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.

Okay, we have an Ask a Shivanaut question from Jan in Nebraska.
Nebraska! I think he might even be the first Nebraskan Shivanaut, so that’s pretty fantastic.
Anyway, on to the question:
Hi Havi,
I am just starting to get into doing beginning yoga in the last 2 months. I have some DVDs which I use at [...]

Oh, it’s Ask a Shivanaut time again … and this time it’s not one question but a hundred related ones.
It’s not even questions. It’s more like statements. Like:
Holy crap!
That looks way too hard for me to do. Like, ever.
I’m not very coordinated so I won’t be able to do that.
And I get it. [...]

Okay, so admittedly this site doesn’t get anywhere near as much love from me as my main home at The Fluent Self (and I apologize for that), so really I have no right to get annoyed by questions I don’t know how to answer.

Because I could just put up a FAQ or something. And yeah, I will.

Anyway, here’s the question that always baffles me:

“I want to learn Dance of Shiva — what do I do?”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the question:

OK, I watched your little demo video.

I don’t get it.

How does that bring an epiphany?

Thanks.

Okay. Here’s how it works: