Shiva Nata Practice Journal

Shiva Nata Practice Day: The Gap

Intention: There is something I need to finish. It won’t take much to finish, but gosh if I haven’t been avoiding by doing nothing other than staring out windows and walls.

Working on: Level two fast arms and legs sequence 1.

Things that came up for me during this practice: This was very hard, my form has really gotten sloppy the last few months. I noticed myself looking at the time, as if the whole experience was a means to an end, like “I’m just doing this because I think it will mean I can do this other thing later.” Random thoughts about whatever I was recently reading. Did a pretty good job of doing the arms correctly, the legs were kind of haywire.

Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana): Was reviewing how my practice went. Wiggled around a little on the floor and stretched. 

Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours):

Hmmm. Seeing that the thing I am avoiding is too wrapped up in my head with the thing that I must do after it. Need to find a way to work just on it as it is, and not worry about the next phase which I am dreading. Of course, the longer I put off this phase, the less likely I am to get to the part of the process I am so afraid of. I know this has stuff to do with perfectionism written all over it again. Hmm. I don’t know, I just feel kind of as lost and confused about this as before I did it. Wanting an answer is a pattern. Wanting to take a shortcut to that answer is a pattern. Not moving forward until that answer comes? Also a pattern. Still unclear about how to interrupt this pattern. Still want to stay in avoidance and stare at the wall. Boo. Why do I want some answer so badly when its just me sitting at my computer at the end of the day? When no fairy will come in and magically do this, it is just me and me, sitting here, one trying to cajole the other to move forward, the other just sitting there, in resistance. No one will even care whether the two of us ever come to a conclusion and move forward. Its just me. It only matters to me, and yet I don’t matter enough to do this? What is that supposed to mean?

Okay I get really disappointed about The Gap. The Gap between what is in my head and what comes out.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

I have no tolerance for this Gap. I keep thinking my work will be more, better than it turns out. Even when no one sees it. Like I made a few postcards with crayons the other day of the Loteria. I don’t plan to show them to anyone, it was just play, for fun, to try to do some art that I enjoy instead of something agonizing.

And I hate them. I hate an experiment that no one will ever see that I have no intention of showing to anyone. But its that Gap that makes me angry. They didn’t look as good as they did in my head and I’m angry about it. I wonder how I can move through this.

Been Too Busy Epiphanizing to Post!

Right now my life feels completely different than it did three weeks ago. I have been walking around with a quiet calm excitement, amazing things are happening in my business and personal life, and I have perspective.

I thought the pattern changing would be overt like I would see what I was doing and just decide to do it differently. But it is happening much more organically and quickly and naturally. I am engaging in conversations differently, opening up, feeling joy and hope (those guys have been strangers around here for awhile). Its not even conscious.

I am not hungry, either, which is weird. All my life I have inhaled food, and this week I have been forgetting to eat. Really, I have to remind myself. I always though people either made that phenomenon up or were on drugs/caffeine that suppressed their appetite.

If you haven’t started this yet, maybe you were waiting to hear that it is working magic on someone else. Sooooooo - yes! It is! It is happening to me! It is like someone sprinkled fairy dust all over me. Really.

Shiva Nata Practice Day: Getting to Flow

Intention: I really need to be present and work very hard today. So my intention is going to be asking my body and mind to summon up every ounce of strength to support me in every way I need to be supported today. I need to go reread Havi’s guides because I am feeling like this may be inappropriate, like the intention needs to be a question? But I might as well ask myself for something and see if I get it.

Working on: Level one fast horizontals and fast transquarters.

Things that came up for me during this practice: Very fun, very lost, much flailing, really really wrong, this is way too over my head oh no, oh this is fun, more flailing.

Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana): I may have been way over my head but am not thinking about it. Just asking my legs my arms my heart my mind my eyes to be in peak performance today, I need everything they can offer.

Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours):

Confession - this was yesterday’s practice. I am writing it the next morning. And I am feeling almost hungover and exhausted. Why?

