There are, of course, infinite ways to challenge yourself and make your Shiva Nata practice hard.

This list of one hundred and one is a great starting place. And it’s also barely the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Here are the ones I pretty much always use, just as a baseline to start off with:

1. I alternate between teaching mode and student mode.
2. Rotations in space with each new starting position.
3. Using a word/quality/wish.

I’ve been doing these for long enough that they don’t even slightly count as my actual challenge for the practice, which I have to add onto these. But the more challenges the better, and I try to mix these up each time in some way too.

Explanations!

1) Alternating between teaching mode and student mode.

In teaching mode, the left hand becomes the right hand. That is: right hand is the starting hand but you pretend it’s the left hand. In student mode, the left hand is always the starting hand.

This means that when you’re in student mode, 3:5 means left hand at 3 and right hand at 5 (aka Vertical 1).

When you’re in teaching mode, 3:5 means right hand at 3 and left hand at 5. But you basically just pretend that your right hand is your left.

Alternating between teaching mode and student mode means that you have to SWITCH which hand is the starting hand.

For one full set of Level 3, my left hand is my actual left hand. For the next full set, I start with my right hand.

SUPER ADVANCED: If you want to make this really brain-breakey, switch modes with each new starting position (!).

2) Rotations in space with each new starting position.

Each time I move to a new starting positions, I turn one full quarter turn. To the right if I’m in teacher mode, to the left if I’m in student mode.

Sometimes I do a full spiral:

If I’m doing a level with sixteen starting positions, I’ll end up turning sixteen times in the same direction. Then I’ll repeat that level (or do another level with an equal number of starting positions) and spiral out the opposite way.

Other times I’ll do right quarter turns for the first four starting positions, then left quarter turns for the next four and so on.

Other times I create other combinations.

The main thing is that you have another element to keep track of — “Wait, which direction am I turning?”. It adds a nice layer of general confusion.

All those turns also can make balance harder, especially if you’re working with High Legs and core work.

Plus it improves your ability to orient yourself quickly in space.

Recommended!

3) Using a word/quality/wish/affirmation.

In addition to setting an intention at the beginning of a practice, each set gets a word, a quality, a wish or an affirmation.

This is in addition to using words in your practice, if you’re doing that. Or numbers, if you’re doing numbers.

If my horizontals are, say, Trust, Wonder, Patience and Speediness, I can still associate another word or quality with that set.

For example, I might attempt to think Love-Love-Love-Love WHILE I’m cycling through those word combinations.

Or I might experiment with seeing if I can feel or perceive the quality of Love every time I cycle through H2. Or to pulsate it with my body in different places.

Or I might try to imagine that [X part of my body] is getting a healing with love every time I cycle around.

Sometimes I follow the numbers on the iPhone app or the DVD while repeating my sentence the entire time.

To make this extra hard: Don’t Look. See if you can listen to the numbers and say your words at the same time.

Lately I’ve been trying to say my word or statement at each position so that I repeat it the same number of times as there are arm movements. That’s either sixteen or thirty two times per starting position, in the lower levels, depending on your count.

In your own practice…

Your baseline challenges could be completely different, of course.

It’s your practice. See what works for you.

Try stuff. Experiment. Mess around. Play. Be curious. Enter as you wish to be in it.

Be conscious of the experience you’re having.

Meet yourself with as much amnesty, permission, and spaciousness as you can muster.

It’s all patterns. All patterns are legitimate. All patterns are information. All patterns can change and transform into the new patterns, which will then transform again. Bring them to the dance and take them apart.

We just show up and notice what’s there. We turn inward. We interact with the experience in conscious and loving ways. We make room for ourselves. Again and again and again.

So I taught four Shiva Nata workshops this week.

Three at Rally (Rally!), and one for the roller derby team that we sponsor.

Doing Shiva Nata at Rally is always entertaining, especially the first class.

That’s because we typically see a huge range of familiarity with the practice, from people who have never done it and have no idea what it is to people who teach it regularly. And everything in between.

