Shiva Nata: the Dance of ShivaTruth elixir, nude dreams, realizations, just being.
Back in July, before I had ever met the wonderful Briana of Blisscovery, I got a letter from her and thought she was awesome.
Because the letter was … pretty remarkable. So in my mind Briana was already a Pretty Remarkable Person.
Then she came to my Biggification Day in Sacramento and ohmygosh I was right.
Short version? We like Briana. A lot.
And I wanted to share (with permission, obviously) some of her words because I thought it was big. And useful. And extremely interesting.
Well, I thought that you guys might find it inspiring. Because I did.
Here it is.
The Letter by which I was introduced to Briana (and let the record show that I did not find her even slightly crazy).
Oh, Havi, my dear,
No, we’ve never met, but I just have to address you like that because of the experience I’m having.
Wow. Here’s the thing:
I got my Dance of Shiva dvd in the mail yesterday at about 5 p.m. — and I’m writing you less than a day later, and hoping that doesn’t earn me lunatic status.
I am blown away & completely overwhelmed. In an absolutely lovely, delighted way.
I had been reading through the reports since I ordered the Starter Kit last Wednesday, trying to learn all I could and reviewing the arm movements. When I got the DVD yesterday, I watched the intro and then went through the first five-ish short segments in level one.
Yesterday had been a pretty huge day for me before that.
Without giving you a ton of background, I’ll just say that I launched a website and blog and shared it with a few actual real live people. Aaack!
So I was feeling very self-conscious and vulnerable. And if I’m honest, I might have felt a squidge worse about all of it after Dance of Shiva. So I made some soup, parked myself on the couch with a cozy blanket and a good book, and tried to just BE.
The dreams.
Then last night I had what seemed like hours of very vivid dreams. And I remembered all of them which is very unusual for me.
And I know that hearing a detailed play by play of someone else’s dreams can have a pretty soporific effect on people, so I will spare you all the boring details.
The important thing is that the dreams had big, whack-me-over-the-head, obvious metaphors.
But of course you have to hear about this.
Like, first, there was one where I was getting on a white, antique, double-decker bus. And for reasons probably only clear to me, climbing the stairs to the second level looked a little like, um, ascending into heaven.
And second, I was taking a shower, outside on some kind of main street, completely naked. And I seemed altogether much too comfortable with this. Like, shampoo commercial comfortable.
And for the finale, I was carrying around a ton of baggage (think roller suitcase, carry-on, big tupperware thingy, and purse). Carrying this stuff through places it shouldn’t and couldn’t be carried – up and down stairs, through deep sand, down streets and through neighborhoods.
And finally I got really tired of the burden, and just put it down. And yes, this worried me a little. But when I came back later, it was right where I left it, and I knew I could pick it back up if I really wanted to.
Is there a more embarrassingly obvious metaphor for my own stuff than heavy, cumbersome, baggage?
And then it happened.
This morning, I did about 10 minutes of Dance of Shiva and then meditated.
Then I took my dog for a walk and it felt like the spigot had opened and some truth elixir was pouring out.
Really, I feel like nuggets of bing! are raining down from the sky, and I am holding out a blanket and trying to catch as many as I can.
I’m not really looking for you to tell me I’m normal, I think this decidedly proves I most certainly am not.
But maybe it would be nice to be reassured that I’m not stark raving bonkers.
One last thing…I think I may want all of these synchronicities to be related to Dance of Shiva. Because I want it to work, I want to have hot-buttered epiphanies. But in the past I would have resisted that about myself and now it feels amazing to just own it, to know that it’s true for me – I want things to work, I want enlightenment, and that’s who I am right now.
Ever freaked out and grateful, and just thanking you,
Briana
And here we are now.
I can say – this is Havi writing now, yes? — with 100% certainty that no, this doesn’t sound even slightly not-normal.
Dance of Shiva does all sorts of weird stuff. Odd, obvious dreams being extremely normal (though if you practice in the morning instead of the evening, they shouldn’t be too crazy).
And the spigot of truth elixir? I get that whenever I seriously challenge myself to do a part of the dance that absolutely cannot be done. At least by me. Yet. Now.
So no. Not stark raving bonkers.
And yes, these understandings probably are all related to Dance of Shiva.
Maybe some more directly and some more indirectly, but hey, you’re messing with the brain. In a good way. In a systematic way.
Which means that your everything you perceive is being filtered through this new internal structural knowledge of how things are connected to each other.
