Adventures of a Shivanaut

Level 2 was feeling a bit lacklustre

I was on twitter recently and found out that maybe I wasn’t pushing myself as hard with Shiva Nata as I really ought to be to get the full benefits.  As I mentioned before, I was wanting to get on with Level 3 but chose to work through Level 2 first.

Well this week I finally started working on Level 3 and it’s official – Shiva Nata is now royally kicking my butt!

Moving up a Level really made a difference

The odd combination of pride and concern at finding Levels 1&2 quite so straightforward to pick up has been replaced by the gleeful sorrow that I get every time I finish a phrase and realise that I finished in a completely different position to the one I started in.  Not just once, but over and over and over and over again!  I’ve stood there going painfully slowly through just the one phrase (usually something with a starting position of 2:3 or 3:4 on the right hand side) but my brain seems to stubbornly trick me each and every time and refuse to let me finish where I started!  It’s brilliant!

I honestly had no idea that my brain could even do this to me – just slip these little errors in under the radar.

Can it make me a better dancer?

I can now see how, with practice, I’ll be able to spot patterns of mine that had not been challenged at the earlier levels and start to get more conscious control over my body-mind connection.

As a dancer there’s a lot that happens on auto-pilot due to constraints on what you can focus on at any one time.  For example, sometimes a foot or arm will lose focus and detract from the movement or require the dancer to compensate (e.g. lack of balance).  This auto-pilot requirement is part of why technique is so riguorously practised.  However, I am much more interested in less technical and more improvisational dance.  This requires a much greater state of flow, rather than control, and as such I am very interested to see if Shiva Nata will contribute to this state of flow whilst maintaining the high level of control still required.

Finding the mid-point between comfort and stress

Feeling the change from learning the basics and starting to push my practice outside of my current abilities lead me to think about a post at Emma’s Tao of Prosperity blog where she introduced an idea to me that built on the idea of a comfort zone, whilst also explaining why you can push yourself too hard, too fast.  Basically, she draws it as 3 circles (which I’ve adapted slightly below):

The Three Zones: Comfort, Learning & Stress

So from my story above I would say that I have moved from the comfort to the learning zone with my Shiva Nata practice.  The trick for me now is to keep it between Comfort and Stress.  Which leads me on to my latest epiphany.

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Intentions, visions and epiphanies
• You know you’ve had an epiphany when…
• Masochism FTW!