August 24, 2010

When getting it wrong is Oh So Right! … and other sweet stuff! : A Review of Havi Brooks’ mind-blowing, (literally) Shiva Nata dvd!!

I know that title might look like a bit of an exclamation frenzy, but please believe me when I say I’m being way, way restrained.  Or better than just believing me, go sovereign and discover  for yourself … but first, let me give you some incentives …

Basically, Shiva Nata consists of a series of simple arm and leg movements (for the record, I’m nowhere near attempting the latter), on horizontal and vertical planes, which when done proficiently by someone like Havi, looks like the gorgeous images of the dancing hindu deity Shiva Nataraja .

There are interesting brain-stimulating elements to this otherwise awesome workout too. The arms and legs are not meant to cross the mid-line of the body, which has the brain working left and right hemispheres independently, though at the same time. The science behind this is deeply fascinating, but being a results person, it’s the doing-of-it and what-happens-thereafter which firstly interests me.

The whole point of engaging in this practice, is to do it WRONG !

I’ll say that one more time… for those who zoned out…

The whole point of engaging in this practice, is to do it wrong.

How fabulous. Wrong is right. Now that gets my interest straight away. Having grown up in the kind of environment where getting it right is a large chunk of all-that-matters, and having consciously devoted at least half of my life to building up a toolbox to free myself from the binds that this gets me into (physically, mentally, emotionally just for starters) … a tool to grow wiser which specifies that I get it wrong has got to be worth investigating.

Happy Hour for your brain …

What happens as you practice (following the simple instructions and demo of world-numero-uno-shivanaut Andrey Lappa), is that the usual well-trodden neural pathways of your brain become superseded for the duration. The plasticity of your brain is now an established reality.

Or in other words… your normal brain activity becomes confused… and is ripe for new patterning and realisation.

As you follow simple-yet-brain-taxing new physical movements, the bio-feedback loops carry chemical messages back to your brain, bathing it in new, juicy chemical cocktails. Happy hour!

Paydirt… or, Bring on the Epiphanies!

The results of all of this intentional flailing and failing come in at my favourite part of the whole shebang. Once you’re done with the activity, it’s vital to bring it all to stillness… whether lying or sitting is up to you. Arming yourself with pen and paper is a very good idea, because at this stage your brain, as the lover-of-pattern-and-order that it is, embarks on a thorough search for the aforementioned pattern-and-order.

Only this time… it’s swimming in a whole different sea.

And oh the ideas, the clarity, the changes-of-view … they are just amazing! Epiphanies big and small. Every time.

A leetle wafer-thin Coda :

Like anything worth it’s salt, or happy, brain-stimulating cocktails, there’s a key to having it really work for you… and that is …

Openness and Curiosity.

Beginner’s mind.

Approaching your practice curious as to what it will show you this time.

So if you’re curiosity is piqued, and you want to try bathing your own brain in happy juices… just click the button below and head over to Havi’s Shiva Nata site :



August 12, 2010

On Writing, Making friends with the Heat, and other seeming impossibilities.

First, a little scene-setting if you will.

It’s mid-afternoon, early August, Andalucia, Spain.

The shutters are pretty much all down. The fan is doing it’s level best to move the syrup-for-air. The cicadas outside are deafening, and I’m considering agreeing with my friend Barry who thinks they’re evil and unnatural things (that’s the heat speaking people, I do NOT think this!)

I’ve been in tears, close to tears, or irritated-to-cover-pent-up tears for most of the morning, and probably the last couple of days too. Just having got back from a get-it-all-done-in-the-bat-of-an-eyelid trip to Scotland, where the brisk air seems conducive to just about anything (well, except sunbathing or swimming maybe) … and I have plans to make, and things to write to make this site the attractive, you’d-have-to-be-crazy-not-to-want-to-work-with-me place it’s always been meant to be.

And it’s hot.

And I can’t think.

And I can’t write. Anything.

My brain won’t move. My body’s wisely moving at a minimum too.

Hence the tears. They’re frustrated tears. It doesn’t help one jot to know that their chemical composition is altered as a result of their emotional provenance, and that releasing them is a relief for the chemical soup bathing my cells. Urgh.  They are not what I want.

So that’s the scene set.

