Hey Hooper friends,
I turn 28 today and have had lots and lots of time (28 years actually!) to reflect on the person I want to be in the world - both in the hoop, and of course, outside of it. But perhaps more relevant for this site is inside the hoop. I have long said that the more we learn to tap into our core being, our core 'state' and authenticity, the more potent our dance will become. I believe that all of us have an innate capacity to detect falsehood in any interaction - call it an intuitive sense we didn't know we had! Today, on my birthday, I wrote this piece for Elephant Journal.com (a yoga/sustainability e-mag) and I thought some of you would enjoy it here.

When we learn to embrace our essence, our 'us-ness' or 'you'-ness, we fall into relevancy and beauty.

Enjoy!

It’s 1989. The video camera – an old 8 mm – sweeps into a room, the focus, soft at first, comes clear and true on an impossibly dimpled face. A round, brown-eyed, dark haired two year old sits contentedly enveloped in a world of her own making. “Horses!”, she says popping out of her isolated reverie, perhaps an invitation for the linear adult mind behind the camera to join her circular story.

The camera pans out. Joplin tunes, the Maple Leaf Rag, waft up the stairs from the piano in the living room. To this little cherubs left enters another figure. Distractedly moving back and forth about the room, occasionally interrupting the quiet play of the two year old, this girl of seven touts similar features – minus the dimple craters and the baby fat, and the internal nature of the darling on the floor. Catching on to the camera the seven year old obediently states her name, “Laura,” and informs the camera that she is not, in fact, “little.” Empowered now, and prompted by the videographer, she puffs her chest and shows her audience what she’d been up to that afternoon. No, she didn’t make a fort out of couch cushions, she didn’t build a lego castle, she didn’t join her sister in the land of horses. She didn’t even play with the teepee that sat on the bottom shelves of the small bookcase she was now presenting.

She organized them.

That’s right. She organized shelves – proudly and loudly, securing her place among the future of OCD adults.

That seven year old, you may have guessed, was me. The tugboat on the floor my little sister. I find it delightfully appropriate that I watched this home video – sent to me last week by my cousin – on the eve before my 28th birthday....

Read on: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/11/be-yourself-youre-qualified-...