Shiva Nata » stuff I think about

Post-it note epiphany…

Havi — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:49:15 +0000

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.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

The one about corollaries.

Havi — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 01:56:20 +0000

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…

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Kachow Boom!

Havi — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:28:04 +0000

At the last Rally (Rally!), we were getting ready for our first Shiva Nata class.

And I asked the group — some of whom were experienced shivanauts and some of whom had never done this ever — to make up words for the eight basic positions.

I often do this when I teach.

Do you know why?

Why would I do that?

Ahahahahaha.

There is, as always, a reason and intention behind everything I do. And in this particular case, there are several reasons. That I’m not going to tell you about today.

Guesses are welcome. :)

Anyway, I let the Rallygators choose the words and here’s what they came up with.

For the horizontal positions:

Clarity, Knowing, Love, Bad-assery.

And for the vertical positions:

Floop, Poink, Kachow, Boom.

So we ended up with lots of fantastic connections.

Love Kachow! Clarity Boom!

And sentences.

Like this one, during the Level 2 transquarters:

You have to know your poink in order to be a bad-ass about the boom.

Which starting position was that?

Yup. 2:6!

Or here’s another one:

Loving the floop makes it easier to clear your kachow.

If you know what I mean…

Which starting position was that?

You tell me…

Creative play is magical.

It whirls your brain around and melts patterns.

It changes your force field and shakes up your internal snow globe.

It makes you laugh.

Sparklepoints!

Sparklepoints to anyone who figured out the last starting position I was referring to is. And to anyone who wants to guess what the theory is behind making your students come up with the words to do Shiva Nata to.

And to anyone who needs some sparklepoints, of course.

p.s. We’ll be doing lots of inventing words and other unlikely ways to bend your brain during the Shiva Nata teacher training in September, if you want to play. And at the next Rally, which starts May 16, and is all about Shiva Nata. Fun.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Architectural overhaul

Havi — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:06:41 +0000

I have been enjoying this fascinating book by Stefan Fatsis called Word Freak, about competitive Scrabble.

And my favorite part, of course, is about how about studying word patterns strengthens memory patterns in the brain.

As you study patterns, the synaptic connections get stronger and go deeper, encoding the new patterns and embedding them.

Here’s the phrase that I just love: he talks about how your brain undergoes a “long term and complex architectural overhaul”.

A long term and complex architectural overhaul.

That just so perfectly sums up my entire Dance of Shiva experience.

Having just spent the weekend running a Shiva Nata teacher training, where I got to practice with twenty smart, capable, radiant women, my brain is kind of melted. In a good way. It’s the next round of the next complex architectural overhaul.

And it’s pretty intense.

I’m not in a position to be able to describe it yet, but overhaul. Yes! That! That is the word.

And sometimes the word is exactly what you need.

Some good things to read:

Gaps. And the finding of them.

Havi — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:25:36 +0000

Okay, this is probably my favorite thing about Dance of Shiva.

The openings.

The way they just show up.

What happened yesterday morning wasn’t a massive life-changing epiphany thing.

More of a mini-epiphany.

It was a gap. And I stepped into it. And all was good.

The situation:

A small thing, really.

In my Kitchen Table program we needed to add a new forum board.

But there was nowhere for it to go.

We’d gone over it in the Group Leader meeting but without getting anywhere. Opinions were divided. I didn’t really like any of the options.

Sat down to work on it and instantly felt annoyed.

I said, hey annoyance. I said, what’s going on in there?

My annoyance said:

This is stupid. It doesn’t make sense to put it here. It doesn’t make sense to put it there. There isn’t an opening. No matter what you do, it won’t really work.

An opening?

So I went to do Dance of Shiva.

Three minutes. Super fast. Super hard.

And then what happened:

I came back.

Had a glass of water.

Paced around the room.

Knew what needed to happen.

Found the opening.

It was obvious.

I had to set up a new section. And I knew exactly what to call it and where to put it and how to describe it and how it would work.

This thing that had been bugging me for half a day. Done.

So typical…

It’s one of the most exasperating things about Shiva Nata, actually.

