Hooping.org

[This week Hooping.org columnist Lara Eastburn gets into the Hooposophy of our hoop dreams.]

by Lara Eastburn

One way to think of the unconscious is as a rich, deep, magical reservoir of untapped YOU. Ever wonder if yours is storing some mad hoop secrets just waiting to be unraveled? Can you resolve the mental block you’ve got around that one awesome move while taking a nap? Is it possible to literally dream yourself into upper echelons of your art? Grab a pillow, dear readers, dim the lights … and join me on a journey into how you can help your unconscious help your hooping.

“Knowledge is not an object that you acquire. It’s not a mechanism that somehow you provide to the human mind. It’s actually an epiphanal moment and I think this is true of the arts, poetry, painting, music…” – Arthur Zajonc, physicist at Amherst College and leading figure of a national collective of academics at The Center for the Contemplative Mind

“Hooping is ALL muscle-memory” – we’ve heard it a million times. I’ve said it at least a thousand times myself. But that’s not exactly true, is it? Certainly, we owe to regular practice and repetition their due for mastery of movement. Our muscles learn, and they remember. And we know that our muscles store memories of their own, from every year of our lives.

But when our bodies create something unexpected in the hoop … when we have those rare and beautiful, spontaneous and surprising moments that wow even ourselves (What was THAT?), where does it come from? Like penning a poem that seems to have been written by someone else, or waking in the morning with a brilliant idea that wasn’t there the night before, these moments of epiphany can feel “divine” or magical. They can seem as though they’ve come from somewhere outside ourselves. But, no, I look down and see that it’s my hand holding the pen that just wrote that song. I’m pretty sure that’s my body that just flawlessly executed a graceful and beautiful sequence in my hoop that I’ve never seen before.

I belong to the school of thought that attributes these epiphanies to the realm of the unconscious. And by “unconscious” I mean the majority portion of my brain that is constantly working, filtering, and processing my world for me. My unconscious registers every single detail of what I encounter from seven senses, every thought I have, and every emotion I felt about it. Next to what my unconscious knows, my conscious life is an RSS feed of dumbed-down headlines and out-of-context soundbites.

But if the line between unconscious and conscious is hardly thin for many of us, it is at least malleable. We can ask our unconscious for more information than, from its past experience, it’s accustomed to providing. We can ask for more than we previously thought we could handle. Can we employ the help of our unconscious to expand what we think we’re capable of in the hoop? You bet we can. Here are a few ways to do it.

Dreaming and Dream-Like States

You don’t have to be asleep to access the vast resources of your unconscious. For some reason, my best “aha!” moments come to me in the shower. If you’re focused on both relaxing and reflecting (which water does for me in general), that can be enough to thin the wall between your minds. Some folks can do this on long walks, even running. Wherever or whenever there’s no pressure on the directions your thoughts will take will do just fine.

1) Formulate your question. This is the most important role your conscious mind can have when requesting the help of its counterpart. The job it CAN do is to take its best stab at what you want. And it will help to be as specific as possible. The conscious mind is best at what and how, but can get hung up on why. How can I hoop more freely in public? What is holding me back when it comes to knee-hooping? What do I want to express through my hooping/ this song? What emotion or experience am I tapping into when I’m hooping at my best? Once you’ve found a question that’s meaningful for you, register it fully, and then leave it alone. Leave the rest to your unconscious.

2) Write. For those of us who relate best to the world through words, this tool can be as efficient as dreaming. Write your question at the top of a blank page. Then close your eyes and repeat the question to yourself three times. When you’re ready, write. Write the first things that come to your mind, and do your best not to censor yourself. Don’t edit, don’t cross anything out. If you repeat yourself, that can be a clue, too. When you feel done, read what you’ve written and boil it all down to one sentence. Write the sentence down. Sit back in amazement at your own genius and ability to collaborate with your unconscious while under the illusion that you were in control the entire time.

3) Going to sleep. Your unconscious is most receptive to your conscious requests in liminal, or in-between, states of waking. The most effective of these are the moments after you lay down and before you go to sleep. You may want to repeat your question at this time, and then let your mind wander. Your conscious question will help orient and focus your “procedural memory” (which governs muscle memory) during REM sleep. (Hint: To help yourself remember your dreamtime wanderings, drink half a glass of water now, and finish the glass upon waking).

4) Resting and napping. When I experience extreme stress or anxiety, or feel I absolutely must find an answer to a problem, I become sleepy. I don’t mean to – it’s just my physical response to pressure. It’s a strange phenomenon that, as a habitual over-thinker, I feel very lucky to have. I may not sleep, but I lay down, and my overactive mind takes a little “vacation.” When resting in this way, or napping, we enter NREM sleep, which consolidates our episodic and semantic memories. In other words, this semi-conscious state takes stock of everything we know about a situation and helps us make sense of, and map a way through it. Feel terrible about a performance? The hooping class you taught didn’t go as well as you’d like? Nothing went right during practice today? Nap on it. Your unconscious can help you problem-solve in this liminal state.

5) Visualization. This is my favorite way to hoop. If I’m having trouble with a particular sequence of moves, or more often, when I’m trying to choreograph my hooping to a song, I start by laying down. How’s that for taking the pressure off, eh? I put on the music. If I’m choreographing, I put the song in question on repeat. I cozy myself up in bed, and I start hooping. Yes, in my head. I concentrate on the rhythm or the lyrics, depending, and wait for the images to appear. When I feel I’ve got a handle on it, I resist the urge to jump up and get hooping for two more songs. And then, when I do get up, there it is! My body and my minds making magic in my hoop.

6) Dreaming. Do you have dreams about hooping? That can be powerful stuff. If you awake with the vivid memory of such a dream, I encourage you to try to decode it. Skip the dream dictionaries … only you can read your dream. It’s not as hard as you might think. Make a list of the major components in the dream. Chief among them is how you felt during the dream. Once you’ve got your list, free-associate (write down as quickly as possible the first things that come to your mind) each item. In the school of thought in which I was trained, you are the only player in your dream. So, if there are “other” people, consider what parts of yourself they may represent.

Postscript. I purposely formulated the question behind this article and then napped before writing it. It seemed only fair. And then I wrote it in bed. I then visualized your responses and can’t wait to hear about the dreams you’ve had about hooping . In my dream world, there’s a big field full of red poppies where you meet me with your rainbow hoops and big smiles. I’ll see you there tonight!

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Lara Eastburn has been dancing in meadows and singing with the moon while spinning in circles for eons at Superhooper.org. Beyond commenting here, you can also discuss this and other topics related to the Hooposophy for living in Hooping.org’s Hooposophy Group and Gorum. Lara is also the planting and gardening force behind discovering our hooping community roots: The Hooping Family Tree Project.

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