And the point at which I came across these wonderful words from Pema Chodron : Whether it’s ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, a local Scrooge, or the political situation (insert – the heat), it’s more daring and real not to shut anyone out of our hearts and not to make the other into the enemy.

Humph! So much for blaming the heat.

But, (whining just a little) how can I possibly wade out of this thick, sluggish sluggishness surrounding me like a bell jar and actually get something done? Anything really, apart from laundry and other non-gurubody related tasks.

Enter stage left : Shiva Nata  (drumroll….   )

It’s become an if-all-else-fails tool in my toolbox. As the point of it is failing (making mistakes in order to confuse the status quo of the brain and encouraging said brain to figure out new, interesting, useful ways to work), the irony of it’s being a fail-safe is always going to make me chuckle, if ruefully. And it always provides interesting information. So the dvd goes in, the fan is set to high and I start working on eliminating heat as an excuse for not using my brain and writing.

And guess what.

Epiphany numero uno…

…comes before I’ve even failed/flailed for more than a minute – My brain does work significantly slower in the heat.

(hey, it’s my epiphany, no sniggering at the glaring obviousness, please!).

I can barely copy the super slow beginners level 2 movements. Movements I was sailing through in Edinburgh last week. Hmm. Ok. So maybe the frustration isn’t just based on my complete uselessness and inability to knuckle-down-and-write-goddamit!

Epiphany numero dos…

…comes a few minutes in, but well before I chill out horizontally in the prepare-for-epiphanies-savasana-pose. And it is, that Siva Nata speeds the brain up and clears it in the heat.

Result.

Ok, rather than a second epiphany, it’s more of a deeper experiencing of something I already know. And (blush) something I’ve been glibly telling people about all week, cos the cosmic jokers can’t help themselves and have me yammering about stuff when I’m on the point of realising just how much deeper it goes.

Anyway, it’s this….

Our physical posture and our mental posture (read state-of-mind/attitude) are completely interdependent.

They influence and are influenced by one another in a constant, non-stop, never-ending cycle. Change one, and the other will automatically change too. Doesn’t really matter which one you start with.

Even if the mental posture is busy quite justly blaming the heat for mental fatigue, there are options and ways of changing things! (And they’re most easily accessed via the physical posture if the mental posture is feeling overwhelmed.)

The thoughts affect the chemical composition of the entire body. The way the body is used, the flow of our posture-in-movement, affects which types of thoughts we have.

As the kids would say ‘No sh*t Sherlock!’ … all the same, I love how the glaringly obvious can present itself at just the right moment, via just the right channel. Instead of being my Public Enemy Numero Uno, my struggle with the heat versus what-I-intend-to-achieve, can turn into a deeper discovery of the mind-body dance …  as well as a damn good reason to let the computer cool off too, and head over to Monda for a reviving dip in Sheila’s pool.  Win-win we like!

May 31, 2010

Rainy days and the Lung gompa money moth … or how metaphor works in my life.

(Woo-envelope alert! You have been warned… )

In this work I’m doing with the ‘Havinator’ to biggify my thing and generally have people know that it’s happening, most of the work has been on the inside of me. No great surprises there, it’s where the stuckness hangs out and the best place to go with my can of de-stuckifyer.

One of the first places we explored together was the Money Cave.

Weehee… loved it! It’s so purty in there, and sparkly, and fun, and boundless, and full of surprises, of the nice kind. Havi had me play with strands which were hanging down like vines in thick curtains. They’re there every time I go back (not quite as often as optimal, but it’s becoming a kitchen-sink/red-traffic-light retreat spot as quickly as I can build the neural pathways to make it a habit).

Pulling the strands in, like coiling a long rope, got kinda boring kinda fast… they seemed to be endless… but they intrigued me all the same. And each time I revisit the cave, they reveal neat new elements to their make-up. At the top of each strand (yeah, I did eventually reach the top, or the top reached me…) is a money moth.

Huh? Money Moth??

Uhuh?! Sure thing… They’re waiting to be sent off, or released, to work on the invisible stuff I can’t see, but that needs to be done. They’re moths because butterflies can’t see in the dark, of course.

