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:

• Ask a Shivanaut: setting intentions
• Shiva Nata: odd and unexpected side effects
• Dance of Shiva on the brain

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:

• Shiva Nata: false gods?
• Ask a Shivanaut: Dance of Shiva before or after a yoga practice?
• Shivanautical realizations + epiphanies: take 2

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:

• Shiva Nata teacher training!
• Punk Rock Shivanauttery: answering a bunch of questions!
• Oh, and some more epiphanies.

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:

• North Carolina workshop – DIY travel arrangements
• Help me out? Title for the Shivanaut Manual?
• Dance of Shiva + Roller Derby! Whoo!

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:

• What kind of epiphanies can I expect?
• Needles in haystacks. More patterns.
• The Levy Flight. Patterns. Again.

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!

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

• Shiva Nata teacher training!
• Punk Rock Shivanauttery: answering a bunch of questions!
• Oh, and some more epiphanies.

Or, more accurately, a bunch of post-it notes.

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

Oooh. Interesting observation that completely surprised me.

So. My fear of conflict is … not the fear of conflict itself.

Which is weird.

I thought (and I have always thought this) that my fear is of other people being angry with me or saying harsh things.

But my fear is actually of myself — that I will blow my top. That I will say the really mean things that only live in my head. In the heat of anger, I will tell someone that I think they’re a fraud or a jerk or a horrible excuse for a human being.

And that will make me co-conspirator in a world of cruelty.

When the people I’m avoiding confronting are awake in the middle of the night, their agonizing self-doubt will be reinforced by the opinion I couldn’t keep to myself because I got mad and started saying what I think. Ugh.

This is a relief to know, because I’ve spent my whole life trying to get over the thing that makes me avoid conflict.

But it’s really about having clean, clear ways (hi, NVC) to express myself. Because the thing that scares me is not the thing that scares me.

The thing that scares me is internal, not external. Which means I can work with it. Phew.

Found a pattern. Moved the pattern.

I have serious workaholism issues, yes.

And it’s no big secret that a huge part of that is fear of depression. That if I stop working myself to the bone, it will be agony to get out of bed, and I’ll spend the whole day just trying to get my act together to the point where I can do laundry and come up with something to eat.

That’s the stuff I’ve been working on in various forms for however many years.

Boom. Five minutes of Shiva Nata today and I realized that that each of those roles (the workaholic and the depressive not-able-to-do-things person) are really the two life roles that were consistently modeled for me while I was growing up.

It’s the kind of thing you’d come up with in therapy, over the course of a few months. And it was just there. Right in front of me. Completely obvious.

Along with the reassuring piece of information that I don’t have to live the lives of other people just because that’s what I got from watching them.

I don’t have to work myself to death.

And I don’t have to fear the not-doing, because my [insert non-cheesy word for "path" here] is different than theirs. Sigh of relief.

That’s mostly it.

There were a few other things about movement.

And I got a couple of completely genius business ideas.

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. I’m off to sunny Sacramento tomorrow — will be teaching Shiva Nata all weekend there.

p.s. my big Destuckification Retreat in January (where we’ll be doing Dance of Shiva every single day for a week, along with Old Turkish Lady Yoga) is more than half full.

If you haven’t applied, do it!

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

• Shivanautical realizations + epiphanies: take 2
• What kind of epiphanies can I expect?
• Ask A Shivanaut: what’s with the epiphanies?

Am I still one of your Right People if I don’t like Shiva Nata?

My response:

Oh, bless your heart. Of course, sweetpea.

No one likes Shiva Nata. Well, that’s not true. Lots of people do. I have no idea what’s wrong with them though.*

* It’s probably the students who have done it with me in person when we get all silly. I’ll bet they like it. Ridiculous.

But really? Not liking it? So completely normal.

Here’s why.

In no particular order.

1. Dance of Shiva brings a ton of awareness to patterns in your life that you didn’t necessarily want to know about.
2. It’s hard.
3. There is no room for perfectionism: you’re going to be bad at it.
4. You’re always supposed to be making it harder — you never get to enjoy being good at it.
5. If you’re doing it right, you’re doing it wrong.
6. Coordination is annoying because most of us don’t have any (not that we need to in order to be Shivanauts).
7. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

Fine. It’s not likable!

But then … why would you do it? Why would you keep doing it anyway when you don’t like it?

I wrote that post a couple weeks ago.

But if you don’t like Shiva Nata, I get it. Most of the time I don’t like it either. You have full permission to not like.

You can totally not like it and still be one of my Right People.

You can not like it and keep on not liking it.

We’re still going to keep doing it, though. We’ll keep doing it and we’ll keep finding ways to deconstruct the challenge, so that the emphasis is less on the hard and more on what we’re learning.

And sometimes we’ll scream and cry and throw things.

That counts too.