Because yesterday, I was flowing, I was in peak performance, I worked for a straight twelve hours at a desk nonstop without even getting up to eat, drink or use the restroom. Without emailing. Without checking blogs. None of that stuff. My body and mind responded and I did it.

Now I don’t think I respected my body because of the burnout migrainish fuzziness I am experiencing right now. I could have been fueling it or trying to take care of its needs when it was busting its butt for me, but I just pushed through because I had a deadline. So even though another deadline looms for tonight, and I would like to repeat yesterday, I am going to be kind to myself right now and get a really nice meal, a long shower, some stretching and breathing before asking for the incredible again. And today I give my body permission to ask for food or whatever it needs. Yesterday it didn’t even ask, I didn’t even feel deprived the whole day. It was an amazing sacrifice so I need to honor it and respect what it did for me.

Also that was a cool experiment - my intention for the morning doesn’t need to be asking a question, it can also be a summons that I ask myself to rise to the occasion of. Way cool, way valuable, and will be easier to just ask for what I need when I know what it is I need. Sometimes I don’t know what I need or want and that is when I can engage the practice with a question.

And - when Havi says get lost she means get completely lost, I think, because I was floating on a log in the ocean a million miles from shore with how wrong I was doing it and had the best day afterwards.

Shiva Nata Practice Day: Deus Ex Machina Edition

Intention: Was freaking out and couldn’t figure out what to ask for. Just wanted a situation resolved my way! With no hard! But figure I can’t just bring absurd wishes to Shiva Nata and make them come true. So just decided I would ask, “What do I want?”

Working on: Level one verticals, vertical and horizontal links

Things that came up for me during this practice: Verticals are hard. I hate verticals and don’t understand them. I am allowed to be annoyed by the verticals. Just more reason to spend time on them! But grrr did I grit my teeth.

Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana): Laughed at my predicament and realized that all I want is a deus ex machina. Just some magical way to escape from having a tough conversation that will need to be had, the other person of which will need to decide the outcome of how we will move forward. The situation is out of my control and what I want was for it to simply

1. Work out my way.

2. Not even have to exist anymore. Something to whisk me out of the situation and let me forget about it without having to deal with it.

Even though I feel gross about wanting an easy way out, I am allowed to want the easy way out. I doubt it will hapen, but it is what I want.

Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours): Holy guacamole! Received a phone call that could very well be the magical way to avoid the hard talk. But it comes with strings attached, of course. And is that a pattern I am seeing? Where I want to be out of a situation, I want to run and hide my head under the sand, and have in fact done this many many times.

This time I don’t want to hide.

If I was the other person who I need to have this talk with? I would want to know the facts and make my choice, rather than be left hanging and confused. And I can respect this person enough that the will make a good decision.

What I really need is the words. I need to summon exactly the right words so that this person knows where I am coming from. So that they don’t feel a betrayal by anything I say. And if they can truly understand my mind, then my worst fear will not come true.

My worst fear is that I will have this conversation and then be hated.

So today I am going keep this new intention in my heart and see what happens. See if I can summon the words I need to make us both feel safe in the conversation. Hope that I can find a means of speaking my mind in a way that shows respect and doesn’t damage our relationship. Trust that if I speak the truth, the other person and I can connect with empathy and we can resolve this.

Shiva Nata Practice Day: Annual Review Edition

Intention: Just find some calm.

Working on: Fun level one transquarters! And fast horizontals! And slow verticals!

Things that came up for me during this practice: Lots of mirror giggling and making funny faces. Making sharper horizontal arm movements.

Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana): Got an image of the space from yesterday. Now I know where I want to go, it is a library not too far away. Planned to go today but it is (uncharacteristically of California) raining.

Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours): This morning I joined Chris Guillebeau (in spirit! I don’t know him but think he’s amazing) in beginning my own “annual review process.”

This was the, hmm how do I say it? safest-self-love-feeling goal setting I have ever participated in, and not one second of it felt like “yuck, goals.” or “yeah right I am never going to do this.” or “I have been screwing this stuff up for so long I will never get it right.” or “oh yeah I messed up on that again this year and got no closer to my goals.”

