But short answer:
– First couple days are the HARDEST by a lot. Everyone hurts the first few times and then it gets better.

– Women about to get their period OR going through menopause tend to get a LOT more soreness. Sometimes good just to back off then.

– H3 to H4 transition is the most painful. Especially if you’ve had shoulder issues, soften that up. You can try doing looser, more flowing movements and less exacting ones.

– If that doesn’t help, take out #3 and substitute an easier position for you. As long as you’re making connections systematically between points, it’s okay if you change the shape until you recover.

– Yes to epson salt baths.

– Yes to stretching before after your practice.

– Yes to slow practice with breathing.

– Yes to massaging your arms after each round.

Give yourself a bit of time to recover, and then take it slow. It’s definitely work, and this does happen and yeah, you’re working muscles that hardly ever get used, so also normal.

Thanks for asking and I’ll add more as I think of it!

I know this is not yoga, so I hope all you yoga fans (I am one too!) will forgive me, but I just wanted to let you know, Nathan, that I have found Reiki to be a great form of energy work for some of the issues you mentioned. I do it myself and worked with one person who had chronic fatigue syndrome and fybromyalgia, and his condition improved noticeably with regular sessions. That was a long time ago, if it had been recent, I would actually recommend learning it. I find it’s best if you address big health issues (with Reiki) yourself, so you can use Reiki as often as you want, regularly, especially for the pain and weakness. In any case, good luck building core strength and getting to a place where you can do Shiva!

Don’t forget to come back here and give us a link! (Or at least have Havi give us one….)

Giant, fluffy mental hug right back at you! : )

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Since I’m getting a strong feeling I’ll have a band of yoga fanatics (and you DO NOT mess with women who can wrap their legs behind their ears, just ask my cousin Gerald) turning up at my door chanting 4-2 3-3 2-4 1-1 in the garden all bloody night I’m going to start blogging (for, oh, the 5th time at least! But the shivanauts [havinauts?] will keep me company eh?:) )

First blog posting in a couple of days… if I can remember what it was supposed to be about (if anyone replies “memory loss”, I’ll come sit on you. That’s supposed to be a threat you see…)

Havi, I love you too…in the whole “speaks to me” way, not the freaky stalker way. I love that you posted this exchange. I love that you didn’t try to sell something that wouldn’t help (but then, I expect nothing less from you). I love that you talk about these ideas without being all preachy or high falootin’ (is that really a word?).

The numbers thing confuses me. I like saying it. I like concentrating on the patterns. Patterns fascinate me. So much that I color mandalas with my son to relax after a stressful day. However, I don’t “get” the numbers.

Last…YAY for you, Nathan. Yay for doing hard things. Yay for knowing they’re hard for you. And yay for sharing it all with us!

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The numbers thing is exciting. I am going to try that.

P.S. I have been doing the actual movements (vs. just practicing the arm positions) from the DVD for two days now but still am not good at it. Think I will quit, clearly it is not for me.

Just kidding.

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I’ve been doing a lot of traveling inside my head lately, and the other day I spontaneously decided to do Shiva Nata. In my head. So for those who don’t speak Megan, this means that I’m lying on my bed relaxed, like a meditation, and I’m the me in my head who walks around and sees things and does things. And I started doing Shiva Nata positions.

My physical body wasn’t moving at all, but something fascinating was happening in my brain. It was harder to do each position, because being in my head is super different than being normal waking Megan. But if I concentrated and challenged myself (A LOT) I could do the positions, just the very basic ones. And I had a pretty intense feeling that doing Shiva Nata in my head could result in a lot of the same benefits as doing Shiva Nata with my body. It was like a new way to challenge myself — it felt like starting from scratch again!

I haven’t tried it again, because I like experiencing the mental and physical results at the same time. But it was a wacky thing to have happened, and when I’m getting more non-Shiva exercise I might try switching temporarily to in-my-head Shiva, just to see if I get crazy BING! effects from it. Because THAT would be INTERESTING!!

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