learn to fire dance

I’m not sure if I can mark this off, since I’ve only done it once, but that’s certainly a start!

Superhooper.org came to Austin and gave a fire-hooping tutorial. Here I am!

It was so powerful. I felt strong and invincible and sexy and amazing! I can’t wait to do it again, but we are so often in a burn ban that it probably won’t be something I get to do with any regularity.

The hoop was so much heavier than mine and a little bigger, too. I was so scared to drop it, but I managed to float it up and down and chest hoop and even rock a few angles with it.

...sometimes you just have to say, “I think that ship has sailed.” I’m not in the right part of the country to find someone to teach me this (safely) and I’m too old and busy to try to pick it up myself. There are other things I could focus on with a greater chance of success.

So my friend Rita teaches belly dancing. She’s pretty amazing. She says if I can find two instructional fire dancing (Poi) videos, she can learn it and then she’ll teach me. So THERE’S HOPE!!!! I would love, love, love to be able to fire dance. Now just gotta find some videos. Anybody ever tried this?

I would SO love to learn. Ohhhh…it’s just so beautiful and sexy and fun and…dangerous, yeah. I would love to learn. But there are no teachers around here that I can find. I guess I could get an instructional video. But it doesn’t seem like the best way to learn. Well, hell, why not put it on the list and see what happens.

Take that first step, it’s addictive.

But a friend found the phone number of the Eugene Fire Tribe in the bathroom at Cafe Yumm and brought it to me. I can’t really pursue this seriously until after Aidan, my son, is done with his Lego season. I thought that would be in December, but his team won their regional competition, so now we’re off to State in January, just three weekends away. If I weren’t the coach, it wouldn’t be so time consuming.

Still, it feels encouraging, like one of those cosmic convergences that make me slightly queasy but definitely excited. More reason to practice at home, for sure. Although, I haven’t added my daily exercise goals as item four yet, because I’m really trying to decide what balance between yoga, pilates, and poi will keep enough variety for me to stick with it. I felt so great and like I’d made so much progress when I was doing pilates every day for nearly three months. Then I hurt myself, and I haven’t been able to reliably get back in any sort of routine.

So the commitment to exercise will wait for two more weeks, by which time the caffeine goal should be more stable.

I’m on my way to this. I have poi. I learned a bunch. Now I’m not practicing enough. It got waylaid by the quitting caffeine thing, and I’m not sure what all else.

I think I need a good video, now. I feel like I’ve learned what I can from the Web sites I’ve found. Maybe I’ll break this list up and add each new move. That would be more like getting something done. I can do left and right turns, butterfly, and some others. I think I want to learn the weave.