I wanted calm this morning but what I really wanted? To stop hating on myself for not finishing something yet. The self-criticism was non-stop from when my eyes popped open this morning. I just wanted some peace. One thing Chris suggests to help you target your goals is to think about the last year and write about what went well and what didn’t go well. I had so much love and compassion for what I have done and been through this last year, and was really surprised by how I approached this process. Writing what went well was really easy, and my list kept getting longer.

Then I moved onto the category of things that didn’t go well and you know what? By the end of each sentence, I had turned something that sucked into something that was awesome simply by observing exactly what happened. It wasn’t even intentional, the whole “making lemonade out of lemons” thing. I was just sort of, being nice to myself? But even that part wasn’t intentional! By writing a detailed account of the event in retrospect, I could see something in context. Like, “oh yeah, that was dreadful and uncomfortable, but I really bonded with ______ during that thing, and now we have a great relationship because of what happened.” or “Those people threw shoes at me, and I may have pitched back a flip flop myself, but that situation was the wake up call to start acknowledging that I needed _______ in my life and so I made better choices in the days that followed.” I couldn’t help it! It was amazing.

And all of this is on top of the fact that I repeated to myself several times last week, “2009 is the second worst year of my life.”

Like if not daily, then at least weekly, terrible things seemed to happen. So to perform this exercise and go line by line through those terrible things and realize that, hey, I actually have NO REGRETS about 2009, well that was pretty calming.

Shiva Nata Practice Day: Virginia Woolf Edition

Intention: Stop the terrified jumping jacks my insides are doing. Find some calm and peace because the state of overwhelm still won’t go away.

Working on: Transquarter level one horizontals and verticals

Things that came up for me during this practice: Wow, very, very fun. This gets more fun every time I do it. I went for about 25 minutes because I enjoyed it so much. Began the session by flipping ahead to fast horizontals and flailed a little - that will be wild when I get to it for real.

The interesting thing was how easy and intuitive the slow horizontals became once I switched from going fast back to going slow. So far in my practice I haven’t noticed the patterns, I have been simply trying to grasp what Andre was doing, and couldn’t retain or predict anything because it made no sense. Now I saw the patterns and that made sense, and I was switching to the next correct move in the sequence on my own.

Which means - the slow horizontals aren’t hard enough! But it was great that I did parts that made absolutely no sense and I was completely lost. Getting lost in the chaos made the order emerge in the lower level, so I think both experiences were valuable from this session.

The other nice thing was that my thoughts and fears relaxed, my teeth unclenched, and I was able to think just about the dance and not about all my overwhelm of stuff. It came back now that I am done, but in the moment, I had some peace.

Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana):

One word came up, it was almost floating in front my mind, and that word was “space.” I am not sure if it means that I need space from my fears, or to go to a really large space and just sit with things for awhile. It feels like the word meant I need a personal space, a room of my own, some privacy.

Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours):

Maybe there will be a way for me to create some space. I am someone who needs a lot of alone time and I have had very little of that for the last year. My new job is an open office environment and everyone is very loud. I need to write as part of my job, and everyone around me is yelling. It is difficult to concentrate and be productive. The fear and overwhelm are about making up missed writing assignments. Maybe in order to do them what I need is some privacy and space.

Shiva Nata Practice Day: Dumb Fight Edition

Intention: Figure out how to give the chihuahua a bone. What does he want? I want him to feel like this:

I want him to be safe and secure and at peace and most of all quiet so that I can get unstuck and get back to work. But he is too busy growling and criticizing and alerting me to every possible negative reaction that will result from anything I plan to say or do. He is too busy looking like this:

Working on: Level one horizontals and verticals.

Things that came up for me during this practice: Woah! Anger! Not from doing the dance but from some offsides, real life actual criticism.

My boyfriend is very athletic. Has been his whole life. He is also a teacher and a coach and along with that takes immense pleasure in telling people how to do something the “right” way. Walking past me and getting a look at the video, he immediately told me my form was terrible and there was no way I could be getting any benefits out of this unless I made my arm movements sharper.

