I started. Here are some of the things that got me hooping and helped keep me inspired.
1. I looked for more reasons to hoop. While it is true that I love to hoop. In the four and a half years that I’ve been hooping there are times when I get lazy and opt out for a while. This year, I reminded myself that though it was okay not to hoop, I could add to my count if I just grabbed my hoops and moved for half an hour. I also subscribed to video tutorials with fun new moves I was excited to learn. I bought hoops in different sizes and weights so I could get a little more creative in my hoop play.
2. I went to some fantastic hoop workshops and events. In January, Baxter’s phenomenal weekend workshop, Myth and Way; Betty Lucas’s fun choreography class in the spring; in October I spent four extraordinary days at Hoop Camp and in November, Baxter’s life-changing Puri*Fire workshop.
3. I introduced a lot of new people and old friends to hoop dance. Because I was keeping my focus on hooping, my regular Saturday morning classes attracted a lot of new students this year. I love introducing people to hoop dance and watch them find something inside themselves that they either didn’t know they had or had forgotten about, like rhythm, joy, free-spiritedness and the fun of doing something new. I made two trips back to my home town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin last summer, the first time for a high school class reunion and taught a Saturday morning hoop class in the park for some of the women I’d gone to high school with and hadn’t seen in decades. Now THAT was a treat.
4. I learned how to honor my energy and flow. There were times that I hooped when my energy was low and slow. I discovered that by playing music that matched my mood I could get into a real groove and feel supported by the hoop rather than attempting to override the way I was feeling in order to get in what I used to think of as ‘a good hoop session’. Because I was hooping so much I didn’t feel the pressure to hoop intensely or push myself into a sweat. I felt the luxury of being able to stretch out into those thirty minutes in whatever way felt good. What a breakthrough that was!
5. I rediscovered the joy of hoop dance. By making hoop dance a priority, I did enough of it in a variety of ways, places and times of the day that it became new, again. The more I hoop, the more I discover there is to learn, the more I connect with the core of who I am and can express the creativity that the hoop has inspired in me from the first time I saw a video of a beautiful woman wielding a hoop.
If you are considering undertaking a hoop challenge, the month and year are both still new enough to get started. Hooping.org is hosting a new 30/30 Hooping Challenge for January. Check it out if you’d like to take your hooping and your life to a new level.
Wishing you all the very best in this shiny New Year!
Love all around, Jodi