Sometimes the realizations you have are so completely obvious the instant you realize them that you cannot imagine how you didn’t think of them before.

So it seems more like you’re the idiot than that Dance of Shiva did it’s brain-connecting thing again.

It’s like my friend who spent weeks agonizing about a problem she had. Then did Dance of Shiva for the first time and woke up in the morning with the answer.

But the answer was so clearly the right thing to do that she couldn’t remember what it was like to not have known it. And felt like an idiot for not coming up with it sooner.

Anyway.

It was such a shivanautical moment that I had to share it.

I couldn’t find the gap and then there was the gap.

This is essentially why I’m so excited about teaching Dance of Shiva to the roller derby girls. Because when you’re a jammer going through a pack (or a blocker trying to help your jammer through), finding the gap is the only thing that matters.

There’s always an opening. There’s always space.

Anyway, it was cool. I don’t know if it comes across in translation but the moment was beautiful.

It’s just a matter of your brain being willing to find it.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Oh, and some more epiphanies.

Havi — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:27:09 +0000

Because why not.

Okay. I’ve been doing lots of thinking lately about the interaction between Shiva Nata and everything I do in my business.

The obvious connections. And the more subtle ones.

When we were at the Destuckification Retreat and doing Dance of Shiva every day (sometimes twice!), the moments of bing were flying fast and furious.

And one of the things that came up was that our Shiva Nata practice was preparing our brains to go way deeper with the change-your-patterns material.

But also the actual content of the program was helping us be better equipped to contain and process all the crazy-cool stuff that the physical practice was giving us.

The first Shivanautical epiphany.

This wasn’t even mine.

In fact, it kind of drives me crazy that I hadn’t come up with this before.

So I was teaching about how Dance of Shiva is all about the relationship between deconstruction and rebuilding. Create and destroy. Take something apart and then build something new with the old components.

That’s why Andrey calls it the liberation of consciousness. Because you can take any pattern — physical, energy, emotional, mental, spiritual — and use the parts of it to bring in the new pattern.

And the new pattern heals the old pattern. Patterns rewrite patterns. It’s like homeopathy but bigger.

And then, of course, when the new pattern becomes automatic and unconscious … it’s time to bring in more new patterns to engage with.

Anyway.

Then Hiro pointed out that everything I teach is a parallel of the Dance of Shiva. Everything I teach breaks down into destuckification and biggification.

And what is destuckification if not deconstruction? And what is biggification if not new creation.

*slaps forehead*

The next Shivanautical epiphany.

Again, I was talking to Hiro.

And she was speaking beautifully eloquently (no big surprise there) about energy.

Lots of people talk about releasing energy. Releasing gunk and stucknesses in the system. Releasing things that no longer serve you. And then giving all that stuff back to the universe or to the earth or whatever.

Releasing things to be transformed into something else.

But she was describing this process in the coolest way ever. It was about giving back the thing that isn’t working … and then that thing being dissolved until the only thing that remains was the core essence of it.

And then that core essence infusing the world with its truth and beauty.

So it’s not letting things go. It’s letting their essence be free so it can transform everything it encounters.

It’s not destruction of the thing. It’s the deconstruction of the outer layers of the thing because at its heart is something beautiful and necessary.

And then the next one.

And of course when I did Dance of Shiva the next morning, what came up later in the day was that we’re constantly throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We have all these things we don’t like. Our monsters. The shoes that get thrown at us in the form of criticism. The difficult conversations. The avoidance and the iguanas.

And inside each of those things is something important that is completely hidden. Or completely distorted.

And that’s what the deconstruction of Shiva Nata is for. Releasing the essence. Transforming the whole.

Dude.

Again, it’s kind of hard to explain because epiphanies are stoopid. But it’s also kind of awesome.

Waiting to see what the next one will bring.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Epiphanies are stoopid.

Havi — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:21:37 +0000

Here’s the problem with epiphanies.

Those Shivanautical moments of bing and zing that show up and make you go oh.

They’re really hard to explain to anyone outside of your head.