Each of the projects and little-baby-things-that-want-biggifying has a strand and a moth, at least one. And until I connect with that strand (think Tree of Souls) they remain attached to it and unable to do their working-on-the-invisible-stuff-I-can’t-see.

A few weeks back, some little voice or mothy whisper in my head told me that a couple of them were hanging out for some of my attention, so I headed over to the cave (treading another round of new neural-pathway making) to see what was up…

The first strand that drew my attention released a little moth to complete a kind-of-mundane-but-essential task and close a little financial loop in my day-to-day. Gracias mariposa! It was as I stretched out my hand again, and made contact with the second strand that things began to get significantly more interesting…

Lung gompa moth…

The strand took on a life of its own, like a luminous thread of metaphoric dna it began to pulse and flow with light-life… waves were undulating along it and carrying me on a surge higher and higher. The thread itself contained spiral flows in both directions, information in the form of light…

At the end of this wonderful ride of life-force and creative inspiration, inevitably, there was a moth… but she was small, and still … not at all what I might have expected, if I’d had time to get into any expectations. There was something of a sadness around her which turned out to be because she’d been waiting… waiting… waiting, for me, for eons… or so she said.

The thing was though, that she was entirely meant to wait. Because as it happens, she’s a Lung gompa money moth (?!)… so the waiting’s built-in. Lung gompa’s train by waiting, building their super powers, refining their skill-sets, until the day when they are released and they set-off at speed across the vast Tibetan landscape, running with feet barely touching the ground and without stopping until they reach their destination, sometimes days later.

Before she set off, she let me know that her mission is to find and activate magical opportunities that result in windfalls-large-or-small for ‘a rainy day’. No kidding. Wow… now all I needed to know was the how-to on my end of the receiving of windfalls.

Receiving windfalls for a ‘rainy day’…

… is simple really. Just a matter of keeping an eye open for postcards she’d be sending along the way. Little messages and opportunities to tap in to the abundant flow, man!

Ooookaaaayyy… I think I can do that…I said to the gently falling cloud of moth-dust, dust cos she was ‘gawn’.

I’m not sure if there’s few postal services from the places she visits, but the postcards aren’t exactly piling up on the doormat (Ok -  there is in fact NO postal service to our finca in the olive grove, there’s no address either) … but the messages that get through are mighty enough to make up for their diminutive number.

Postcard 1:

The insurance claim post-burglary, where personal integrity (or plain stupidity) made me resist the urge to make a creative claim (despite the encouragement from the authorities – wtf?!) … but which yielded an astronomically over-generous pay-out solving the issue of a mechanics bill and seeding a nest-egg all in one fell swoop.

As a way of getting my attention, this one worked! Go money moth!

Postcard 2:

Some emergency translation to help a friend out with her work with NGOs … I took it on as service to the community … in the hope of some buckets of karma-cleaning fluid, cos I really didn’t expect much cash for it. But hey, lung-gompa-moth strike 2!  It worked out as a significant hours for euros exchange and the rainy day nest-egg just grew beyond ostrich sized in one coffee-fuelled pre-dawn blast.

So the corner of one eye is now trained on the metaphorical doormat, ever watchful … just waiting for the sound of a soft-moth-postcard-delivery … advising me of another opportunity to pump up that nest-egg with ease, delight and the disbelief-dissolving reality of lung gompa moth-hood.

April 1, 2010

Sovereignty, gravity and the-day-the-burglars came…

(Disclaimer 1: to cover my this-isn’t-good-enough-to-post ass:  It’s taken several Shivanautical explorations before putting fingers to keyboard, and it touches on some of my deeper stuff about being who I can be … and it’s scary. Still. I can feel it in a tight tightening of the facia across the front of my collar bones, which loosens as I type this….  exhale….)

(Disclaimer 2 : this post is loooong. You have been warned!)

The butterflies are on the outside now… I can feel how the butterfly-that-I’m-becoming is testing out the co-ordination of her wing movements. The four wing sections relate to segments and sides of my thoracic spine, sort of around the back of my heart. It makes it warmer inside, and more spacious somehow.  I can hear the line that ‘they will guide me’… hmm… pause… ok, I’ll go with that.

Being a butterfly is all about choosing to sacrifice what I have been in order to become what I can be.

