Something I've experimented with …

I teach an exercise in some of my workshops where we do five minutes of freeform dance, five minutes meditation, five minutes Shiva Nata, five minutes meditation, five minutes freeform dance, five minutes meditation.

And in the second set of freeform dance, everyone finds that they're doing completely different movements, and also that they have an easier time “surprising” themselves by letting their bodies do something new and unexpected.

In terms of your smart question, yeah! Every time you challenge a pattern in one plane (for example, your free-form dance), you're making space to let patterns shift in other areas. In your brain, but also in your relationships/encounters with people, concepts, time, space, etc.

The only other thing I'd add to that is that the value of “challenging a pattern” is so strong that even thinking about challenging the pattern without taking action on it is actually already challenging the pattern.

Because you're bringing conscious awareness to your thought process, which is naturally going to spiral out into everything else. Yay, brains.

far-away hug!

Something I've experimented with …

I teach an exercise in some of my workshops where we do five minutes of freeform dance, five minutes meditation, five minutes Shiva Nata, five minutes meditation, five minutes freeform dance, five minutes meditation.

And in the second set of freeform dance, everyone finds that they're doing completely different movements, and also that they have an easier time “surprising” themselves by letting their bodies do something new and unexpected.

In terms of your smart question, yeah! Every time you challenge a pattern in one plane (for example, your free-form dance), you're making space to let patterns shift in other areas. In your brain, but also in your relationships/encounters with people, concepts, time, space, etc.

The only other thing I'd add to that is that the value of “challenging a pattern” is so strong that even thinking about challenging the pattern without taking action on it is actually already challenging the pattern.

Because you're bringing conscious awareness to your thought process, which is naturally going to spiral out into everything else. Yay, brains.

far-away hug!

Brain Gym by Dennison
I seem to recall Mead and Baetson commenting on some of this in relation to their research on tribal dance. I don’t have the references unfortunately.
Casteneda talks about this: You are being hunted by your own habits.
Do some research on the mind/body split – or more specifically the errors in that thinking: Philosophy_of_mind on wikipedia…

I’m so glad you understand.

I’ve been finding Shiva Nata creeping into my free form dance in Body Choir… who knows where that will go! It’s way fun, regardless!

I would definitely recommend doing movement that feels odd or awkward, often it looks the most interesting to anyone watching and it provides a completely different experience of the situation. Keep breaking and rebuilding those movement patterns: it’s whole body Shiva Nata!

Maybe it’s something like that? Only you ARE the dancer?

I also seem to recall a brain exercise my ASL teacher in high school used to make us do at the beginning of class every day- we’d cross our arms over our chest with our main hand (right-handed/left-handed) on the inside, and spin in the opposite direction. So I would cross my left arm over my right arm on my chest and spin to the left, right?

She said it was a brain exercise and I can give credit to it helping me wake-up on tired days. Maybe that’s it? Maybe your body found a spinning-source of brain-chemical energy, and is helping you to access it by nudging your spinning in that direction?