At this particular Rally we had six Shiva Nata teachers alongside total beginners. People who practice with the DVD but never done it with me, which is very different, and then people who have only practiced with me. And a mathematician. Yay!

Anyway, my job is to make sure that everyone gets thoroughly and deliciously scrambled, and that we all have crazy fun doing it. Or at least that we meet our experience with sweet presence, to the best of our abilities.

Here’s what class looked like this week.

Toozday.

To provide extra mind-meltingness for people who already know what they’re doing, I taught the positions completely out of order.

And I didn’t give any numbers as reference points. Instead, I asked them to come up with words that described the things they wanted to feel at Rally.

The words they came up with were as follows:

• Glee (vertical 3)
• Safety (vertical 2)
• Strength (horizontal 3)
• Curiosity (horizontal 1)
• Excitement (vertical 4)
• Effortlessness (horizontal 2)
• Belonging (vertical 1)
• Passion (horizontal 4)

Next I taught them about sequences: what it means to move sequentially forward and backward to create a spiral loop. And how you can start that sequence from any of the four points.

Then we did all CONNECTION SETS between horizontals and verticals and vice versa, but impossibly ridiculously fast. It sounded kind of like this, but imagine Alvin and the Chipmunks because that’s how fast we were doing it:

I’m curious about belonging! I’m curious about safety! I’m curious about Glee, because I have no idea what happened in the last episode! Being curious is exciting!

Effortless belonging, effortless safety, effortlessness makes me gleeful, I’m effortlessly excited! Strength in belonging! Get stronger through safety! Strengthen your glee! The strength of excitement! I’m passionate about belonging, passionate safety, passion and glee, and passionately excited…

I belong in my curiosity, I belong effortlessly, I belong to my strengths, I find belonging in passion! I feel safe when I’m curious, I find safety in effortlessness, I am safe and strong, yay safety and passion!

Gleeful curiosity, being gleeful is effortless, glee is my strength, glee and passion! I’m excited about being curious, there’s excitement that can be effortless, get excited about how strong you’re getting, excitement leads to passion!

Then when we stopped giggling, we put it all together and did some sequences. I let them invent starting positions. Also we danced to Cake, and I may have improvised and thrown in some other levels for extra brain-breaky power.

And then we shavasana-ed with intention.

Wednesday.

Wednesday we came up with new words!

To replace the old ones, and undo those patterns.

This time the category was nouns or verbs that describe things you might find or do at Rally.

The horizontals (in order): Bubbles, Movement, Selma and Naps.

The verticals (in order): Clews, Buttmonsters, Caboose and Wheel.

And once I was positive that they’d erased the old words, we brought the old words back and combined them.

But we also added NUMBERS. But with a switch! Instead of the horizontals being 1-4 and the verticals 5-8, we reversed it!!!

I am so nefarious! They were so delighted/mad! It was so great!

All of our heads broke a dozen times. Also we pretended that we were the Count from Sesame Street.

Von Clew of Belonging!
Two Safe Buttmonsters!
Three Gleeful Cabooses! Cabeese? Sadly, no.
And Four Wheels of Excitement!

Five Curious Bubbles!
Six Effortless Movements! Just like in a sun salutation!
The Seven Strengths of Selma.
Eight Passionate Naps! Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Haaaaaaa!

Then we did a bunch of math.

Because of the number-switch, if you take what would normally be 2:5, it becomes 6:1 instead. Which is ALREADY confusing enough.

But then we gave that number FOUR different names — calling it 6:1, 61, 6 and 7.
Can you guess why?

And then we did some Flip-its. I have to say, it was pretty brutal. By which I mean we were all thoroughly bewildered by the end and also everyone had about seven hundred epiphanies that day.

They were really good sports. Sparklepoints to all of them!

Oh and of course we danced to the sexy robot song, because it’s a Rally tradition and we couldn’t not follow tradition.

Thursday. Class #1.

I taught this class in a pig hat. That’s a story for another time.

