I remember when I first laid eyes on her.
It was years ago, a sunny morning in a wooded area north of the city on the last day of theOM Festival. She wore a short torn dress, giant sunglasses, and leg warmers. Her hair was in dread locks, her feet were bare and dirty. Somehow I always imagine her with animal ears, though I can’t be sure if that was just my imagination. She danced in slow sensual sweeps to the wildly fast music, every 16th beat she would raise a shoulder, arch her back or stir her hips.
There were hundreds of people dancing in the sun, as I sat watching on the hill. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the dancer with the hula hoop.
The Hula Hoop
I saw it and was hypnotized. Where did she get that? This was not your kiddie plastic hoop that you pick up at the grocery store. This hoop was built for a woman’s hips. It was enormous, thick with weight and it moved in slow pendulous orbit around her dancing body.
There were other hoops there on the grass, and anyone would have been welcome to try. But I was frozen. It had been so long since I’d been inside a hula hoop, and I don’t remember being very good at it, even as a child. And so I sat there, wistful and wasteful. My hips stayed put.
Fast Forward to This Past Spring: I sign up for a six week hula hoop class.
My classes were in a small studio with a group of lovely women. The instructor brought us hoops and great tunes every week as she seduced us into sharing her playful relationship to hooping. She took us step by step through new moves like hooping on our bums, hooping with our knees, hand hooping and how to get in and out of the hoops with style. One of my favorite moments was when she had us practice dropping our hoops. We did this over and over until the sound of the hoop crashing on the floor was just a regular part of the class instead of some humiliating alarm signal that we had failed.
The Perfect Gift
Hula Hooping is exhilarating. It is a sparkly gateway to ease us adults into play. It is soothing on the belly, a delicious workout for the waist and hips, an instant way to wiggle off the blues. It’s faster than hopping on a bike. And as fun as it is to hoop in your own private world, it is much more so when you can hoop along with others. Giving the gift of a hula hoop to a friend is also a gift for yourself: an instant playmate to share hooping with.
Who knows, you may even find that you rock the hoop with little effort!
Be sure to check out World Hoop Day, a world wide celebration and non-profit organization aimed at bringing the joy of hooping to children in extreme poverty and underdeveloped neighborhoods. By spreading hoops around, they also spread joy. The founder, Annie Leffingwell-O’Keeffe’s dream is to have the world hoop for peace in 2012.
But if we pull back just slightly from world peace, I invite you to feel the peace in your body and spirit that wakes up under the coaxing rotations of a hula hoop.
Come on give it a whirl, then share your experience here.
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