Because a lot of the time they sound kind of obvious.

It’s kind of like big spiritual truths.

Right?

Like you have a serious moment and you realize that everything is made of the same stuff.

But no matter how you frame it ….

It’s like physics! The same components come together to become different shapes and forms. A tree is a tire is a doughnut. I am a tree and a tire and a doughnut!
It’s like kabbalah! Everything is made of light!
We are all one. We’re all the same, at the core of things. It’s just permutations!

Yeah. Your enormous life-changing understanding is just probably going to sound kind of ridiculous. At best.

More likely, it’s going to come across as something that everyone already knows. Or has heard. Or doesn’t seem like a big deal.

And the reason it’s a big deal to you is that you have had a deep, visceral understanding.

Your entire body knows it. Your consciousness knows it. Your cells know it. Your heart knows it.

You are in the process of internalizing something really huge. And it’s so huge that it can’t be explained without sounding like the biggest, most cheesy cliche ever.

Same deal with Shivanautical epiphanies.

The biggest, most surprising and wondrous ones are really hard to explain.

Sometimes this is because the actual information isn’t that much of a revelation: it’s the depth at which you get it that is the new thing.

And sometimes this is because once you have the new piece of information, it’s so completely obvious that you can’t really remember what your brain/life was like without it.

And sometimes this is because the new way of perceiving things is so compelling and so deep that it doesn’t get words.

It happens.

The other day I woke up into a serious Dance of Shiva moment.

I knew it was a Dance of Shiva moment because everything made sense. And also because I was feeling kind of annoyed that I hadn’t spent my entire life acting on this thing I knew to be true.

But I couldn’t put it into words.

It was sort of like … “everything is good.”

Or:

Everything has good at its core. And I can break down any situation and take out the essence which is good, and use that essence to make the next thing happen.

And this is what needs to happen. And Dance of Shiva will help me do it because the purpose of the practice is to break things down into their essence and restructure itself. From the good into the good.

Couldn’t explain it beyond that. And to be honest, my thinky brain wanted to start finding all the intellectual holes in this.

And instead, I decided to just take the essence of it. And let it plant seeds for my day. I can find holes later. I’m good at that.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Shivanauts. They’re everywhere.

Havi — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:02:32 +0000

Lots of great Shiva Nata writing on the web lately.

I love how each one comes from a different — but equally unlikely — angle, and then just nails something that is so completely true.

Some stuff I thought you might like.

Off. Balance.

Casey wrote about being off-balance.

Sometimes when I’m doing the Dance of Shiva in the mirror, I feel like a fucked-up cheerleader. It’s hard to resist the temptation to snap into every position (three years of marching band in high school will do that to you). Most of the time when I start feeling really cheeky and flow-y, I throw myself off balance within moments.

My Stuck Is A Bear

Holly wrote about her stuck being a bear.

But this is important, important enough for me to haul my how-does-it-manage-to-be-both-flabby-AND-flat arse out of bed at this ungoddessly hour and risk the Wrath of Bob, so he’ll just have to put on his big kitty panties & deal with it.

All of that tension and a cacophony of tuning.

Eric wrote about the relationship between internal noise and internal information. And about pain, flailing, tension and listening.

One thing I learned from Tai Chi is that the best way to relax something that is chronically tense is to actually listen to what it is telling you.

All of that tension and a cacophony of tuning before the music begins.

Paper Fireworks.

Lots of great stuff at this paper fireworks tumblr blog that I am madly in love with.

Like this one.

And – when Havi says get lost she means get completely lost, I think, because I was floating on a log in the ocean a million miles from shore with how wrong I was doing it and had the best day afterwards.

She’s an anonymous brand new Shivanaut chronicling her thing and it’s awesome.

Show some support!

Group Blogging.

Yup. There’s a Shivanata Group Blog.

With so much goodness.

Like this piece from Elizabeth.

Anyway, after the practice, my About me page practically wrote itself into my journal. I have been trying to write this page for months and months – and here it just flowed out.

Even though I didn’t set an intention or anything. Hurrah!