The story of leaving the chrysalis…

starts a couple of weeks back when I came home, alone, to disturb burglars in my just-a-little-bit remote finca in an olive grove in southern Spain. Apart from the never-before-experienced fear which froze my blood and wiped useful activity from my brain (why was I clutching my phone? was I going to throw it at them?!) nothing hideously unpleasant really happened. They ran. They took next to nothing and didn’t leave much of a mess.

The bars on the bedroom window now look like wonderful Gaudi sculpture from Barcelona where my neighbour kindly bodged them back together to keep me secure (?) for the night.

My people rallied round Big time with constant presence, support and offers of company. The ensuing facebook conversations were hilarious given that the local police failed to find my house (it’s seriously NOT remote at all), not once but twice when they came back the next day for fingerprints! The chances of them finding two men equipped with legs and wheels seems a wee bit remote, even with the registration number (my brain kicked in briefly when throwing the phone at them clearly became pointless!).

Violation of self/space, essentially Sovereignty …

is what most people seem to resonate with when burglar stories are shared.

Yet I slept like a baby at night, though maybe the medicinal brandy did help on night 1!

But four days on, wow! …

I was feeling just as I had in the days immediately following the births of both of my sons. Spaced-out doesn’t come close to describing it, or maybe it does. My sense of where I end and the rest-of-existence begins was so expanded that ‘I’ was spread out across the Milky Way, endless, boundless, an enormous all-that-isness. Most definitely NOT handy for everyday living.

But the boundlessness has thrown up further interesting explorations into Sovereignty …. described by Havi as the quality of owning your own space.

Enter a sometimes-intimate-ally/dear friend…

… on the day after burglars-are-disturbed-in-my-home. By me. Alone. At mid-day. (Note : mid-day for chrissakes.. what kinda Spanish burglar breaks into a home at mid-day, when everyone comes home for lunch?!) Despite the Big time rallying round and support of my wonderful friends… I’m still feeling the need for more hugs.

So the ever loving sometimes-intimate-ally touches me with their compassion and kindness by interrupting an overdue evening of  work to administer to my not-unreasonable wish for sustained hugs. May they be blessed one thousand times!

And yet…..  this yearning for support and feeling somehow safe was not satisfied.

Help! Que pasa?

Does Sovereignty and its attendant strength require me as an overgrown kid adult to always provide for my own needs? Does real inter-dependant (not co-dependant), healthy relating mean that even in a time like this, neediness will not wash?

The intervening days of hard as these and other questions bubbled on the backburner came to blissful resolution yesterday … lying on the trampoline in the Spring sun… talking them over with an oh-so-wise friend. Several times in between, my body (another ever-wise friend) had asked me to lay it down so that my battered-feeling-heart could literally, physically, feel itself supported by a horizontal surface.

Our mutual wonderings revealed that the Earth (Gaia, the utlimate Mother, Gravity, whatever you want to call Her) does, in a very practical yet subtle way, always provide for our needs. As my body lay there, the holding in the tissue around the middle of my back, the backdoor to my heart, aided by our conversation and shared awareness, began to slowly unwind.

With easy breath, the gentle pull of gravity, and tracing with my attention the tiny increments of release… little by little… I felt the areas of tension dissolve and the tissue allow itself to let go. By the time our conversation was done (read – when the kids decided they wanted to bounce) my back was ready to explore the opening of new butterfly-wings.

The exploration continues… as I pump metaphorical-lymph-type-stuff into my newly opening wings.

My own personal brand of Sovereignty and boundaries might well need to include elements of being-like-the-Milky-Way. How this looks is still to be discovered.

That neediness is valid at times is clear. That I alone, with the help of my body, can find food for that neediness without turning to another has also become clear.

That butterflies can be trusted to guide me too.

Yay!

p.s. The tightness in my collarbone has freed now too – double yay!

March 11, 2010

Ballast monsters and the samba-butterfly-crew…

The other day I was exploring some stuff with the awesomely wonderful Havi Brooks which involved wondering how to bring the samba-butterfly-crew from inside where they were creating a certain degree of havoc, to the outside, where they might better be able to help me biggify my business.

The resistance involved a deeply held belief that it’s really, really important ‘not to rock the boat ‘!! Which is kinda funny, given as Havi kindly pointed out, I’m something of a professional boat-rocker by trade. ‘So where did that one come from?’, we wondered collectively.