We sang a sea shantey while doing Level 1 verticals and then horizontals, at a fairly moderate clip. What most people would call “fast“.

Then we did Level 1 to a recording of a much faster version of the same sea shantey.

Then we did Level 2 to an INSANELY fast recording until our brains fell off.

Then we did freeform Zombie Shiva Nata, which involves being fierce and unpredictably growling, roaring, stumbling and scaring. It’s harder than it sounds. We’ll do it at Shivanauticon, I promise.

Awesome.

Then a long shavasana which felt like zzzzzzzzz-flatline-no-thoughts-emptiness, and then we did a bunch of stone skipping and went back to playing.

Thursday. Class #2.

Shiva Nata with my Guns N Rollers. I can’t even tell you how much I love training skaters.

They wanted to do colors, so we did, starting with the verticals and then the horizontals. They got to choose/invent any colors they wanted.

V: purple, black, pink, orange
H: turquoise, yellow, white, red.

We reviewed theory. We reviewed legs. In motion, of course. We tried to imagine pulses of color with each position. We played with using color in our imaginary force fields.

Then, just to make it harder, we added numbers to the colors. But we did it the way you would in roller derby.

When a ref calls you out for a penalty, it’s by color of uniform and then number. Black 2! Red Eight! Red Eight is Cadillac. See?

Like that. A little Level 1, a little Level 2.

Then we did it to the Clash.

Then we did it super slow to sloooow music, with legs high and lots of core work, and they had to think of ONE color each time we cycled through it.

And then I let them collapse in a heap and we did some resting and a bunch of stretching, and it was beautiful.

I figure even if we only erase one mental block each time, by the end of the season they are still going to be ROCKING IT. That’s the plan. Go GNR!

That’s it.

I mean, it’s not even slightly it.

I didn’t get a chance to go into how we challenged ourselves and made it harder.

Or how much we laughed.

Or how many incredible realizations we had and how many patterns got rewritten.

But it was a fun week. Extra-scrambly!

Are you mixing it up? Good. MIX. IT. UP.

Blowing kisses to all the shivanauts. Happy flails.

This post comes from shivanaut Simone Seol, who created this drawing in a recent fit of inspired Shivanautical brilliance.

Thanks, Simone – this pretty much says it all!

Found scribbled on a post-Shiva-Nata post-it note.

From a few months back, but I found it today.

Which was exactly the right day to find it.

Anyway, here it is:

There are two ways to find the clues.

1) Be present and you will find the clues.

2) Be someone who sees patterns, and you will find the clues.

Answers. Everywhere.

Over the past several months, the clues have been falling into my lap with an immediacy that surprises even me.

But really it’s not that surprising.

It comes from being present. And from being the person who sees the patterns.

And since Shiva Nata is the insanely fast shortcut to both of those states/abilities…

Clues. Pointing arrows. And surprisingly often also the information I need in the exact moment that I need it.

So I’m doing a lot of reflecting.

Sitting with pieces and shards of information. Playing with it. Rearranging it. Flipping it. Turning it upside down and inside out. Mapping out the connections.

Turning off my brain and then turning it back on again.

Because that’s the shivanautical approach.

Be curious and play. Be curious and play. Be curious and play.

How the commenting blanket fort here works.

Each of us is in charge of our own experience. Yay!

So we take loving responsibility for how we interact with concepts, with our process and with each other. We pay attention to what we need and to how we can give it to ourselves.

p.s. I haven’t yet posted here about ohmygod SHIVANAUTICON! Mostly because I was hoping to have more information for you other than the dates and the much-wished-for cotton candy machine. But you can sign up here for details and there will be some excited noises soon.

You guys! This weekend is Roller Derby Championships! And I’m there. In Denver.

Okay. Here’s Demon Llama!

It began by accident.

I was recently asked to take on some coaching duties for my derby league.

And I’ve started teaching them Shiva Nata.

When I introduced this practice to the league, one of girls asked how it was useful for derby. I wrote up some notes to share on our league’s board. … and here’s what I’ve got:

How is Shiva Nata is useful for Roller Derby?

