For the first time since starting Shiva Nata, I had been able to think of an intention that I was emotionally invested in.  I have struggled with this before, though I’m still not sure exactly why that is, so it was great to finally find myself with a question that I felt I could use Shiva Nata with.  The intention was to understand what I got out of the hours I was spending online before going to bed.  I’d realised that my constructive part of the day tended to end around dinner time and I would then spend hours online which often resulted in me feeling frustrated with myself, yet I had a real sense of getting something out of this time that I couldn’t quite identify.

Visions

During shavasana I had a little vision/thought about feeding the rabbits grain, rather than vegetables.  I was annoyed at Glyn for not just ditching the grain and feeding a mix of veg instead.  As my awareness came back to my thoughts I started to think “oops I’ve gone off on one” but for some reason, rather than let go that thought and come back to blankness, I was drawn to go back and look at the story that had played out.  I noticed that there was a message to the story: that change, even when easy and with obvious benefits, can be resisted simply because of inertia.  I thought about my intention: I am resisting the change to my sleep patterns.  Now this statement was being touted by one part of my brain as obvious, it was simply a restatement of the question ‘Why don’t I want to go to bed?’ but I know that a rewording can bring powerful insight and understanding so I paid attention and realised that the key phrase was ‘I am resisting the change’.  So I sat up, grabbed my large journaling pad and wrote “I notice that I am resisting the change to my sleep cycle.”  What followed blew me away.

Epiphanies!

I had nine, count them – nine, epiphanies in the 3 A4 pages of writing that followed.  It was one per paragraph at one point!

Going forward

This is what I’ve been looking for in my practice.  A way to access understanding around an area.  It’s taken me a long time to be able to get the different pieces in place:

• a real intention that I’m focussed on with emotion
• a strong practice that challenges me (I did Levels 3, 4 and half of 5)
• an understanding of when I’ve reached the point to stop (brain fog just starting to really kick in – before I’ve pushed through this and totally flatlined my brain for no extra benefits)
• being able to listen to my thoughts in meditation afterwards
• following my intuition within the meditation practice, not just going for silence but hearing the message
• knowing when to follow that message into my journaling
• feeling comfortable in how to journal and record the thoughts that come to me in a safe way, knowing which routes are dead ends and which are the path to follow

I feel like I’ve reached the next level up after plateauing for so long.  I was truly skeptical I could go any further – I’m so grateful that I’ve gave it one more try!

On 11 January I started a 27 day trial at mixing up Level 3 to see if I really had ‘mastered’ it or whether I was conning myself into thinking that so I could have a pity party and generally feel superior and sorry for myself all at once (oh yes, that’s an achievement in itself, right?!)

Well, 12 January I stopped.  It turns out what I needed was some time off from all that, after my last trial which I did on my other blog.  The holiday is over now (in a looking-forward-to-what-comes-next way, since I get to decide it’s over, rather than in a oh-my-god-now-I-have-to-return-to-work way) and after a forum discussion around Shiva Nata and thanks to my tendency to want to finish something that I’ve started (not always a bonus, but if I approach it consciously it can be a good way to self-motivate) I’ve decided to get it going again today.

So, without further ado, here is Day 2 of my 27 day trial (with no promise that the other 25 days will continue consecutively from this one, but that’s the intention).

Today’s session was 10 minutes of my first alternate to Level 3 starting with the right side first.

Did I get stuck?

Nope, not really.  I started off a lot slower than I finished, but I didn’t really have any complete blank moments where I just couldn’t work out where I was or where I was going.  I did end up in the wrong position after one set of 4 repetitions, but a second attempt corrected that, and I did have one point where I wasn’t completely sure of where I was in the routine, but letting my body go with what felt right sorted that out for me (a dancer’s trick when you realise half-way through a routine that you haven’t a clue what you’re doing, but your body seems to be getting on with it anyway – just don’t panic and you’re fine!)