Indeed.

Diving into the where made it quickly apparent it was much more of a who that we were looking for … and the who had feet. Two of them. Huge ones. Huge enough to make a hobbit’s look dainty. They were sticking out from under my front door, and on opening to take a look, they belonged to an extremely short, hairy, pretty featureless (on account of the hair) monstery-troll type person. (Think cavemen from the Wacky Races with vertically-challenged issues.)

This, it turns out, is my Ballast Monster… (??!)

His job is to keep the boat from being rocked. He’s ideal. Huge feet and a seriously low centre of gravity. He’s made for the job.. and good at it. He’s certainly managed to keep me from any dangerous boat-rocking activities, like actually posting any of my explorations on here, or finding too many of my right people that might actually want to work with me. And so forth..

So I pointed out how good he’s been at doing his job. This boat aint rocking much. More’s the pity. But with him down there as ballast… I really don’t see what the problem is. He liked that. It’s always nice to be seen and appreciated, huh?

How about some gentle divine guidance for the boat? … Would he be into considering that, we wondered?

Bless him if he didn’t just think that was the bee’s knees, or the butterfly’s wings, of a suggestion, as it happens. Because no sooner had we asked, than the boat was being magically lifted, James-and-the-Giant-Peachwise, by hundreds of samba-butterfly-crew butterflies each attached to a gossamer thread … taking me off on solo-adventurer-traveller explorations (with the Ballast Monster too, of course, to ensure a degree of stability).

p.s. If you’re now feeling the urge to check out what monsters might be hiding in your own unique pantheon, or even just to see how you might go about doing that, I’d totally recommend heading over to the Fluent Self for some 101 on the how-to’s, including how to come out unscathed.

p.p.s. The Ballast Monster’s just agreed that the butterfly-powered boat explorations are kinda fun… it looks like we might get some more exploring done… and get to report back here too! Yay. Result!

March 9, 2010

Why my sitz-bone is glued to my heel…

…. so I’m kneeling, ok?  Watching Andrei Lappa introducing the awesomeness that is Shiva Nata . I have my just-a-little-bit-more-challenging-than-usual question in mind to be flailed into clarity by my practice (more of that later) and there are a bunch of butterflies doing sambas through my whole torso. Not just in my belly, oh no, this is no local butterfly-samba-crew jamming on a Tuesday morning… there’s a whole Rio’s worth of carnival going on in here.

So I notice this.

And I notice that there’s also a light tension in the base of my throat… which is probably keeping the butterflies from storming my brain and causing all hell to let loose. Can’t have that ….

And it’s at this point that a gap appears.

Or more precisely, a gap makes itself apparent. It’s a space. And also a non-connection. It’s between my right sitz-bone and my right heel.

I’m kneeling on a blanket in front of the fire (and the video). Everything points to the continued presence of gravity… you know, furniture on the floor and the like. So really there’s no particularly good reason I can see for my right sitz-bone not to be resting easily on my right heel, just like its partner the left one is.

No good reason other than ‘maintaining the status quo’. Hmmm… did I just say that? Further hmmm … I’ve discovered a status, and it has a quo. I wonder. Why would this sitz-bone choose to hold itself out of gravity this way? And even more interestingly, what would happen if it made a different choice?

And in the meantime, I breathe. Fully. Easily. Lightly.

Which is when the minor miracle happens..  gravity steps in and does its thing. With the combo of easy breathing and more focussed attention, my sitz bone expands its awareness and feels the pull of gravity more fully..and realises there are easier ways to be here…and in fact that it could even rest. On my heel! As the awesomeness of this information rushes in, it drops.

And my world subtly changes one more time. The tension holding back the samba-butterfly-crew at the base of my throat begins to dissipate as my mind’s-eye traces the connections. From knee-to-ankle base on the floor, up through my newly balanced working-together-as-a-pair sitz bones and pelvis, my spine stretches itself out, luxuriating in the samba rhythms now pulsing freely through each cell.

And all the butterflies ?  … they flutter excitedly into my head, brain and through my mind to spill out here as this first Postcard from Lindsay’s body.

Yeeha !