Watermelon static

This is a guest post from Elle.

And full of some really Useful Insights that I know you will get a kick out of. Yay!
Havi + Selma

Watermelon static

I started my Shiva Nata practice while the DVD was still in the mail, reading the ebook and perusing the Shiva Nata and Fluent Self blogs.

I was fascinated with the ideas, the powerful metaphors and the completely radical concepts of being friendly with myself, taking care of myself, and talking to my stuff.

Previously I hadn’t really realized that it was legal to get everything done without depriving myself of sleep, beating myself up, or at the very least pretending that I knew everything.

But I digress…

When I started my Shiva Nata practice, it was based on pictures of what arm positions looked like, how they should feel, and a vague idea of what a sequence would look or feel like.

And, just as Havi mentioned several times, Dance of Shiva works even (especially?) in that form — when you just put faith into the weird, and try something that, to an outside observer, might not make a great deal of sense.

The very first time I did my morning “flail my arms around practice”, I used sample pattern questions from the Fluent Self blog:

• What does my pattern (my problem, my block) look like?


• What does my pattern need from me?


• What do I need right now?


• What if I had permission just to do everything wrong


• What’s missing?

After shavasana, I sat down with my laptop and the answers just typed themselves up.

The most interesting part, for me, was the shape and look of my pattern — because it did not have a shape and it barely had any color.

In fact, it was more like a noise — something like “television static” — when a TV has no reception and there is “white snow” on the screen and the buzzing noise. (To me, waking up to this noise after accidentally falling asleep in front of a TV is a very unpleasant sensation, conveying a lot of loneliness and low safety).

It was fairly easy to translate this “static noise” pattern as avoidance, tuning out, fighting or running away from things that I did not want to experience.

But what to do about this pattern?

Or, more accurately, what did it want? It was the question that I never asked myself- in the many years that I’ve had the pattern, it never really occurred to me to listen to it. Instead, I wanted to resolve it right away.

The answer came immediately: the pattern wanted attention.

The situation literally reached the point where the pattern was knocking me on the head, desperate to get me to listen to it.

It was asking for help.

It just could not think of any other way to get through.

So the very first practice brought me two very useful pieces of information: the sound (and a bit of a look) of the pattern and the awareness that it desperately wanted to communicate with me.

That day, we did not have much of a conversation, as I promptly asked my static noise to take a break or a short business trip and leave me alone, so that I could move forward with my very important work project.

But my pattern was smarter than me.

A few days passed with me impatiently peeking into my brain, trying to find something interesting, and wondering why I was not finding anything relevant (of course I was not finding the big white elephant — it was off on a business trip as requested, too scared of me).

And then later that week, as I was again lying in shavasana, I became aware of a real-life noise, the refrigerator humming a few feet away from my head, which was very much like the static noise that was trying to tell me something a few days earlier. This time, I decided to listened and just tuned in, trying not to interrupt.

And then, a very cool thing happened.

I slipped into this cool meditative trip, where images unfolded one after another, and each image had a meaning that instantly became clear to me. My pattern, the static TV noise, became one with the humming refrigerator.

Once I was finally listening, I could actually see — I saw a metaphorical refrigerator and I saw all the cool, delicious things inside it. And the things in the refrigerator were waiting to be taken out of it. They might be cold, but this is what helped them to stay preserved.

One of my favorite foods that can often be found in the fridge is a watermelon. It’s heavy and green and hard on the outside, but it’s red and sweet and delicious and full of seeds on the inside.

Bing!

The static noise was the watermelon calling for me from the refrigerator, ready to be served. Listening helped me see, meeting the pattern rather than fighting took away its scariness, and my avoidance was actually my creativity trying to get out.

My creativity trying to get out!

I just love this. Avoidance as creativity trying to get out.

Thanks!
Havi + Selma