I reacted by getting really angry, telling him that he didn’t know what he was talking about because this was not a typical martial art or yoga form and that the goal was to “do it wrong.”

He looked at me like I was crazy, of course, and then proceeded to passive aggressively whine about how “of course I know nothing about stretching, I’ve never seen anyone stretch in my life” etc etc

Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana): Was too irritated to even sit in shavasana. Left the room in anger.

Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours): I don’t know maybe something about my intention will come up? I am trying to use the practice to get over my perfectionism, and having someone walk in and reinforce all my fears about doing it wrong while I was doing it wrong really didn’t help. My reaction certainly didn’t help.

I reacted so strongly because what I need is to hear that yes it’s possible for even me to make shiva nata a part of my life. I am very uncoordinated. I once took Arthur Murray dance lessons for a summer and ended up getting a partial refund for being “unteachable.”

I have always been drawn to the idea of yoga, but have been worried about being physically unfit and not capable of doing it. In college a friend started a daily yoga practice and I asked if I could attend a class with her. She looked me up and down and said “I don’t think its for you. Its really hard and there is also some praying you have to do. Maybe you should try powerwalking.”

I was pretty crushed and at the time didn’t know how to communicate how that made me feel - embarressed, fat, too “bitter” or “sarcastic” to even try to engage in a spiritual journey. Spirtuality isn’t a contest but I felt condescended to with the statement.

Since I read Nonviolent Communication, I think I could have heard my friend but come to a very different conclusion. Maybe she herself was really involved with the praying and didn’t want me to make fun of her. Maybe she just wanted that time to be for her alone and didn’t want to bring a guest. Maybe she really just thought I would enjoy something else more but her tone was unintentionally abrasive, leading me to believe she meant it in the vein of “you aren’t capable of this” when she literally meant “from what I have observed of your taste, you may be happier trying something like this instead.”

Well yesterday I completed a yoga class! And the way it made me feel - wow! Amazing! Tremendous heat and pounding blood. It was beautiful. I have never felt my body so completely in my life. Like every cell, every membrane, everything. It was all alive and pulsing with deepening and receding pressures. I can’t wait to have that feeling again. Today’s soreness is a gift. It is a reminder of the party my muscles had yesterday. Now my back and my legs and my arms and my shoulders are all hungover from the revelry, texting eachother about what a crazy celebration of life that was. As I gingerly wiggle through the covers like a snake, every movement corresponds with soreness, but I can’t stop grinning.

Brain Wackiness - In Which Your Heroine Wins a Card Game and Finds More Puppies Running Around Her Consciousness

Last night my boyfriend and I played a terrifying card game of speed and death. Okay no one died but it’s a fast game.

My boyfriend has been playing this game since childhood, I have been playing it for about five months (fun fact, he is also a couple decades older than me, so that is a LOT of experience).So he always wins. Every time.

The game is lightning fast, with a lot of bumping into eachother as our arms flail to rearrange cards into new patterns. In that way it is kind of like the Dance of Shiva.

Which might explain why, after doing a morning Shiva Nata practice, I finally won the game! I don’t know, do you think that’s a stretch? Was I just due for a win, or was it the wacky brain training? I totally attribute it to Shiva Nata. I felt very present the whole time, and I didn’t get mesmerized or overwhelmed by the speed as my momentum built.

Then I started telling my boyfriend about my realization this morning that my fear is a yappy dog. And he said, “Well, you are strong like a Great Dane, too. And you are letting that little dog boss around a big one!”

And then we realized that there is probably a whole pack of dogs in my brain. My sense of humor is a pug and my intelligence is a border collie and my sense of style is a poodle and my love is a pit bull.

It’s true though, the little chihuahua is bossing them all around and they don’t know what to do. They have huddles and try to figure it out, “Should we tell Human Resources? Should we tell his mom? He just won’t stop yapping about all these ‘emergencies’ that we are fully equipped to handle! It’s annoying and then we start to believe him. And then we can’t get anything done because he has us under his spell!”