Having made it through Level 3 arms I’m now working on being able to do it with greater speed and fluidity (rather than with lots of pausing and umming!)

However, the golden rule of Shiva Nata is “it has to be difficult to work”.  So rather than simply work on getting from a 4 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10, I figured that maybe I should try something completely different with a lower level to challenge myself in a completely new way!

Reminding myself it’s a practice

This is a totally new way of doing things for me.  I normally like to obsess until I master something and then celebrate by showing off to my friends and feeling good about myself.  And to be honest I’ll probably do both of these anyway (heck, I did promise a video at some point – I just need to get over the whole perfectionism thing with it – all encouragement welcome!)

Anyway, the idea here is for me to work on always aiming for a goal, by constantly reminding myself that it’s a practice, with infinite variations, that I will never finish but will keep doing anyway.  This ties in big with my current personal development theme.

Masochism FTW!

So, to make things harder for myself (so as to stimulate deconstruction and reconstruction) I decided to try the idea of replacing the numbers with colours and saying them out loud!  I chose Red, Yellow, Green and Blue because they’re separate, bold colours in my mind – making it easier to ‘see’ the patterns with my mind’s eye.

It was totally worth it too.  I could see new patterns emerging from Level 2 that I hadn’t noticed, or at least taken notice of, before.  And there was no way I was doing it with the legs either – so I have another thing to try next time!

I’ve had a lot of practice at masochism…

I’m a dancer – I have various horror stories about pushing through pain barriers and exhaustion in order to perform & rehearse.  It seems that being able to happily take risks and make things harder (in a controlled manner) on a physical plane can translate to doing the same on a mental level.

Of course, no-one is always willing to do it, everyone has times that they want to just lie down and relax – but given that it’s generally considered a good idea to play on your strengths to support your weaknesses (oh my gosh – I’m doing yoga talk! Havi, what have you done to me?!) I figured that I would let my years of dance lessons help support my brain training now!

Going backwards?

I actually did the Level 3 arms as well (or at least as far as I could get with them today) because I don’t want to feel like I’ve ‘slipped back’ into Level 2.  See above about still working on my need to master vs being in the practice.  I don’t see this is a problem, it just meant that I took longer with it all, but at the moment I’m lucky to have time on my side (and know it – when I’m not freaking out).

What do you think?  Is doing a different version of Level 2 a step backwards?  Should I just be pushing myself harder with Level 3 to make it difficult?

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.