In general, I’m for it. Yay, Shiva Nata! I think it could be a wonderful experience.

But, as always, it’s your body and you know best.

So exercising caution is definitely not a bad thing. This is all about you developing a healthy relationship with yourself, which is basically the most yoga thing you could be doing.

Hope that helps! Thanks for the question.

Anyone else? Thoughts on this? Experience with this? Ideas one way or the other? I’m off to start a doo-wop quartet called Questionable Things May Occur.

Every few months I get a question from someone who is worried that the Dance of Shiva is a form of avodah zarah (idolatry, the worship of false gods).

And even though a lot of you have no connection or concern with this specifically, I know there are also many people who need reassurance that this isn’t going to be some wacky religious practice.

I mean, it is wacky. It’s just not religious-wacky.

So I am going to bring a couple of these questions in here and do what I can to answer them.

There are the usual answers.

That men are (or tend to be) better primed through social conditioning to try things that are hard.

Or to have the testosterone-fueled confidence to push through to the next level — and to not get so caught up in the endless “who do I think I am” type of questioning that women often put themselves through.

There’s got to be other stuff going on too. And I don’t know what it is.

Epiphanies on the emotional level.

Realizations about how your patterns work.

About what elements they’re composed of.

You remember things.

You dream things.

You notice things.

All of a sudden, you know why you do something the way you do it. And you know how to do it differently if you want to.

And I haven’t the foggiest notion of how to answer this.

Other than renting the film in question …

So I’m putting this out to you guys. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?*

So here it is:

Is “coordination” a pre-req for Shiva Nata?

The short answer is: “Oh dear God, no!”

But it’s the longer answer that’s more interesting.

But Shiva Nata? Hahahahaha, no. You won’t be good at it, and moreover, you can’t be good at it because it’s all about making sure that you’re always doing it wrong.

In other words, the only way you can be good at it … is by being bad at it.

Which kind of ruins the whole “good at it” part.

How’s Shiva Nata on mixing practices? I do a qi gong style now; my teacher might say something opaque about energetic confusion, but he moved to Alaska and never answers the phone.

Best regards,
Bill Randall

This comment on the last post (part 1) is from Jennifer Louden who is just completely awesome and has been on Oprah and I love her madly and you should all be reading her books or taking her classes and just thinking about her results in my writing ridiculous run-on sentences.

I wanted to share a bit from an email exchange I had a little while ago.

Because it’s interesting, possibly helpful and also just really sweet.

So please enjoy this charming letter from Nathan in Scotland, who has kindly given me permission to reprint some of our correspondence here, in the hopes that my answer to him may prove useful to others.

And even if not, it will at least teach you something about the art of writing email subject headers:

Shiva Nata, ego pumping, expanding comfort zones and a disabled duck (that’s me)

Now that is a subject header. How can you not love Nathan instantly? I don’t know either.