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

Report from the front.

So Selma and I taught some Shiva Nata twice this week.

Once at the fabulous Sacramento Biggification Day and once at the yoga teacher training (they’re the ones who flew me out to teach non-icky business concepts to the new yoga teachers).

Things we noticed:

• It’s really fun teaching people who have zero expectations. The yoga teachers had, for the most part, no idea I was going to throw this at them. They just played. They were awesome. It was beautiful.
• Actually, teaching is fun. Period.
• Shiva Nata is soooooo different with music. I played wildly inappropriate things with my biggification mice, and more traditional stuff with the yoga people. But either way, having music changes the experience completely.
• Teaching without a stage (or some kind of raised platform) is ridiculous. I generally remember that but it totally didn’t happen this time.

Found a pattern. Moved the pattern.

This week I was dealing with all these (annoying) systems issues in my business.

Like, certain things happening that I hadn’t prepared for, and then not knowing how to respond.

Then I remembered that all that structural thinking stuff hurts my brain too much if I don’t do my own shivanautical tangling-detangling stuff first.

So my big plan had been to do ten minutes or so of Dance of Shiva on that particular problem yesterday when I got back from California.

But guess what?

It got solved while I was teaching. I’m not sure what happened, but by the time class ended Sunday, I knew exactly how to fix the stuck.

Nice.

Other people’s cool stuff.

There’s all kinds of amazing things in last week’s comments.

Like Bess and her sad hedgehog.

… the hedgehog told me it didn’t want to be smart anymore because being smart keeps people away and it’s lonely – like playing alone at recess.

I got chills.

That’s mostly it.

I’m still processing some other stuff, but it’s not even slightly coherent, so maybe I’ll save some of it for next time.

Lots of ideas buzzing around and I’m just letting them settle. Yay. Settling. With, not for.

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.

p.s. Teaching Shiva Nata to the Roller Derby girls this weekend. Will report!

p.p.s. Beautiful post from Elizabeth about how doing Shiva Nata helped her see energy. For the second time ever. Very cool.

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

• Shivanautical realizations + epiphanies: take 1
• What kind of epiphanies can I expect?
• Shiva Nata teacher training!

Last year my friend Andreas and I co-taught a series of workshops that combined Dance of Shiva and painting/drawing to …

… well, to unleash mad creativity, destuckify blocks and have big crazy beautiful understandings.

We used the space at SPOLZ, which is this neat collective studio space for artists. (And yes, we’re doing it again in the next few weeks if you can make it.)

Some of the people who came were artists, art-ey people, or people who don’t really self-define that way but really love engaging in creative things. And some weren’t.

So yeah. It was an incredible experience. But get this:

One of the artists from SPOLZ has been doing Shiva Nata every day for five minutes since last year’s workshop in July 2008.

And she recently showed Andreas a series of paintings she had done and asked him (he teaches design at the Art Academy in Berlin) which ones he thought were the “good ones”.

These would be the ones to star in an upcoming show.

He sat with them for a while and then made his choices.

She looked at him and burst out laughing.

Actually, she was completely astonished.

Because?

Yes, okay, because those were the ones she thought were best too. But that’s not the exciting part.

Here’s the exciting part.

All the paintings he had chosen were the ones she had painted directly after her Shiva Nata practice.

And the ones that he had left out were the ones she had done without doing Shiva Nata first.

He could see the difference. Or feel the difference. It was obvious.

I had to know.

What was different?

What made the post-Shiva-Nata paintings different from the this-is-me-doing-my-painting paintings?

After carefully analyzing the winners, here are some of the qualities Andreas and this woman found:

Freedom. Intuition. Clarity. Knowing.

And a deep internal creativity where you aren’t taking into account anyone else’s stuff. Where you aren’t involved with anyone else’s interaction with the work.

I have more to say about this.

As you might imagine.

But I’m not going to. At least, not for now.

I want to leave you with this image of my artist friend, buzzing into stillness, going straight from shavasana into the studio, fearlessly mixing colors. And letting her art happen.

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

• The colors of Dance of Shiva. With blobs and splotches.
• Ask a Shivanaut: setting intentions
• And more Shiva Nata classes in Berlin!

Remember Eileen from Soul Sleuthing and her fabulous guest post about science?

Yay.
– Havi

Science, but also magic.

Okay, now that I have fed science to the logical side of my brain, let’s hope it stays out of the way so I can let my airy-fairy side narrate this part…

The truth is Shiva Nata is magic.

Here’s an example. A hard, complicated, real-life example.

For a large portion of my adult life I engaged in what you might call unhealthy relationship patterns.

