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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!

(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!

…. 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 !