It’s not as weird as it sounds. It’s just what happens when you introduce systems of patterns into a doo-hickey (okay, the brain) that likes trying to figure out patterns.
Anyway, I thought this was awesome.
And so much so that I asked Briana if we could share it with you. Especially now that she’s been Shiva-ing it up for half a year already.
Here’s what she said :
Sure! Yay for wackiness!
I don’t feel super vulnerable about it, which is a little weird considering the naked part, but who hasn’t had a public nudity dream, right?
Mostly, just thank you. Thank you, thank you for introducing me to Dance of Shiva. Because I wouldn’t have jumped on board for wacky brain training advocated by just anybody. :) And the practice has become such a treasured part of my life so quickly and smoothly.
Right. I forgot about the naked dream part.
So yes. Now I have to share one of my own.
In my post-Shiva-Nata naked dream, I am flying over mountains.
And I have this huge cloak. But wearing it gets in the way of the flying. It slows me down.
So I toss it.
And I also had this experience in reality. Except I wasn’t flying. And there weren’t any mountains. It’s complicated.
There.
Hope you love this as much as I did.
Thanks Briana for letting me turn her fabulous letter into a guest post!
And thanks Shiva Nata for being weird and wonderful and full of miraculous, unexpected strangeness.
Twitter: elizabethhalt
I think Briana is pretty remarkable too. Love that letter.
Hmmmm .. I have not had a naked dream that I remember. However, I have been practicing every other day for the past week – and always in the evenings – and had no idea why I was having all these crazy dreams. Now I know ..
Now that I think about it, I have been having realizations all week .. and i’ve been playing with Level 2 at fast speed, which I pretty much can’t do, but it’s rather fun to flail around anyway. Yet I haven’t been thinking that I’m getting epiphanies. Maybe I just need a different word. When I think epiphany .. I think grand, glorious, voice from the sky that comes while I’m doing the thing that causes the epiphanies. Ok .. which sometimes happens (well, not the voice from the sky – that would really be crazy). But mostly what happens – like this week – is that I’ll be doing something random and think, “Oh, that’s why I do that.” And that does happen regularly when I’m practicing. And those are epiphanies too .. I just don’t always realize it.
elizabeth´s last blog ..i am a genius
Twitter: copylicious
Briana makes this whole process sound so sexy. Sorry, not referring to the nude dreams. Although I’m sure they’re great. Reading this makes me wish I could just do Dance of Shiva all day and stock up on truth elixirs. But for now the 10 minutes will do. I’ve found what started as epiphany-hunting has slowly turned into quality-receiving. It’s weird, I guess it just helps us give ourselves what we need most at the time.
Twitter: amysnotdeadyet
This is so awesome, it makes me really long for a Dust Off the DVD class so I can ask a few things that I hope will help get my own practice on track.
Amy Crook´s last blog ..Contest!
Twitter: pearlmattenson
Oh Briana you are wonderful.
Youcaptured it. Totally. Thank you and thanks to Havi for bringing your voice to us. Also I am with Elisabeth on “epiphanies”.
Still hoping to get myself a hot-buttered one. (if it is crunchy on the outside and soft inside it would be perfect!)
Oh! This is so lovely. I particularly love the ‘I feel like nuggets of bing! are raining down from the sky, and I am holding out a blanket and trying to catch as many as I can.’ How beautiful! I relate to the crazy dreams and realisations and I’ve not even tried shiva nata. Yet :)
Kerry Rowett´s last blog ..Duality. Synchronicity. And Spotlights.
Elizabeth, exactly! Why do I always want my epiphanies to arrive on flaming horses and dismiss the hugeness of suddenly noticing my pattern in the moment and avoiding it? Because that latter? That’s kind of blowing my mind this week.
Of course, I’m still hitting myself in the head doing fast arms on level 1, so maybe the flaming horses come later.
Julie´s last blog ..Theme of 2010: Wealth
Twitter: victoriashmoria
Wow. I’m 100x more in love with Briana now than I was before reading this. You know, in a totally non-creepy way.
Victoria Brouhard´s last blog ..Quitting the Man: 63 Days Since Freedom
Twitter: brianaaldrich
Hi Guys! Oh wow, waving and laughing. And blushing, yeah. Sexy? OMG, hahahaha. That’s a good one
I love you guys and, yes, I love me some hot-buttered epiphanies. Even if we call them something else. (Because Elizabeth, you are so darn insightful and wise and brimming to the rim with *them*.) So yeah, I could become quite the Shiva Nata evangelist.