Intention

As usual, I didn’t have one, I just go through the practice with the mild intention that the patterns do their thing and that I start to notice more of what’s going on in my head.  During the relaxation afterwards (a full 20 mintues, no skimping here) I did give myself the intention of trying to figure out where some anger I’d had recently was coming from, and my mind wandered through a few different scenarios in my head (some completely unrelated to this) whilst I was lying there (the best bit of the whole process, IMHO).  I didn’t reprimand myself for that, I just brought my awareness to what was happening rather than letting myself mindlessly daydream.  I’ve decided that seeing what comes up in these wanderings is useful, so it’s not about stopping them but rather paying attention to them.  That way if something presents which is turning into a downward, negative spiral, I can step in and stop that, but if it’s telling me something useful I can see what comes up.  If it’s just silly or distracting I can bring my awareness back to my body, breathing and feelings and restart the process.

Thoughts on the whole thing so far

Well, I don’t suppose tomorrow’s (variation 2 starting on the right) is going to be particularly stickyfying either, but then I’ve spent 20+ years practicing being able to take any movement and repeat it mirror-reflection style in dance classes, so that practice is pretty much embedded in my head already.  Does this mean that Shiva Nata won’t hold as much possibility for growth for me as someone else (as Duff alluded to in a comment on a previous post)?  I don’t know, but given that this is a practice, rather than an achievement, that I actually find accessible, at this point it doesn’t matter.  It may prove to be my perfect thing, it may prove to just be a doorway to another, more challenging, practice that takes me deeper, but the only place I can act is in the here and now, and right now there’s no difference between either of these scenarios, so I might as well just let whatever is going to happen happen, and keep practicing so as I can see how it will all turn out!

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.

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?

Right, now that’s got that nonsense out of the way, I come fresh from my kitchen to tell you that today I managed to get all the way through Level 3 arms with simple legs!  Woohoo!  I realise that this is going to mean that I have to shake things up again in the future for it to keep working, but there’s the more complex legs to add (including “rotations in three-dimensional space” or turning as it’s also known) so I’ve still got something to learn.  And besides, just because it’s supposed to be difficult, and I don’t want to let myself get complacent, that doesn’t mean I don’t get to celebrate my achievements.  So I say again, “Woohoo!”

I admit to a small part of me wandering what will happen when I’ve learnt all the stuff on the DVD, but hey – that’ll be a nice problem to have and I’ll just cross that bridge when I come to it

EDIT: Further success…my blog is worthy of spam comments (thank you akismet for keeping them hidden)!  Oh yeah!

I had a bit of a ‘grey’ day today.  I didn’t really feel like I was getting anywhere with anything.  I am lucky enough to have a group of friends that get together to talk and help each other out on Wednesday evenings and was able to share how I was feeling.  They gave me some perspective but I was still feeling low.

[I'm thinking that this might be a warning sign that some serious epiphanies are building up and about to burst!  I wonder if there's a smoother way to deal with that?]

So I listened to one of Havi’s Emergency Calming Technique recordings, and was able to shift my mindset but I was still not feeling energetic or productive (my energies were being stored up for the ‘big showdown’!)  So I whittled the evening away on Twitter, RSS and email.

The thought that triggered it happened just as you were about to go to bed

I was listening to a meditation at 3am and realised that I had fallen asleep twice during it, so I decided that perhaps now was a good time to go to bed.  As I shut everything down and got ready to go upstairs, I set my alarm for yoga the next day when suddenly…

It came when you weren’t looking for it

I had the most tiny, innocuous thought creep into my brain.  No lead up in my mental chit-chat.  It just bounced in, as some ideas do, so I went to quickly jot it down before going to bed.  Only this quick thought suddenly turned out to be a bit bigger – so I got a plain sheet of paper and got ready to scribble.  Only it suddenly reminded me of some other stuff I had read, so I went and go that back up on the computer.  Finally, I’ve joined a few dots in my head and I start to scribble some of the basics onto my sheet of paper.

Your pen can’t keep up with your brain

It doesn’t take long for the A4 sheet to get full, and there’s little arrows and circling and stars and exclamation marks.  I realise I’m going to need a bigger boat piece of paper and settle into my comfy chair to scribble some more.