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

• Why would you possibly want to do this?
• Dance of Shiva + Roller Derby! Whoo!
• It only took a year

And I have to admit: perfectly legitimate question.

Why would you want to do something that is a. not easy, b. impossible to finish, and c. supposed to be challenging you to the point that you’re constantly doing it wrong?

So usually when someone asks me this, I have to give them a hug. It’s harder to do that on a blog. So assume that we’ve done that part already.

After the hug, I have three things to say about this. They’re important. Very, very important.

Thing 1: You might surprise yourself by having fun.

Sure, I have been known to say that it’s not fun.

But that’s my experience. And my particularly twisted sense of humor.

Don’t let me dictate or define your experience for you. It’s your experience.

Some people have fun with it. Some people have lots of fun with it. Weird as that is, it happens. :)

That’s fantastic. And you might be one of them.

Of course you might also be more like me — someone who has to use Dance of Shiva to disentangle from some of her perfectionist stuff before she can loosen up and let herself “intentionally get things wrong”.

But either way? It’s your dance. It’s your practice. It’s your experience.

Take whatever you need from it.

And keep in mind that lots and lots of my students enjoy the hell out of it. People in my classes are constantly cracking themselves and each other up in the hysterical fabulousness of being ridiculously, horribly bad at something.

Thing 2: It’s the eye of the storm.

Dance of Shiva is about chaos and it’s about order.

And about the relationship between them.

You find the hidden structures that live in the chaos.

You access the freedom that hides inside of patterns.

You tear down worlds and build new ones.

So yes — all of that can be pretty scary. And intimidating. And I get why people would say, why would I ever want to do something that’s so completely difficult?

That’s why the remembering the “eye of the storm” is important.

When you do Dance of Shiva*, it does create a hurricane effect.

Your job is to ground yourself and stay in the eye of that storm.

Right in the center of it. Chaos and deconstruction all around you, but where you are is calm, steady and centered.

You’re observing the patterns move and change. You’re feeling the movement even when you’re in stillness. Maybe you’re also noticing your stuff come up about wanting to get it right.

And at the same time, you are marvelously insulated from the hurricane.

You’re in the eye of the storm.

When you let yourself experience the dance, it’s not about the chaos anymore. It’s about you finding the peace inside the chaos.

*Whenever I say stuff like “when you do Dance of Shiva”, I am implying (and assuming) that you are doing it fabulously, gloriously *wrong* and intentionally challenging yourself.

Occasionally people say “I was doing Dance of Shiva and I wasn’t getting effects like that” — what that means is that they were practicing the movements without actually challenging their patterns.

Thing 3: It’s worth it.

Even if you do end up kind of hating it? The results are so totally worth it.

For me — someone who really, really likes doing things well — it’s not always the most enjoyable thing to undo that pattern and really screw up.

But because I know from experience that the best results come when you’re screwing up in the worst way possible, I keep at it.

Everything that is great about my life right now is related to my Shiva Nata practice. Every realization. Every piece of stuck that I’ve taken apart. All the things I know that make people say ohmygod you’re so … wise. And even my duck.

It comes from Shiva Nata and my relationship with Shiva Nata.

I know that’s a really intense (and maybe even kind of crazy) thing to say. But I stand by it.

And I know from watching my students and reading about what they’re doing now, that people who keep challenging themselves — out of love, not out of self-abuse — go through an extraordinary learning process and really grow into themselves.

So yes. You might learn some stuff about yourself that isn’t fun.

But you also learn about your patterns of judging yourself for not being someone else. And you learn about kindness. And you learn about what it means to have a relationship with yourself that is based on love.

For me, definitely worth it.

So.

Food for thought. Stuff to think about.

And let’s keep coming up with ways to access more of the joy and love in this practice … so that the part about how it has to be hard can be a little less intimidating.

Because yeah, it is sometimes.

Internet hugs all around!
Havi

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

• Needles in haystacks. More patterns.
• The Levy Flight. Patterns. Again.
• What if you don’t like it?

And it was awesome.

Epiphanies like mad!

Also — among other things — I completely revised the Shiva Nata Manual.

Which means … I rewrote a couple of sections. I tossed a couple of sections. Had a messy, messy break-up with the Table of Contents. Made sweet, sweet love to some subheadings.

You know. Stuff like that.

But where I’m getting stuckified is the title.

Here’s where I’m at so far:

Hot Buttered Epiphanies:

The Shivanaut’s Manual to Wacky Brain _______________.

Help?*

*Is there a word that goes in the blank? Am I even in the right direction? Is there a better title I’m not thinking of? Do I need to devote my practice for the next few days to finding a perfect simple solution? Brainstorm and namestorm with me, please!

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• Dance of Shiva: report from Taos.
• Dance of Shiva on the brain
• Dance of Shiva, neuroplasticity and the brain.