The Dance of Shiva, Why I Do It Differently

When I first started doing yoga I learned Ashtanga yoga which for those of you who don't know, has a set series of yoga poses (and connecting moves between those poses.) It is one way of learning yoga with the benefit that once you learn the poses you can focus on doing them. However, as a teacher I didn't think I could spend my whole life teaching this one series over and over again. However, at the time it was all that I knew and I didn't know how else to do yoga meaningfully.

Along came Andrey Lappa with Universal Freestyle Yoga.

He taught me how to understand the body by breaking it down into elements and then looking at what movements each of those elements could do. For example the hip has 8 possible movements, the knee 2. Knowing all the possible movements for each joint we could exercise the body completely by making sure that we took each joint through all possible movements. By showing us how to break the body down he helped us to understand it.

This same method of understanding the body also allowed us to break down poses so that we could understand what how they worked on the body and also create poses based on what we wanted to do.

After experiencing this simple way of understanding the body and doing yoga I asked myself why I didn't think of it myself.

Psychic Energy Flows

When I started playing with the dance of shiva I thought that I had found the underlaying system behind how andrey created his yoga system.

However, discussing this with Andrey, his own idea (and it may have changed since I last talked to him) was dance of shiva as a way of practicing a sort of mental gymnastics. The idea in doing so was to create "psychic energy flows" or altered states of mind.

Since Andrey was pursuing another path completely with Dance of Shiva I had my chance to break down the dance of shiva into "meaningful elements" in the same way that Andrey broke the body down into elements to help us understand it and use it when doing yoga.

Oriental Calligraphy

Apart from yoga I had another experience of "breaking things down" into "elements of understanding." (Actually I've had a few but I'll leave those others out for now.) That other experience was via oriental calligraphy.

In brief, to learn characters and to paint them I practiced learning a few strokes at a time. I'd practice say five strokes of a character until I could do them more or less fluidly, with flow, and without having to think. they might not have been beautiful but that could be worked on later. Once I'd learned one set of strokes I'd add on. I'd learn to paint whole characters in this piecemeal fashion. Then I'd practice painting the character with the idea of flowing from one stroke to the next.

If I had problems then I'd focus on the problem area, the stroke or transition between strokes that wasn't flowing smoothly, then I'd go back to painting the whole.

Now imagine trying to paint a character like dragon which has 16 strokes. Imagine trying to remember it all (with no prior experience) and put them together in a way that looks right (let alone looks good.)

It would (I imagine) be quite difficult. However, if you break it down and practice it bit by bit you can learn it. And you can do the same with other characters.

The interesting thing (in my experience) is if you practice these little bits,enough (and it doesn't have to be alot, just enough that you don't have to think to do them) you can then paint a whole character without thinking. The experience is like watching yourself paint or draw. Or if you've ever learned to touch type, the feeling is similar. Or it's like speaking. We don't always have to think about what we say, we simply have to know what we say and then our lips tongue and mouth do the necessary actions to create words out of sounds which are created by muscle actions.

Back to calligraphy (and via that to the dance of shiva) When I've learned a character or set of characters to the point that I can do them without thinking I can then focus on feeling what I am doing while I am painting. More often than not the really beautiful characters don't come about when I think, instead they happen when I focus on painting them. And on occasion I've painted beautiful phrases when focusing on the idea of someone or something (one instance was someone's pet rabbit recently deceased.) Learning the strokes before hand, to the point that I don't have to think about what those strokes are frees up my mental space for focusing on "bigger ideas."

Freestyle Yoga

This same sort of thing happens when I teach yoga based in large part on how I learned it from Andrey. When I know the limits, say of the body and of my students (and myself) I can play freely within those limits and feel great both during and after class. Not only that, but if a student or students is having problem with a particular movement or action I can give isolate that movement and create an exercise disigned to help that student learn the movement so that they can use it within the pose that they are doing.

I've used this "skill" in teaching tai ji, as well as yoga and I've learned it to basically teach myself calligraphy.

Breaking Things Down Meaningfully

That element, that key thing I learned from Andrey isn't even how to do yoga, it's how to break things down into meaningful elements so that you can learn those elements and use them without thinking. And that's why I teach dance of shiva the way I do. It's a way of practicing, very simply "elements of meaning."

What are those elements? They are first of all the positions (both with one arm and with two arms.) And they are the movements, again, with one arm and then with two arms.

By naming the movements uniquely (instead of links, change, changeforward, changetransquarter, changebackwards) I make it easier not only to do these movements individually, I also make it easier to point to or communicate these movements since they each have a unique name.

You can then get on with doing them without having to think about what they are.