The answer is this:

I’m pretty sure that EVERYTHING about Shiva Nata is useful when you’re training for derby.

But here are a few specific things that come to mind, although I’m sure there are many more.

Mistakes:

Basically the whole idea of Shiva Nata is that if you aren’t screwing it up constantly then you aren’t going to get that much out of it.

Making mistakes and moving through them are part of your experience, but it’s also one of the hardest things to adapt to at first.

In any bout situation, mistakes are going to happen.

You’re going to look one way and the opposing jammer is going to fly by you on the other side.

Maybe you’re jamming and you trip over your own feet.

If you’re beating yourself up over this stuff, it’s hard to adapt to what is actually happening.

Shiva Nata helps you get used to the idea of not getting attached to the screw-ups; just moving through them and trusting that you will get better each time.

Shiva Nata also shows you the patterns behind the screw-ups. Also the patterns behind the self-recrimination. And what to do about it.

The ability to take in multiple things going on at once.

In Shiva Nata, you’ve got one arm spiraling in one direction, the other arm spiraling in the opposite direction, trying to say the numbers out loud too, oh and for good measure you can throw in a leg going in some other direction.

In derby, look forward, you look backward, play offense, play defense, communicate with your team mates, and stay on your skates (among other things).

Shiva Nata trains your brain to be able to handle multiple different kinds of information AND to communicate that with your body.

To think & move at the same time.

Team work.

Especially when you’re just starting out, mirroring someone else lets you attune to what their body is doing and trust that they are showing you what to do.

This is a great way to get used to the idea of physically working with your teammates — like when you need to form a wall that is capable of staying together and stopping an opposing player.

Even when practicing on your own, you are asking separate parts of your body to cooperate with you, to respond to the messages you are sending them.

The better you are able to communicate with your own body, the better you can communicate with your teammates, and more intuitively too.

Using one part of your body in one way while simultaneously using another part of your body in a different way is useful cross-training for jammers — being able to fake in one direction, while simultaneously getting your legs moving in the other direction.

Shiva Nata is great for core & upper body strengthening.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of taking a hit on skates knows how important core strength is, so anything you can do to build on that = awesome.

Also, I think upper body work tends to get forgotten in the focus on legs & core, but one rotator-cuff strain and you won’t forget it again.

I’m always surprised by how easy it is to fatigue my arms doing Shiva Nata, and unlike weight lifting (which is awesome too) Shiva Nata keeps your muscles dynamic, so they aren’t just strong, but they move with strength.

And being dynamic is fundamental to derby — we’re on wheels!

Shiva Nata teaches you to stay out of “the middle”.

“The middle” is that dangerous place where you think you don’t need to improve anymore. Shiva Nata celebrates mistakes because that’s where you are pushing your mind and body into new territory, forming new neural connections.

Bringing that to your derby training helps you remember to actively seek out the challenge when something has become too easy for you.

Shiva Nata is also super useful in small doses.

You don’t need to spend an hour doing Shiva Nata to get major epiphanies. I usually do it in 5 minute increments, and have really started to appreciate that a consistent strong effort over a short period of time can yield amazing results over the long term.

Learning new strategies and then replacing them with different ones.

Shiva Nata gives your mind a major workout just learning the basics of Level 1, and then suddenly you’re on Level 2 and everything you thought you knew is now totally different.

In roller derby you may go into a jam with a solid strategy, but suddenly your jammer gets a major penalty and now you need to control a power jam: you have to adapt instantly.

Practicing different aspects or levels of Shiva Nata one after another is super useful in developing your ability to adapt instantly.

Shiva Nata improves your ability to recognize patterns and then look for the gaps.

As a jammer it trains your eye to see the paths through the pack, not the people in the pack.

As a blocker it trains you to identify the other team’s strategy quickly — and counter it.

This is one of those things that is pretty hard to explain without experiencing it.

