Shiva Nata revisited – a year since I started

Plateaus happen. When you’re ready for the practice it will call to you.
Havi Brooks, Dance of Shiva Special Report #1

After a long silence in Insightings-ville, I received a comment on the I Heart Shiva Nata post. Kat wanted to hear my thoughts on Shiva Nata after doing it for more than nine months now. In fact, this was something I’d been meaning to post about, but there were some obstacles in the way. I’ll dedicate this post to answering Kat’s question, and then address the obstacles in a future post – there are some interesting threads to untangle there, too.

A year’s worth of Shiva Nata

I first tried Shiva Nata in June, 2008. From the first moment, I was hooked. I managed to establish a morning routine of Shiva Nata, yoga and meditation, and I felt awesome. Once or twice I taught the basics to a few people, and they were psyched as well. I was doing level 3 with movements in space, slowly moving on to level 4.

The morning routine carried as far as last spring. Then, for reasons I’ll get back to, I fell of the proverbial Shiva Nata wagon, and did maybe one or two practices a month for a good while. I’d do a few starting positions of level 4 arms to get my brain going in the middle of a work day, or a few level 4 arms-and-legs if I managed to get up early enough in the morning. Nothing as habitual as the routine I used to have, though.

What surprised me about that was how okay I was with that. In the Starter Kit (that I devoured right in the beginning as I was waiting for the DVD to hit my mailbox), Havi makes several fabulous points about the practice, but one of them was especially important to a recovering perfectionist like myself.

Plateaus happen.

Maybe this was one thing Shiva Nata had managed to drill into my unconscious. Not doing the practice is no reason to feel guilty. Not doing the practice is just something that works for you right now. When doing the practice starts working for you again, it will feel more natural and less guilt-inducing.

And it will start calling to you. Within two days, I received an email from Havi telling me the access information to the Starter Kit (which I’d incidentally lost as my hard drive crashed in the spring) and Kat’s comment asking me about Shiva Nata. If that’s not the universe nudging me, I don’t know what is.

So currently, I’m feeling a growing warmth towards Shiva Nata again. There’s no need for me to rush things with the practice – there will still be a lot of brain-pudding-inducing hardness in the future levels, and I don’t need to catch up with the time I’ve “lost” not doing the practice. I’m still working on level 4 with legs, and hope to move to level 4 with movements in space sometime. And after that? I’ll figure it out when I get there.

I’m still convinced by the fabulousness that is Shiva Nata, and consider myself a Shivanaut. Maybe one on an orbit?

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading my thoughts on this, and feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments! And as always – keep catching your own insightings!

Love,

Sari