Adventures of a Shivanaut

It’s been a while since I posted, but my practice has hit a bit of a rut.

I’ve been doing level 1, 2, 3 & 4 (ish-maybe) with legs raised but not really getting that <erk> moment that is the so-called Epiphany Generator!

So what am I doing wrong?

I’m not sure at the moment.  I’ve a couple of inklings, around focus/intention, or about trying other ideas to make things harder (I’ve tried Level 1 with colours, but not the higher ones) so I’m going to look through the notes I got from Havi’s Starter Kit again and see if anything there sparks up some ideas.

I still don’t feel like I’ve shaken the intention to ‘learn’ Shiva Nata, which is the nice way of saying ‘master’ it.  Which since it makes Havi laugh so hard she starts coughing, I know isn’t going to work.

Still, I can do the moves, but it’s feeling a bit hollow – not got the substance in there (plus, yuck, I don’t want to suddenly find myself going back to Level 1 because I did it all wrong!)

Well, whatever happens, I’ll try and write about it a bit more – if nothing else it will help me to remain a bit more mindful with my practice.

Hugs to all my fellow Shivanauts,

James

I’ve been wondering recently whether doing Shiva Nata is part of what has left me so tired this Winter. When I went back to it after a break I started to get tired again and this really frightened me because I enjoy it so much that I don’t want to find that I’m ‘incompatible’ or anything strange like that!

What I realised today was that maybe the reason the DVD has years of material is because it takes time to really let it sink in. I can master the patterns and the mathematics and the movement, but to go from learnt movement to really incorporating it and letting it become a mindful practice may take more time.

Not sure what this means right now, but was thinking about this in bed this morning, as I thought about dancing (contemporary) mindfully rather than going into the trance-like performance state I usually disappear into.

[Yes, this post is all about mathematics and patterns.  If that sounds horrific, please feel free to skip it.  If you want though, I've created a new Level 3 pattern for you to try at the bottom.]

Why would you write about this?

My handle is the Dancing Geek.  The geek part is not just for show – I have a degree in this stuff, and sometimes I actually enjoy solving unnecessary puzzles just for fun.

The theory behind Level 3 as a mathematics puzzle

I’ve made up some notation to keep this shorthand.  H is horizontal, V is vertical and the number relates to the position.  So H1:V1 is left arm in Horizontal 1 position, right arm in vertical 1 position.  Clear?

1 complete round (i.e. you get back to the starting position and are ready to go on the opposite side) is 16 moves at Level 3.  It breaks down into 4 repetitions of the same 4 moves (i.e. the instructions are the same).  Looking at where your arms are after each of these 4-move combos for the first starting position gives us the pattern:

H1:V1 to V1:H3 to H3:V3 to V3:H1 to H1:V1

This can be generalised (using algebra – yippee!) to:

Hx -> Vx

Vy -> Hy+2

In words:

A horizontal starting position will end with that arm in the same position on the vertical plane.

A vertical starting position will end with the arm in the transquartered position on the horizontal plane.  (Hy+2 uses modulo 4 arithmetic, in case you weren’t clear).

How does it work?

Another way of looking at it would be to say that the movement swaps the positions of the arms, moves the right arm 2 positions on, and swaps the planes of the arms.

Either way, the most important aspect of the pattern is that it has symmetry 4.  That is after 4 repeats it returns to where it started.  Simple example of this would be a rectangle with a dot in the corner being turned 90 degrees clockwise:

Example of 4 symmetry

A brand new level 3 pattern!

Yes, I have created a new pattern which I am calling Level 3 because it works in a similar fashion.  Since I don’t know about anything higher except for a bit of Level 4, I could be talking complete and utter bull.  Blame @Sari_O for getting the idea stuck in my head.

It goes:

• Transquarters
• Mirror reflection
• One forward, one back
• Mirror reflection

Or, you could do:

• One forward, one back
• Transquarters
• One back, one forward
• Both forward

Not sure if I’ll try these or not.

Playing with speed

Whilst Level 3 is where I’m pushing myself at the moment, I like to mix in a little Level 1 and 2 at top speed to see how I do.  Since I realised recently that Level 3 was not causing me complete havoc any more I thought I would have a go at doing it at speed.

Gah!

This was tricky.  The difficulty however was less to do with the movement itself (though at speed I did get lost many, many times) but in keeping up the speed.  Whenever I wasn’t sure what was next I found it nearly impossible to make a move that I wasn’t confident in.  Rather than keep going, even if I knew I’d mucked it up, I would freeze until I had worked out what the next move was.

What can I do when things go wrong?

Part of me thinks that this isn’t really a problem.  I can go as fast as possible and get frozen every so often and it will still be more taxing that going through it slowly.  I do get some moments where I’m able to flow through a tricky situation and others where repeating it on the same side and/or then repeating on the opposite side makes the pattern clearer and I can see it in my mind more clearly.

However, I had originally been aiming to keep up the pace and just go wrong if I went wrong, and that didn’t work.  Rather than just move my arms and keep going, even though I was very confident that I had gone wrong and would therefore need to repeat this section, my arms would just freeze, if only for a second, until I worked out the next move.  I’m wondering if this is where using the DVD would be useful – since I can jump back in by following the DVD when I freeze and just skip where I get stuck for now, repeating this over and over until I get stuck less often.

On my own though, I know that I’m able to go back and repeat and repeat as much as I like an area that catches me up until I feel like I’ve at least got a better grasp of it and then move on (I don’t want to spend hours waving my arms around – they start to ache after a while).

Anything over Level 3 and the DVD won’t be available anyway.  But presumably the keep-pushing method is what happens in a class environment.  So what do you reckon – is it better to immediately stop and work it out or try and keep pushing through?

I had my first full-on shiva nata practice session today for a good few weeks.  I may have pushed a little too hard due to my usual desire to cram everything in as quickly as possible and reach the finish line (uh, hello, that would be death!)

Still, I got through Level 3 with basic legs without too much hassle (hurrah, and yet, oh no!) so after whizzing through Level 2 for fun (ha, it sounds crazy still but the pattern’s in my arms and legs now, not much for me to do) I decided to have a bash at Level 4 arms!  (Thanks to @Sari_O for saving me from bugging @havi as to the details).

So I’m working through (what I understand to be) the Level 4 arms and it strikes me that it’s so pretty!  I’m not talking about watching the movements either, though if I do another video we can all judge that for ourselves, but the patterns that came up in my mind as I worked through the positions.  Now I love patterns, it’s part of why I get on so well with mathematics, so I could start rambling on about oscillations and standing waves, but even that isn’t quite what I was at.

Whilst standing there moving my arms around with one of our bunnies by my feet (so cute!) I could feel the loops and swirls and colours and cycles that it formed and it was really quite awe inspiring.  If you’ve tried even just Level 1 arms then go from starting position 3:1 and tell me you don’t find it just the most beautiful movement to do.