butterfly, finally

I'm going to Costa Rica in March to play with some of my NYC jedi kula. Funny enough, Nick of playpoi fame is going to be in CR the week prior, teaching his classes on advanced poi spinning. The pre-requisite is "The Basics". I consider myself a fairly decent poi spinner, so wanted to see what "the basics" consisted of, in Nick's opinion.

To my astonishment, it included some fairly advanced moves (behind the back weaves, anyone?). I've been playing inside the Weave for almost a year now, and its time to incorporate some new moves. The one that I *do* consider basic, that I was struggling with, even after classes, was the Butterfly. This morning, in between sets of pushups, I decided to tackle it.

With good music, anything is possible!

To my own amazement, I had the butterfly within 2 minutes of attempting it. Just like when I first learned the weave, it was a really high energy schping moment! The important thing about new moves is to train your body to unconsciously complete them. In otherwords, so you can transition into, play freely within, and out of the move without so much as a conscious thought. This is the nature of flow. So I stayed within the move for a mighty long time, and played with the internal possibility space, seeing where all my hands could go, where I could relax, where I could exert force, where the beats and rhytmns were. All the while the chakras were unlocking and energy was flowing freely up and down my spine. It felt so good to be opening up to new moves again!

After 20 minutes or so of left over right (which seemed very natural for the butterfly), I heeded CMs advice: for every move, practice your weak side twice as much as your dominant. So I painfully reverse engineered the move and finally got my right over left working. It *almost* felt like (which means, there is) a way existed to swicth dynamically between the two in real time while still maintaining butterfly. But every time I tried it I either wrapped a wrist or konked myself in the head. We'll get there... something tells me its related to that move I hear about called "thread the needle" :)

I've got it now where I can actually interlock my hands and still keep butterfly going... that's fun! Also tried it bending over backwards and essentially doing helicopter overhead and then reverse butterfly over the head. Fun fun fun. :)

Tantra

been researching Tantra a lot lately. As best I can tell, it encourages engagement with physical reality, as opposed to detachment from it (Vedic)... and all this implies.

However, I also *just* found out that Tantra translates to "weave"!??!?

Sanskrit: तन्त्र "weave" -- denoting continuity

How cool is that?

Weave, Corkscrew, Headspins!

My weave had, over the course of the past month or so, been naturally migrating into a corkscrew. This was pretty neat and I liked it. I made sure to practice both directions :).

Now just the other day I got to do the weave to a corkscrew with high cielings and a high mirror. And lo and behold, as I raised my arms high into the corkscrew, I began doing the "behind / front / high" weave, or vertical corkscrew, or whatever you want to call it. The visual effect is a fast moving vertical circle clear around the head, as left and right poi alternate what is frontside and what is backside. Yay! Finally, breaking out of the weave wormhole, into new tricks!

Weave Death

Well, this was inevitable. And now I progress to the greater evolution of this precious flow art.

My weave dance is about over. This, because I shot a video of it. And I looked at it without seeing the poi. And all I could see was a hunched over person focusing all energy internally, hands tied together and staying close to body core.

I didn't want my dance to look like that. I want it to be free and expressive and OPEN. I began to really move my arms and hands OUT from my body, stretching to maximum extension and re-discovering those BASIC poi moves. It felt good. For the first time in a while, I got the good ole spine tingle... for me, that means I'm opening up new energy channels. Yay!

The FINAL nail in the coffin was when I realised that my "tight weave" manuever could be best explained by saying "pretend like you have handcuffs on"... I did subsequently confirm that I can do forward / backward / spinning weave while handcuffed, but was that really the dance I wanted to be putting out into the universe?

So, farewell continuous weave, hello OPEN SPINNING.

With Open Heart Forward,
+h30ry

Weave Revelations

Well, I've been both meditating, and just started to begin feeling, what, a little "stuck" in the weave coccoon. So I thought I would expand the repetroire a bit and watch some Pele instructional video.

The first four lessons were all stuff I already knew, but it was still nice to see it executed with perfect form, and I learned a few things about planes. I also found a "hole" in my practice which I didn't know about. Strangely, I could with ease do the backwards left over right crossover, the forwards right over left crossover, the fowards left over right crossover. But when it came to the backwards right over left crossover, I hit myself in the face, every time. Wow! So, I practiced that until I "healed" the hole. I'm sure it will open up new areas in my freestyle play, since now we are back to "balance" with that move.

Now, the next thing was something that C had taught me, the corkscrew. But Pele gave me an entiirely new revelation with a single comment:

The Corkscrew is simply the Weave on a Horizontal Plane

BAM!

