Ann Reflects: What the Body Knows
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Four and a half years ago, my heart leapt forward and briefly flashed a light on what lay ahead for me in this life. As is often the case, at the time, I did not know it.
I thought I was just developing another new crush. I was walking on the sidewalk in front of the local food co-op & café, a place I had visited an average of once a day for the last ten years. On the lawn there was a lithe, dark-haired man in sunglasses and a sleeveless t-shirt, dancing what seemed to be an ancient dance with what appeared to be a dusty black hula-hoop. For a few moments I had to stop and stare. I couldn’t have explained why, but I could just feel that there was something deeper going on in this dance. I felt I could see a clear glimpse of this man’s soul, somehow coming through the dance. I’d been to many dance performances and seen the finest professional technique onstage, but this was a pure soul dance which was also contained by some invisible form described by the hoop. The lines of the dance were clean, precise, flowing, beautiful—and somehow seemed to make sense on a cellular level. I had seen my first hoopdance.
I was not imagining that I needed a new passion, that hoopdance would become a gateway into a new life of adventure, fellowship, and healing that would provide essential missing pieces in my evolution into true adulthood: the stage of life in which we embrace responsibility, cease to blame others, come to understand both our real limitations and the power of our equally real gifts. I was under the impression that I was already “there.” Nothing was “wrong”—was it? I had spent (wasted) most of the previous 18 months despairing of a broken relationship, relying heavily on cigarettes and beer to salve the searing pain of my emotions. But, that wasn’t…unusual, was it? I mean, everyone kind of loses it when they get their hearts broken…don’t they? I had a wealth of anecdotal evidence to suggest that many people allowed themselves to temporarily spin off into chaos when confronted with loss or change. I did not see a way around it. I believed simply that we were vulnerable beings, uniquely sensitive to the enormity of loss and pain, and there was no way for some of us (particularly we wide-open artistic types) to escape the agony of these inevitable human tragedies.
Of course, we all know that loss and pain are indeed inevitable and unavoidable in this human life. I do not mean to facilely imply that if we cultivate ‘the right attitude’ we can just press the “Skip” button on loss and pain and blithely meander onto the more desirable aspects of life.
However, what I did not realize then was that our very bodies contain, at the ready, at any given moment, just about any information we need to help us heal. This is the invaluable wisdom that the hoop gradually began to reveal to me. None of this was even in my mind as I admired the handsome young man zing his hoop around him with astonishing speed and grace. My heart simply leapt towards this beauty, and my willingness to follow, for whatever reason, the crack of light opened up in his dance, has led me to a whole other life.
As many of you will know or guess, this young man was Jonathan Baxter, and my incidental fascination with him and his hoop led me to be willing to attend a Hoop Path class with a good friend. To say I had no expectations would be to underplay that concept. I had absolutely NO intention of “becoming a hooper” or even learning any techniques. Quite literally, all I wanted was to see Baxter hoop again. Of course, my mind was instantly blown all over again as I witnessed for the first time Vivian Spiral hooping when I walked into the classroom. To see this dance transformed into something equally powerful, but feminine, gave my senses something they could never have dreamed up on their own. I cannot believe I overcame my intimidation enough to even try the hoop in this first class. But it was as though I were following a call that I couldn’t even comprehend I was hearing—my body simply went towards it: my first lesson in the body’s wisdom overcoming the noise of the mind.
What does the body know that the mind doesn’t know? Nothing, I would have said, at that point in my life. The body is the vehicle of the mind. The body experiences, the mind knows. Probably none of us possesses the powers of observation and memory that would be necessary to understand how such a viewpoint takes shape in one’s life. My assumption of this “fact” was so deep that I hadn’t even bothered, at age 35, to even put it into language, even in my head.
A year after that first class, I found myself in the unique and enviable (and believe me, I know how enviable!) position of sharing daily two-hour hoop practices with Baxter and the dear friend who introduced us, Kimowan. After practice we would sit and talk for another hour or two about our experiences in the hoop. Every day I was a witness to my body’s encoded intelligence, watching it figure out puzzles of physics that my brain would have abandoned early in the process. In the hoop I experienced learning as a process again. It had been so long since I learned to hold a pencil, to roller skate, to ride a bicycle, to type on a keyboard, that I couldn’t remember, really at all, what the physical process of learning to do something felt like.
Learning a new physical skill at age 36—particularly one that is centered around a child’s toy—carries with it, almost inevitably, the pain of humiliation. It was only my uncontainable enthusiasm for Baxter and for the magical and poetic language and imagery he brought to hooping that kept me plugging away, hour after hour. My desire was not to conquer some ideal of hooping, but rather to experience—however briefly or awkwardly—the beauty, the sheer beauty, I had first seen embodied on the co-op lawn. Baxter, by word and deed, made me believe in that beauty. And my life was changed forever.
These days Bax is fond of invoking the ideal of beauty in the classroom. We all want to be beautiful. Don’t we? The difference, though, is in how he defines it. Beauty, he says, is not an image. Beauty is a feeling. It is the feeling we get when we see or experience something beautiful. It is that feeling we seek, and it is that feeling that is worth the search. This is why so often in our pursuit of beauty—our many ways of punishing and depriving ourselves—we feel empty and unfulfilled. Because what we really want and need is not the external beauty, but the feeling of beauty, the experience of it. In my own life this simple shift has transformed a million decisions from impossible to easy. It is so easy to find beauty once you start looking for it. And beauty is what the body understands—it is the language that the body speaks.
Since I have re-oriented from seeking admiration to seeking beauty, I no longer agonize about how to spend my free time (or, in my case, my work time either! But that’s another story). All I have to ask is, What feels beautiful to me? The list is beautifully inexhaustible:
Playing with my dog
Dancing
Singing
Cleaning my house
Laughing with friends
Looking at art
Listening to live music
Cooking a delicious meal
Walking outdoors no matter what the weather
Watching the sky
Helping someone
What’s also remarkable about these lists is that things that feel beautiful are also health- and life-affirming. I am not going to say that it hasn’t taken some time, work, and attention to tune into what really feels beautiful deep down inside. It has. It’s taken lots of time and I have been so lucky because I have had good buddies (my hoop community—you know who you are! I love you!) right there with me on the journey. But now that I have spent this time alone in my hoop and can feel things as vividly as I used to think about them, I have realized how simple, easy, and inexpensive it is to develop this capacity. I did it, purely unintentionally, simply by hula-hooping for two hours a day for about two years (these days, my practice tends more towards an hour & a half every other day). I have experienced as much transformation and liberation as I would have expected from twenty years of enlightenment-focused meditation. But I didn’t have to renounce my home, wear robes, and sit in silence for ten hours a day. All I had to do was hula-hoop. It’s truly incredible. I never would have believed it had it not been my experience.
And so now, as the year turns and I look at my 40th birthday (just two days away!) with excitement and anticipation rather than sorrow and dread, I tell you this story so that you too might have the chance to allow your body to live for you a little more, and bring more beauty and joy into your life. Your body already knows how to do this, all you have to do is just allow it that little bit of freedom to go towards beauty. Any embarrassment you might feel along the way (“I feel so ridiculous out here on this busy corner wearing this multicolored hat I made and waving at everybody just to make their day a little bit easier!”) is worth it, I am here to tell you. As Baxter says, joy lives just on the other side of awkwardness. We need to make that leap to the other side. Those of us who picked up the hoop before it was cool will tell you—it works. It’s real. It’s joy. It’s life. Come with us!