(Almost) all the different ideas that crop up just fit together perfectly

This flow of ideas just keeps coming, I ponder on one area for a little while, jot some thoughts and suddenly connections to lots of other areas are shouting at me: “Look!  See this?  Isn’t it obvious?!”  A couple of trains of thought feel a little bit like wishful 4am thinking, but I’m pretty much on fire right now, so I’m able to spot those, check them out and weed them out appropriately.  Or at least, I hope so – I may feel completely differently once I’ve actually slept which is why I’m writing this now.  I can’t back out and pretend it didn’t happen tomorrow if I’ve told you all about it!

You’re still going at 6.30am

So it’s hit 6.30 am, and I can hear an alarm clock going off (not mine) and I’m starting to think that astanga yoga in 4 hours may be pushing it.  The idea seems to have finally worked it’s way out (complete with a points scoring system, a flow chart diagram, ordered categories and a set of next steps) and everything feels like it’s starting to slow down from warp speed.

You happen to have clicked with that bit you were struggling with that morning

Oh yeah, did I mention…I managed to work through the Level 3 arms this morning without having to sound them out (more to follow on this after I’ve slept!).  It just started to make sense today…

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 kept getting stuck, and I mean like completely and totally, my brain has frozen, why am I stood here with my arms both in horizontal 1 stuck.  I was trying to work through the Level 3 arms – without the DVD, because that just annoys me by going either too slow or too fast depending on whether I’m in the flow or having to work out each step in turn.

My practice habits

I have a habit about how I practice! Yes, it’s a brand new habit, developed whilst I was practicing Shiva Nata – can you believe it!

I don’t say the numbers out loud, they tend to distract me because my arms can work out what they’re doing at Level 1 and 2 without my mouth getting involved.  It’s actually easier for me to do the arms (with or without legs) without saying anything for these.  But at Level 3 this habit failed me!

Trying something new

So, without realising about the habit thing at first, I started talking myself through it (that being another habit of mine – I think best out loud).  One-one, two-two, two-two, three-one, one-three, two-four, four-two, one-one, three-three, ….  Suddenly, the little mini-patterns appear in what I’m saying (even though my arms are convinced that the whole thing is just one great big long random jumble).  Sometimes I say one thing but my arms do another and I’m able to see where I’ve gone wrong because my arms don’t feel like two-four but my mouth knows that two-four is next.  Quick check and ah-yes, I’ve made a mistake, but I’ve spotted it!  I’m aware, I’m conscious of it – this is most excellent, because now I can choose what to do next instead.  (Oh the symmetry!)

The idea for when you’re in a sticky patch

If you find yourself getting stuck and not getting past where you are try changing around whether you do one or both of the moving and the talking.  So if you tend to do one of the following, try another:

• Just do the arms in silence (or with music)
• Talk your way through the sequence moving your arms at the same time
• Just talk through the sequence without moving

What have you tried when you’ve got stuck, and did it help?  Are you stuck now – can you give this a try and let us know how it went for you?

I’m starting to see the path that Havi describes where you go from:

1. I’ve no idea what the heck is happening here; to
2. Oh, that seems kind familiar, I can kinda see some little structures here and there; to
3. Ahh, I think I’ve maybe got it – it’s either this, or this, or this, but yeah I can see patterns; to
4. Ah-ha!  I’ve got it.  La la la la la, this is so easy! (Well, ok, maybe not easy, but…hey, stop raining on my parade!)

I’m now on step 2.  Of Level 3.  Arms only.  *sigh*

Still, it’s about being in the process, so it’s ok that I want to get through it faster, so long as I keep going even though I’m going slo-o-o-o-o-o-owly!  (And yes, I’m aware that others may think I’m racing through, but to me it feels slow – cause that’s my stuff and I’m working through it!)

There is one thought at the back of mind, it’s a hope.  It’s hoping that before I get to Level 7 and feel like I have got to grips with that, I will have worked through my desire to ‘master’ the Dance of Shiva.  That I will have dissolved that pattern and be able to therefore continue my learning with the dance without getting despondent about not reaching the mythical Level 8.  Cause right now, you just know what I’m aiming for, right?

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.