First, I could now do one weave at least, the split time counterclock, with ease. I practiced that a bit. It felt good. I practiced spinning my body in circles while corkscrewing. It felt good. I really tried to keep my spine completely upright, because one of the things that bothered me about Pele's corkscrew was that she was constantly bent forward over it, hunched. I wanted to do it standing erect. This meant that the poi came *really* close to my chest, almost buzz-saw style, but as long as I could deal with that and remain calm, it worked.

OK, now heres the second part of the revelation:

Like I said, I have a pretty decent feeling freestyle weave dance, where I can spin, change directions, and reverse directions at will anywhere in the beat. I've also been doing a lot of experimenting with moving the center of the weave up and down in space (high over head, low near groin). Finally, I've been experimenting with both "loose" and "tight" weave, which I define as how much the wrists move through space, and relative to eachother, as the weave moves. You can basically do a "tight" weave with handcuffs on. Seriously. You just psychicly "glue" your wrists together and movve those poi.

Sudenly, in a fairly tight weave while spinning my body, I realised that the poi had shifted to horizontal planes, and that I was doing an erect spinning corkscrew! Sweet! Then what Pele said about the corkscrew being a horizontal weave made total sense, and I also had an ultrasmooth transition between the two moves.

But best of all, its just more life into my freestyle flow improv, which is the only way I really like to dance :)

Weave Flow

Yay I'm celebrating for a new "trick"... not really a trick, more like a natural flow.

First I had to nail my front to back weave transitions, so I just kept doing them over and over until I could do them without thinking. This is where you rotate your body 180 mid-weave and simultaneously transition from front weave to back weave or vice versa. It was a lot harder smoothing out the clockwise rotations than it was the CC, go figure.

Once I got these rotations nailed, I realised that I could do a continuous circular body rotation instead of just moving 180. So I started doing FW-turn-BW-turn-FW-turn, etc. continuously.

A few days later, I realised that I could rotate my weave without rotating my body, so that if I could be running a forward weave with my torso torqued 90 degrees leftward, than I could simply rotate my torso 180 (to the right), keeping my feet firmly planted, and in doing so switch to the back weave, on the right side. Neat!

It was only natural at that point to realise that I could stop, start, or reverse both my body rotation, my torso rotation, and my weave direction at ANY TIME in the dance, and I didn't need to have set entry / exit points or "cardinal directions". That was where the fun began. For like 20 minutes I listened to a series of songs (a good mix of 180bpm techno and 45bpm folk FYI) and just freely explored the bodyspace inside the coccoon of the weave. I stopped thinking about where the poi actually were and my body naturally rotated, my wrists naturally reversed when needed, and I reveled in the dance.

Natural Movement

after another 30 minutes of spinning to some of my favorite spinmusic (Prodigy: Breath, Fighting Cocks misc, various Burning Man DJ set rips), I have both integrated the weave, both directions, and had some good practice moving into and out of it from other places.

I can truly say this is the most natural move I've ever assimilated. After the first few "watch the video" disasters, I gave up on it, and then "voila!" at the beach, it simply materialised out of thin air, and now its like second nature.

I hope that all moves come so easily in the future!

Celebration! Got my Weave oN!

It happened completely naturally, the day after thanksgiving. I was just playing outside, with two moves that make me feel good: the double crossover figure 8, and the left right swing where both poi stay exactly shoulder width apart in horizontal alignment while doing large figure 8s across the front of the body. Then just out of instinct, when the poi swung left, I did the left weave on them. It worked, and I could feel the energy pulse! Yay! So I got it so I could do one hadn "over under out" come back to the paralell, wait 3 beats, then do the left "over under out" again.


Within 15 minutes, I was in the middle of the yard, and through some complete chaos that my body understood fully but my mind failed to comprehend, I did the weave on both sides, without interruption, for several beats. I then thought "what the hell is going on?" about which time the poi smashed into my thighs.

I was able to repeat this three more times and each time the energy ripped right up and down my spine, like I was unlocking a new piece of the tummy-knot puzzle that is my life, the string unravelling into its naturally relaxed and untangled state. New energy pathways opened, I nearly yelped with joy and celebration.

Where none of those videos (Scales of Poi, Art of Poi, Pele's Poi Spinning Basics, Glowsticking) had gotten me to unlock it, continuing natural movement, and following the natural rhythmn of the poi, led me right into it.

Notably, after those three sucesses, I tried to mentally grok what the hell was going on, and that wrecked my practice for the next three days.

So today I went ever so slowly back into it, repeating the practices and techniques that had got me there in the first place, and again and again kept tangling on the right side. Then suddently something happened, and Just as "New Day" by Donna and the Buffalo came on, I got into the cycle and weaved for a straight 3 minutes uninterrupted.

At that point I concentrated on two things: 1) ignoring mentally what was going on, and 2) straightening my posture (I found I was hunched over the weave).

Anyways, I got it! Yay me! Let the energy pathways pulse with freedom!