Finding the challenge (part 1)

So I got an email from someone who’d pretty much stopped practicing.

Six months of using Andrey Lappa’s Dance of Shiva DVD on a daily basis. Loving the practice. But then … well, this is how he put it:

“I just never noticed the benefits that others seem to have. Now I play with it about once every few weeks or so. I do training of some sort every morning.

Lately I have been thinking of giving Dance of Shiva another try … so your message comes at an opportune time (message from the universe?).”

So this, of course, feeds right into the huge, huge, huge fear that 90% of my students have. Which is:

Ohmygosh! Oh no! What if I’m the one it doesn’t work on? What if it helps everybody else and it doesn’t help me?

Yes, it’s funny how we like to think that of all the people in the world we’ll be the one exception that proves the rule.

Here’s the thing. What’s much more likely is that we’re doing it wrong.

So I asked this guy what he’d been practicing. Level 1. Horizontals and verticals. Just doing the spirals. Stuff like that.

Uh huh. Thought so.

That’s why I go on and on and on about this in the Starter Kit ebooks.

Without challenge there is no learning.

If you ever have the chance to study Dance of Shiva with Andrey Lappa, you’ll hear him say that more than once.

I don’t know if that’s always true, but it’s certainly true for Dance of Shiva.

Yeah. Sorry. In order to have breakthroughs with the Dance of Shiva you really have to do the parts that are too hard for you.

When you’re working with the parts you already know, you’re not challenging your neurons to make new connections.

Sure it can still be fun and it’s a nice flow and good muscle work. Do only what you know or what you can do without making a fool of yourself, and you’ll still have some results.

Good ones. Like really awesome focus, powerful meditations and the most gorgeous triceps ever.

But not the epiphanies.

Sorry.

If you want the breakthroughs to come, you’ve got to do it wrong. Wronger! More wrong than that! You’ve got to seek out the challenge.

Because the breakthroughs come when you’re a. getting completely and utterly and humiliatingly lost or b. just on the cusp of grasping something new. Once you’ve had your breakthrough, it’s time to crank it up a notch.

Make it harder. Do it faster. Add another element. Get it wrong. Mess it up. Lose yourself in the patterns.

I’ve never, ever heard of someone doing Dance of Shiva and making it challenging and not having epiphanies.

The only way you’re not going to be getting the benefits is if you only do what you know. Or what you can.

This happens to me too when I’m prepping for a workshop or festival I’m going to teach at.

I start practicing what I plan to teach instead of what I need to learn. No more epiphanies. But I have enough experience memories of having learned this the hardest way possible to be able to stop and say ohhhhhhhhh.

And then do what I need to do to make them come back.

If you just do what you know, you’re doing it wrong.

More next time about how to go about feeling safe and comfortable messing up. In the meantime, big hug to you. I know! Argh! Just trust me on this one.