There are always multiple patterns at play, and they are constantly changing. Developing this kind of vision is one of the greatest gifts of Shiva Nata.

Just do it. And keep doing it. And keep making it harder. You’ll feel and see what happens. And it will be brilliant.

I will be teaching an afternoon shivanauttery workshop in Boulder, Colorado.

Ridiculously soon!

It’s Thursday, November 10, 2011.

3:00 pm – 5:00pm

Selma will be there. The Schmoppet will be there.

There will be epiphanies of the hot and buttered variety. It will be grand.

And it’s pretty close to full so if there’s a chance you can make it, go for it.

Maybe I’ll get to see you there?

All the details are on this page.

Reports to follow!

p.s. Shiva Nata is also sponsoring the 2011 Roller Derby Championships in Denver. You can try to find me there too. I’ll be wearing a purple rainbow toy snake as a boa. Derby shivanauts unite!

Pocket Shiva Nata

So. After six months filled with crazy hard work, our lovely baby — Pocket Shiva Nata — is here and alive and kicking!

As of right now. Hooray!

And there was great rejoicing, but also MAYHEM and HAPPY FLAILING and general brain scramble of the best possible kind. Again: Hooray!

In my brain-scrambled, state, here’s what I can tell you about our shiny new Pocket Shiva Nata baby:

• This app is a practice tool for the first three levels of Shiva Nata – designed to complement our Starter Kit and Andrey’s DVD.
• If you have an iPhone, oh boy! This is very good news, shivanautically speaking!
• Or an iPad. Or an iPod touch. Or something that runs apps from the Apple store (iOS 3.2.2 or later). Yay.
• Familiarity with the eight basic starting positions is assumed.
• If you don’t have the Starter Kit but you’ve taken a class with me, you’ll be fine.
• There is a stylized animated me doing the positions.
• My voice calls the numbers (you can turn that on or off).
• There are animated graphics and large numbers which show each position while it’s happening (you can turn the numbers on and off too).
• You can adjust the speed to your own abilities (from super slow to outrageously fast), and turn on/off audio, visual, and textual cues as you like.
• There’s a reminder function, which means your device (device!) will let you know once a day that it’s flailing time! This might be my favorite part.
• You can pause it whenever you want, or start in the middle of a level or repeat things.
• You can have the numbers be in 1-4 mode, or make it extra-fabulous/hard with 1-8 mode. Unless you studied with me and started off with 1-8, in which case 1-4 might be harder!
• The entire thing (code, graphics, recording) was made in Portland, Oregon, home of the Playground. :)
• Sadly, there will not be a Droid app version of this any time soon. Unless you happen to be a shivanaut Droid app programmer who wants to donate your services for a collaboration on this, but I’m guessing that this is not a likely thing.
• There is no app for the higher levels. If you want to go deeper into the higher levels of the practice, get thee to the awesome Secret Lab!
• We had an amazing programmer working on this, huge support from loving helper mice, and this was a beautiful team effort. I am full of appreciation for everything that went into making this a reality.
• It was a labor of love! One quarter of the price makes it back to us, which in about twenty years should cover the time and effort that went into making this happen. Totally one hundred percent worth it, though, because a world with more Shiva Nata in it is the world I want to live in!

That’s the news….

Happy, happy flailing! Let the crazed zaptastic getting-lost begin!

What I would love right now:

1) Joyous celebration. It’s done! It’s here! It has arrived in the world! My tiny sweet thing that was also a Gwish has become a tangible, beautiful, amazing, real live gift. Yay!

1.5) Confetti! Shaped like stars! Or asparagus. I don’t know. Invent confetti!

2) Love and good wishes for all the amazing people who helped make this possible: Dave (of Fortified Studios), Richard and Casey: you guys are the best!

3) PLEASE PLEASE as many positive reviews as possible in the app store — the sooner the better.

And here’s the link again: The Pocket Shiva Nata app!

Thank you thank you thank you. And ohmygoodness hooray!

