The colors of Dance of Shiva. With blobs and splotches.

As befits a post that’s about blobs and splotches — and written by someone who just emerged from a much-needed nap — it may seem kind of … scattered.

So I hope (or trust) that the pieces will all come together by the end.

Dance of Shiva meets art.

Remember the artist whose painting changed so markedly on the days when she did Shiva Nata as opposed to the days when she didn’t?

So Gisela was at the Dance & Paint workshop we did Friday at SPOLZ and I got to talk to her some more.

We talked about her art and her process and her almost-daily Shiva Nata practice.

Some of the interesting bits:

• She talked about the huge amount of clarity that Dance of Shiva gives her. That sometimes she’ll do a few minutes just to clear out the cobwebs so she can even think about starting painting.
• She talked about being startled by new coordination skills and the way they show up. Whether on the bicycle or maneuvering with bags of groceries or in the studio itself.
• She talked about the quiet and the calm that deepen her meditation practice, and about the power of the chaos and confusion that free her up to try new things.

Spolz! Try saying that without an exclamation point.

SPOLZ (pronounced “shpoltz”) is this communal artist collective thing-ey.

The artists in the group use it as studio space and they also teach classes there and do events. And they’re very open to combining art and painting with all sorts of things, mostly music, but also movement. Spolz!

Its name comes from the Spohnholzstrasse, the street on which it resides, which is apparently pretty much impossible for anyone to pronounce, even for native German speakers.

So they decided to just call it Spolz. Which then (naturally!) became SPOLZ!

They also started using the word spolzi as a noun to describe any tiny bits or sloshes of paint that land on the floor or a desk or a wall. Look, a spolzi! And then sometimes they draw little smiley faces in them.

So you find a little blob of green on the floor and then it’s smiling at you.

Anyway, I love it. I love everything about it.

And of course they cannot even slightly figure out why on earth I would come and teach there when (as they keep saying) I could teach anywhere. And so they keep asking me what’s wrong with me.

But really, it’s a beautiful space with clean, clear energy and lovely people. Teaching there is a joy.

Plus, the combination of Dance of Shiva and painting? Unbelievably great. Spolz!

Our class.

So we had three hours to combine Dance (Shiva Nata) and Paint (oh boy!), and some meditation-ey stuff as well.

The whole thing sped by in a blur, but here are some of the bits I remember.

1. Andreas lead a really beautiful visualization/meditation where we imagined that we were inhaling and exhaling colors at various parts of our body.

   I usually have trouble with these things as a decidedly not-so-visual person, but it was very calming and really set the tone.

2. The space was emptied out so that the only thing there was empty white walls and two of Gisela’s gorgeous paintings (yes, ones with that extra Shiva Nata juice).

   And a wall-hanging with prints of the chakras that I bought from Nine Tomatoes (who is @NineTomatoes on Twitter). Normally I’m not so much of a “chakra wall-hanging” person either, to be honest, but her stuff is outrageously beautiful and I could look at it all day.

3. The stage. I love it!

   Andreas and Gisela built me a “stage”, which is really a big piece of wood covered in … little spolzis (spolzies?), and attached to other pieces of wood.

   So I got to dance barefoot on top of this wonderful paint-flecked board. And it was so perfect somehow. Just simple and exactly what it needed to be.

   We’ll have to take pictures next time.

The practice.

We did two rounds of Dance of Shiva mixed with two rounds of artistic endeavor and meditation.

So you’d go from the practice into meditation, and when you felt like it was time to go do art, you just wandered into the next room where there were desks and easels and supplies.

And tea and cookies, of course.

Then the back to the practice. Then more art. Then more exclaiming over how crazy and wonderful it was.

Oh, and we did Shiva Nata with colors, too.

More about that!

Shiva Nata with colors instead of numbers.

We ended up using colors for the horizontals:

Blue, yellow, red and white in place of H1, H2, H3 and H4.

So our sequences would sound like this:

Starting from yellow-blue: red-yellow, white-red, blue-white, yellow-blue.

Now: blue-white, white-red, red-yellow, yellow-blue.

Reverse the rotation: red-white, white-red, blue-yellow, yellow-blue.

And then: blue-yellow, white-red, red-white and back to … yellow-blue.

Except in German. But you get the idea.

It was awesome.

We kept speeding up so that the colors we were naming (calling on? imagining? perceiving?) kept bleeding into each other and everything got mixed up in the middle.

You might have noticed that we set it up so that whenever you cross the heart you get one of the heart-chakra colors (either green when you cross blue and yellow … or pink when you move from white to red).

Then when we did transquarters, we got purple between the red and blue, and a pale yellow when we mixed yellow and white.

It was pretty cool, is all I’m saying.

You’re probably wondering what we did for the verticals. We didn’t.

By the time we got to the verticals and some Level 2, we were already pretty wiped out.

That is to say, we were experiencing that weird and wonderful blank-slate-brain stuff that happens when Shiva Nata lets you turn everything off.

So we stopped using words and went right into straight-up mirroring, alternating between music and silence for our background.

Results?

Every single person there (twelve in all) reported painting stuff that they would never normally paint.

Everyone kept exclaiming things like, “This isn’t like me at all! I never use pink!” or “Triangles? Me? I have no idea where this is coming from …”

Lots of people got neat mini-epiphanies or surprising understandings from the subjects of their paintings themselves.

You could also really sense the presence of all the spirals in the paintings.

It was absolutely amazing looking at the paintings and hearing people tell their stories and process their insights about them.

Biggest regret?

That no one brought a camera. I would love to be able to put some pictures up here!

Maybe next time! We’re doing Shapes and Forms in the studio this coming weekend, and I have no doubt that will be interesting too.