It’ll probably be another many months before it gets posted, but hey, baby steps.

Oh, the epiphanies. They are many.

So.

As some of you know, I just came back from teaching a week-long Destuckification Retreat in California.

We did Shiva Nata every day.

Sometimes twice.

On the beach. To The Clash. With words and sounds and seriousness and silliness and transcendence.

And my mind is boggling at all the incredible things that came from practicing with this amazing group of (extremely brave and tolerant!) people.

So over the next week or so I hope to share with you some of the extremely weird and fantastic things I have realized, discovered, seen, re-seen, understood, processed or been given.

Because ohmygosh. Big big stuff.

Love to all the Shivanauts and the people who are just thinking about maybe eventually being Shivanauts and the people who are resting at a plateau or taking a break, and all my beloved Lurker Mice.

So good to be back. Kiss!

Some good things to read:

A Dance of Shiva mini-epiphany.

Havi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:13:14 +0000

Or a lil’ Piph, as Kimberlee suggested.

Oh yes.

Background?

So two days ago I had a tiny sparkle of a post-Shiva-Nata realization.

Definitely not an epiphany. A gasp of a something leading up to one.

So.

It occurred to me after my practice that what I’m focusing on (or trying to emphasize) in my life right now has two parts.

It’s about grounding and stability on the one hand, and flow and movement on the other.

And of course both are related, blah blah blah.

The connection part wasn’t the realization.

The realization was more that I want to focus on this in my home. And that I wanted to think about bringing grounding and stability into my sleeping area (hence the new mattress obsession).

And about bringing flow and movement into my workspace.

But all that is the background to the actual moment of bing that has been sparking all kinds of things today.

Excellent.

So then yesterday morning I was doing my morning ritual of visiting each corner in Hoppy House and connecting to the qualities I’m working on.

Because, you know, wackiness is a great way to start the day.

And I had a total Shiva Nata moment. A mini-epiphany of the best kind.

A quick surprising rearranging of the internal matrix.

Just the way we like it.

Okay. Here it is.

I was standing outside the door of my bedroom. The space that I want to bring more grounding and stability to.

And realized it was flanked by trees.

There is a tree on the mezuzah (you might have to wikipedia that one, sorry). And a tree is the central theme in the gorgeous painting I bought from Leah Piken Kolidas, which hangs on the other side of the door.

Right. The space I want to ground is surrounded by trees on both sides.

Also the room itself has lots of wood. And a brown floor. And all the other colors are first and second chakra colors. Hello, grounding.

Why no, I’m not done boggling at myself yet.

So I went into the office, thinking about what would have to happen to make that space more about flow and movement.

And then realized that it’s all about flow and movement.

In fact, I have four separate pictures of boats in there (only one is a pirate ship, interestingly enough). Plus the walls are … blue.

Like water. And symbolically it’s the fifth chakra which is all about inspiration and connection and communication and various flow-centric stuff like that.

Oh, and I have a painting by Sarah Lacy of a seascape.

My focus: on something that’s already there. Awesome.

I’ve been spending a lot of time and money and energy on new and better ways to negotiate my relationship with space.

To get better at feeling at home in my space.

Wonderful classes with Jen Hofmann and Lisa Baldwin. Picking up on smartnesses from Cairene MacDonald and Janet Bailey.

And all of these things are helping. It’s all about incremental change.

But while all this change has been infusing my life, my brain hadn’t caught up with it.

Hadn’t internalized just how much has actually shifted. Or just how much of what I was looking for was already present.

The conclusion-ey bit.

So yeah.

Obviously the “everything you need is already inside you” thing is a ~~coffee mug slogan~~ a known spiritual truth type of thing .

But it was pretty cool to trip over the reminder that it really is.

Because everything I needed was already there. In seed form.

My job isn’t to bring grounding in or to make flow happen. It’s just to notice what is and attune to the qualities that are already there.

It’s about moving from what I’d thought was the question:

“How do I bring more of these elements and qualities into my space and into my life?”

… to the real question:

“How do I notice and remember that my space already contains what I want and need from it?”

