If you are in the Los Angeles area, don't miss this opportunity to take Baxter's Deep WAter workshops in downtown LA on the weekend of March 11-13. I'm going to be there and would love to meet (and see again) some of you amazing LA hoopdancers. 

Here's a little info in case you are interested:

“Deep Water” is new workshop series offered by HoopPath Founder, Jonathan Baxter. This is the follow up series to the very successful, “Warrior Path” tour. The inaugural weekend for this workshop series took place in Louisville, KY on the weekend of October 8th, 9th, and 10th of 2010.

Deep Water refers to the calm, meditative space found within a satisfying hoop movement session. The Deep Water workshop consists of exercises and techniques that are intended to help us reach a deeper state of meditation with the hoop as well as enlighten us to the subtle nuances of intermediate and advanced hoop dance.

http://www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=F40ysYbsf2w

About The Workshops:

From Baxter:

One of my dear hoop students said to me after a class once, “I feel like you swim in from the deep water to teach us sometimes. I would love to go out there with you sometime.” Although the metaphor of water had not occurred to me before her comment, I immediately resonated with this idea and quickly identified my experience with it. My hoop practices are long, and within them there are periods of time when I am adrift, away from technique and structure, and am purely at the whim of balance and rhythm. In deep water, there is no rush, no pressure, and no ceiling. Rather, deep water is an expansiveness of consciousness and a state of being in which Mind and Body are in balance with one another.

The Deep Water series is a mix of techniques to get us to this state, as well as observations and musings gleamed from my own time out in “the deep.” Unlike the Warrior Path tour, the Deep Water tour will not emphasize one particular style of hoop dance (ie: Warrior Style), but will instead focus on techniques and meditations that will inform any style of hoopdance. Many of you have written to me over the last year and asked if I could share more Maidan stories and delve deeper into my meditative experience as a source for my workshop teaching. Well… here goes.

To be clear, we will certainly explore techniques and movements to add to your repertoire, but that won’t be the primary focus. The primary focus will be on using the hoop to reach a state of calm peacefulness that will inform our hoopdance and open to our Understanding of ourselves.

On Day One (Friday night), we will set the tone for the weekend by exploring the framework of the Maidan approach to hoop practice. Although, this will be similar to the first nights of other tours, we will approach the concepts with new exercises and techniques.

On Day Two (Saturday), we will continue our explorations and build on the concepts learned from the night before. We will also step up the physicality and difficulty of the techniques we cover. Our goal by the end of Saturday will be to break anxiety’s grip on us, and to move closer and closer to true, authentic expression.

On Day Three (Sunday), we will move into the more abstract HoopPath techniques including “Touch.” After 2 hard days of hooping, we will enter Day 3 tired and maybe even sore, but ready to receive and experience our hoopdance as a revealer of our own physical and psychological structure. As a group, we will plot a course for the deepest parts of ourselves and, ideally, learn more about our internal processes and reactions.