To be blunt, I would cheat on whatever relationship I was in. I hurt myself and I hurt others around me, yet I felt like I couldn’t stop myself. It sucked.

By last fall I hadn’t actually engaged in this behavior in over six years.

But I still felt as if I had to be constantly on guard. Like I had to use all of my willpower to avoid doing it again. I still thought of myself as the type of person who does this. (By the way, if you ever want to feel really bad about yourself it’s helpful to completely identify with behavior you hate.)

And then the shift.

One day after lots of ungraceful flailing with the Dance of Shiva, I laid down in my savasana-meditation.

Two memories immediately flashed into my brain:

Age 32: My mom has come to visit me in the town where I live.

We walk to my favorite independent coffee shop, but when we get there we see my dad’s car in the parking lot. He has dropped by to see if I’m there, not knowing that my mom is in town.

My mom and I instead go across the street to Starbucks in order to avoid a confrontation.

Age 6: I am sitting in my little sister’s bedroom with my mom and my sister.

My parents are getting divorced and my dad has returned to the house to move his stuff out. My dad is downstairs with my uncle.

I would like to go downstairs to see my dad, but I understand that we’re hiding-out upstairs in order to avoid a confrontation.

What these memories have in common…

Well, avoiding conflict between my parents for one.

But on an emotional level there is a lot more. A yearning for love from two sources.

A feeling of guilt for identifying with one side or the other. A sense that wanting and receiving love from one is a betrayal of the other. A feeling of shame about these desires.

How might an adult woman re-create this pattern over and over in her life?
Oh. Riiiight.

Healing.

I’m not one who can productively talk myself through super-deep stuff so I packed all this up and brought it to my therapist.

The weird (and wonderful) thing about true healing, from clean pain, is that it’s not super-complicated. I went to a safe environment and felt it all very deeply, with someone who could guide me through what I was feeling and say the appropriate things.

It hurt a lot, but it ended.

The calculation.

Total time spent healing: approximately 25 minutes.
Total time spent avoiding healing: 28 years.

This all seems pretty pat and obvious to me now that I can tie it up in this little package like so, but it’s something that I spent years hating myself for.

Shiva Nata literally scrambled my brain and allowed me to make these deep and hidden connections.

In fact, I truly believe this healing process would have taken way longer if I had not been working with Dance of Shiva (if it would have happened at all, which I kind of doubt).

This was within one month of practicing rather spottily. These days I’m a little more regular with my practice because I enjoy the benefits so much. It’s like getting a massage for my brain. But I still only practice ten minutes a day or less.

So yes, magic. (Plus science! interjects my rational brain…)

Thanks, Eileen for this brave, powerful story.

And for such a perfect application of some of the kinds of epiphanies and realizations that can emerge from the practice in a very spontaneous way. Love it.

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

• Dance of Shiva on the brain
• Shivanautical realizations + epiphanies: take 1
• Help me out? Title for the Shivanaut Manual?

Man, you just have to read this.
– Havi

Transformation, skeletons and the most beautiful story.

Dear Havi (and Selma),

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for creating the Dance of Shiva Starter Kit. I bought the kit last Saturday without really knowing what I was doing or why.

But I loved that it was endorsed by a duck, and I had a feeling inside me that said, “You need to own this.”

So I read the worksheets, puzzled my way through the arm movements, and started keeping a daily journal. I got confused, felt lost, and loved the warm fuzzy brain feeling that came afterwards. Six days later, I had the most amazing experience.

For the first time in twenty six years, I can stand on my own two feet, and it doesn’t feel wrong.

I have always hunched. It’s a caved chest gangly neck look my mother, grandfather, and cousins share. I never thought much of it. It was simply the way I stood, and I didn’t know how to stand any differently.

Last Thursday I did my morning Dance of Shiva. During shavasana, I saw this image of a skeleton cringing as if from a blow.

It was the pattern of that familial hunch, and I knew I didn’t have to do it any more.

I stood up.

I didn’t hunch.

My head balanced on my spine. My spine balanced on my hips. My hips balanced on my legs. My legs balanced on my feet. It was the first time in my life I’ve been able to stand without it feeling wrong, or awkward, or graceless.

I can look people in the eye, because my gaze no longer follows a hunched spine to their feet. It’s one of the most profound experiences I have ever had.

So thank you for bring Dance of Shiva to me. It’s an amazing, crazy, scary, awesome treasure, and I’m loving every minute of it.

Namaste,
Frank Mitchell

Am I right or am I right?

Beautiful.

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

• An amazing Shiva Nata story.
• The Baseline Challenges.
• Excitements! The Shiva Nata app is now live!