And Havi, so nice to not be alone up there in the naked dreaminess of it all.
Briana´s last blog ..Idea! Connection reflection. And bunnies.
Twitter: artistkatana
Oh man.
I’ve had the starter kit for months and months. and I turned on the DVD and got confused by the menu, and turned it off.
tomorrow i am going to get up in the morning to do it.
and here it is on the internet and so now I HAVE to do it.
Well, not HAVE to, but … I will.
Twitter: lucyviret
Ah, Briana, you are fabulous. What a cool letter!
I just spent about half an hour setting up my room so I can do it (in a very quick and dirty kind of way, ahem) and hopefully I’ll do it in the morning.
We’ll see, I guess – wish me luck!
(I have been avoiding stuff like crazy.)
Lucy Viret´s last blog ..*snap!*
Totally love your writing, Briana.
And I have public-naked dreams all the time. All. The time.
In fact, it’s one of the ways I know I’m dreaming.
That, along with being able to fly.
In fact, that’s how I test to see if I’m dreaming – I run and jump and see if I can fly. If I can, I’m dreaming.
If I’m not, well, I have a rich inner life, apparently.
And a low embarrassment threshold.
This is private, right?
Andrew Lightheart @alightheart´s last blog ..And so it begins…
Twitter: williehewes
Yay for Katana and Lucy. Do check back to let us know how it went, even if you didn’t practice after all. You know we’ll be cool about it.
;)
Since I relaxed about the epiphany thing and just started to focus on *learning how to do the thing* and *getting it right, dammit* the mental side effects have started to come back. Maybe because I’m practicing more regularly again, or because I’m practicing in a different way, I don’t know. But focussing on getting it right (dammit) is getting great results. Seeing connections, being a creative genius, getting those “oh, I see” moments, that at the same time feel really obvious. If those are the epiphanies promised, yeah, I totally get those.
It’s ironic, because I know that if I ever do get it right (dammit) I’ll be doing it wrong. But that’s OK, I’ll just move up another level. It’s very comforting to know that Shiva Nata is like Pacman in that respect: there’s always another level to move up to. Nice.
Willie Hewes´s last blog ..New Year’s Good Intentions
Twitter: artistkatana
I did it!
it was fun. I did it with my boyfriend Garfield, and was nervous about not knowing what I was getting him into except for I wanted to do it.
Turns out he said, that many of the basic positions are similar to wing-chun (he practices this martial art) so he immediately tried to put together the sets of double-one. Is that level two?
Anyways, I had a bit of a challenge but it was really great. I’m so pleased he’s catching on a quicker than me; it’s great to have someone to work with.
Yay!
Twitter: williehewes
Yay Katana! Well done! In level 2 one arm does the horizontal positions, and the other the vertical ones.
It’s cool that the positions are similar to wing-chun. Even knowing nothing about that martial art though, I’d be willing to bet it doesn’t get as complicated as Shiva Nata.
Also because it’d be pretty hard to use Shiva Nata to beat anyone up. Confuse the heck out of them, yes, but beating up is pretty much out, I reckon.
Willie Hewes´s last blog ..New Year’s Good Intentions
Twitter: artistkatana
Haha, nope, not as complicated as Shiva Nata: nobody uses wing-chun in martial arts movies (except for exactly three) because it is SO SIMPLE.
Yeah that must mean he’s level two! Neat. :D
This is exciting.
[...] about dreams, the more I’m intrigued by their transformative and healing nature. Also, any dreams sparked by my Dance of Shiva practice are unequivocally [...]
I’ve very new to Shiva Nata, just practicing for a couple of weeks. I, like elizabeth above, think of epiphanies as big grand lightning bolts, which I haven’t been getting, so I was starting to wonder if it was even working.
The main change I’d noticed, though, were my dreams. I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, but most of the time they’re variations on the same few themes (tornados, finding abandoned babies or being forced to care for someone else’s baby, driving from the back seat, taking tests, having no shoes in a place where one would need shoes, losing teeth). Recently, though, I’ve had very surreal dreams involving elements of my real life, sometimes with people I haven’t thought about in a long time.
I found this post because I searched the site to see if these dreams might be caused by doing Shiva Nata. I’m glad to see that they probably are. Perhaps I should get a dream journal to capture some of this. Also, I’ve mostly been practicing in the morning or early afternoon. I think I might try it in the evening, just to see if it intensifies the effect.
Thank you, Havi for creating the Starter Kit and hosting this blog! I’m really enjoying Shiva Nata.