Normally I don’t teach Shiva Nata classes outside of retreats, rallies and shivanautical trainings.

But guess what?

On Toozday, July 26 (soon!), my duck and I will be leading 90 delicious minutes of shivanautical fun at my studio — the Playground — in Portland, Oregon.

And then there is a 3 part series in August too. Yay!

If you like, you can bring a pattern, a stuck, a Gwish or something you want to work on or get better at.

But you won’t have to tell anyone what it is! And if you don’t have one, that’s okay too!

And we’ll use the mad, intense, flailing and brain training to generate insights, alternatives and surprising simple solutions.

It will be powerful and hilarious at the same time.

Each class will include ridiculous flailing, secret just-for-you stone skippings, and some lovely calming down.

Any and all levels (including I-have-no-idea-what-this-is!) welcome.

As are any and all ages, shapes, body types, etc.

We will laugh.

You will get better at things like balance, agility, creativity and adaptability. And finding beauty in both order and chaos.

Cost for the Toozday evening Snack Preview class on July 26.

a) $35 drop-in,
b) $15 if you pre-register online, or
c) Nothing at all if you sign-up for the 3 part series in August.

*All the details are HERE: http://shivanata.com/snack-preview-pdx

Rejoicing!

I would love some happy cheering for this.

If you’re in PDX or the general area, it would be amazing to see you there.

And if not, I would love it if you would help me spread the word, especially if you know people who might be into this.

Let me know if you have questions!

NOTE: I announced this on the Fluent Self blog on Friday so it’s already getting pretty close to full. I think we can fit seven more people in if we squeeze. :)

If you’ve been doing Shiva Nata for a while, you’re already used to contradiction. And paradox. Ahahahaha. Yes.

I am right but I am also wrong.

I recognize the pattern but I can’t explain it or repeat it.

One thing is true but uh oh its opposite is apparently also true.

That’s just how Shiva Nata works. You end up dealing with these constant moments of recognition and understanding that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.

Maybe it’s that all this new neural connectivity means you’re getting better at holding a thought and its opposite at the same time.

Maybe it’s because all the flailing around and mixing it up (or the permission to flail and mix) helps you release various internal and external rules about how things are supposed to be.

Either way, whenever you encounter a rule or a principle in Shiva Nata, you can always assume that this rule has a corollary. Or at least a couple of important caveats.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I’ve been writing up a series of essays for the lovely people coming to the Shiva Nata September Training Intensive — the Academy of Hilarity & Play.

And pretty much everything I say comes with a second half where I totally contradict the first half.

And both sides are right. Both sides are powerful. They each tell part of a story.

So it’s on my mind.

And also because I’m sure you’ve also noticed examples of this in the practice.

Like this old favorite:

Form is not at all important! Form is so important!

I’ve kind of talked about that before, but there’s so much more to say. And believe me, we’re not done covering that one.

Anyway, when you encounter a shivanautical paradox and it’s breaking your brain, bring it back to the practice.

Set the intention that you want to understand how this contradiction isn’t actually a contradiction. Or how both parts can be true. Ask the practice to show you the piece that is still out of reach.

And see what happens…

Something super interesting came up on the Shiva Nata sneak snack picnic call.

It’s the fear of being done.

What happens when I’ve learned all the levels, exhausted all of the options, figured out all the patterns? What if I run out of Shiva Nata? I don’t want to run out of Shiva Nata!

Or, as someone put it on the call:

I also have this fear of “running out” — I kind of hoard the later levels so I still have lots of epiphanies to look forward to.

This worry has has shown up for people in every training we’ve done so far*, and I’ve totally been meaning to write about it, so thank you for reminding me! Let’s look at this.

* So it’s a perfectly normal, legitimate, human thing to worry about.

There is no done.

The thing we need to remember about worrying over what will happen when you finish Shiva Nata is that there is no finishing Shiva Nata. There is no done.

For so many reasons.

Shiva Nata is infinitely infinitely infinite.