It’s about moving from the old thing of bringing something in to the new thing which is accessing something that’s already present.

Bonk bonk bonk.

Off to play with Captain Obvious. And to do another ten minutes of Shiva-ing it up. Because I can’t wait to find out what’s next.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Shivanautical realizations + epiphanies: take 3

Havi — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:20:50 +0000

Oh, odds and ends from my Dance of Shiva practice journal.

Or, more accurately (and embarrassingly), a bunch of post-it notes.

But yes. Things I realized this week after Shiva-ing it up here and there.

Because apparently now it’s a tradition.

More Shivapiphanies. Oh boy! (or gee whiz, if you’re my nephew-in-law.)

Oooh. Interesting observation that completely surprised me.

These were mostly work-related this week.

About why I have trouble taking time off.

About why I get sucked into things that I don’t want to get sucked into.

Got some more information on something that scares me. Useful.

Posts aplenty!

Shivanautically relevant ones, that is.

A useful piece in Psychology Today on the neuroscience of mindfulness.

“When you focus your attention on incoming data, such as the feeling of the water on your hands while you wash up, it reduces activation of the narrative circuitry.

This explains why, for example, if your narrative circuitry is going crazy worrying about an upcoming stressful event, it helps to take a deep breath and focus on the present moment. All your senses ‘come alive’ at that moment.”

The trouble, of course, as we all know from meditation and yoga is that — while it’s awesome when we can focus on the present moment — sometimes it’s ridiculously hard to just do it.

That’s what’s so genius about Shiva Nata. It neatly circumvents the thinking parts and gets you into that quiet here I am headspace.

So being all present moment-ey is just something that happens, instead of something you have to remember to make happen.

And then Pearl started a blog called Shiva Nata Callings & Pearl is NOT having a mid-life crisis. You should read it.

I’m really looking forward to following her practice. Brilliant!

Other people’s cool stuff.

Some super interesting results from some of the people who got to do Shiva Nata with me at the Sacramento Biggification workshop last week.

One of the themes we were working with was finding out what our internal resistance has to say.

I’m just going to put some of it out here because it’s so beautiful. And so familiar.

When the stuck stops talking and starts watching.

“One of the things I noticed about my resistance is that in the beginning of the day, it was muttering ‘hippie shit’ into my ear and in the early afternoon, it was “worried” about the car.

But halfway though the Shiva Nata session, it shut up entirely and was just watching me to see what I was doing.

It went from a child having a tantrum to a curious child learning.”

Uh huh. I know that moment too.

Or how about this …

When you find out what the resistance is really afraid of.

“It seems like most of the time, my loudest resistance or critic is about not being good enough — what if people don’t like my thing, what if I have nothing to offer, blah, blah, blah.

So it kind of feels like standard old news.

But after Shiva Nata I also became really aware of the part of my resistance that’s really scared of being too good… that if I’m too good at something (or maybe too successful or whatever), then people won’t like me and it looks like a very lonely place.

This other quieter part felt more emotionally charged, much older and sadder.

Discovering where your resistance lives and what it needs.

“I learned that my resistance needs to feel safe, and to feel like safety is as important to me as it is to it – and that maybe it would do well with a job, a way to protect me that is acceptable to the both of us.

Not sure what that is though.

Also discovered that it lives in a dark place in the back of my head behind logic and intuition – but it wants light and openness so it can dissolve, because it’s not really happy in there. This makes me happy somehow.”

Discovering why your resistance is unhappy.

“My resistance was craving safety, too!

I also discovered that it was living in a smelly hovel with no space.

And possibly not much to eat. No wonder it was pissed off.

Now wondering if I can work towards creating a safer, more comfortable environment for my resistance and where to start!”

Chills.

That’s mostly it.

In the land of the Shivanauts, that is.

Nu?

If you have Shivanautical realizations and epiphanies of your own to share (even tiny ones), you can totally leave them in the comments.

Or — if they’re super personal and you’d like me to post them without using your name — send them to Marissa with first name only.

Unless you have a super-unusual first name like me and then just make one up.

Talk soon!