Being done with Shiva Nata would be like having learned everything possible there is to learn about physics and mathematics in the entire universe: having thoroughly explored every possible equation, hypothesis and possible conclusion.

Being done with Shiva Nata would be like having visited every single one of the billions of cells in your body and examined every aspect of it and then continued to explore all the atoms in the universe.

It isn’t possible.

And even if you could do those things, the beauty, brilliance and power that you would discover would lead you to new things, and they would be a part of Shiva Nata as well.

Even if…

Even if you were so well-versed and well-practiced in Shiva Nata that you could do Level 7 at crazy-fast speeds (and translating the numbers into Italian) while riding a unicycle, knitting a scarf and solving complex mathematical algorithms on a moving chalkboard….

You would not be done.

You would just be beginning.

There are always more levels. And not just upward.

But mini-levels and transitional levels and half-levels and things that have not been discovered yet.

There are endless permutations. Endless ways to play with each level and make it entirely new again.

I do not mean this in some vague theoretical way.

Not like with yoga or martial arts, which are also infinite.

Yoga is infinite because you can always go deeper, internally or externally. You can always discover something new about a pose or about how you are while you’re in it.

In martial arts, you can always become more skilled, more agile, more adaptive.

I am not talking about that stuff, even though that stuff is also cool and also happens in Shiva Nata.

What I mean is that Shiva Nata is fractal.

Shiva Nata is fractal.

It is constantly expanding, constantly forming and re-forming.

Each algorithm leads you to a new and more complex algorithm.

And there are UNLIMITED algorithms that have not been practiced or invented yet.

As you expand your interconnected networks of neural connections and as you generate moments of understanding, you will find the new ways to do Shiva Nata.

They will come to you, because this is an insanely inventive practice.

You will find endless variations and endless surprises.

You will realize that you have been worried about the wrong thing.

Because honestly? The thing that really should be freaking you out is not that you might finish or run out, but that we’ve barely uncovered the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with Dance of Shiva.

The vastness of possibility is intense, and when you encounter it, that is a big moment.

Luckily that discomfort or fear is a pattern too, and any pattern can be given back to the practice and rewritten.

The part about the two things I invariably say, because they’re important.

There are two things I always end up saying in response to any question about Shiva Nata.

1) Find the patterns behind the question.

This is never as hard as you think it will be because every question reveals the thing that is missing or desired.

In this case, there are patterns of Not-Enoughness. And if they’re coming up with Shiva Nata, they’re probably coming up in other places too.

Like relationships. Maybe with people. Maybe with things like money, time, space, love, creativity, support.

Patterns aren’t good or bad — they’re just useful information about where you are right now.

And if you aren’t sure what the patterns are, make that your intention for your Shiva Nata practice. Ask it to show you what the patterns are.

2) Bring the patterns to the dance.

Bring your question and the patterns inside of it back to the practice, so it can help you bring in the new patterns.

Say something like this:

“Okay, I’m about to practice Shiva Nata. I’m going to make it hard and experiment. And I know there’s this thing going on for me where I think I’m going to run out of Shiva Nata. So I’d like to know what the patterns are and what my next step is in healing whatever old pain is behind this fear.”

Or maybe you don’t say anything at all.

But you just bring your attention to the existence of the question.

Shiva Nata will help you figure out how to not run out of Shiva Nata. That’s kind of how it works.

So where do we go from here?

Anywhere we want to.

We can rejoice about the hidden truth (there’s always enough! there’s always more!).

We can notice new fears, worries, what-ifs. And recognize that these too are patterns. And bring them back to our Shiva Nata practice to get insights on how we can rewrite them.

We can imagine the zaniness that will ensue when we are doing Level 7 on our unicycles or other head-explody things.

We can remember that there is time, and we don’t have to figure it all out right away.

We can ask questions. We can breathe. We can take things apart and put them back together again. We can laugh and cry and play and wonder.

And dance dance dance.

p.s. Tiny popsicle stick reminder! Eight days left in the the September Training early registration period. If there’s stuff you’re wondering about, let me know!