When I started doing Dance of Shiva, I was okay with the “wave your arms, get epiphanies” thing. I’d had enough experience with physical therapy to know that changes in the body could cause changes in the brain. That satisfaction lasted about 16 minutes, and then the engineer in me demanded to know where the epiphanies where coming from.
But in the Dance of Shiva, the main accent is made on the development of the multi-sector control of the body’s controlling structures, the increases of the speed of the controlling processes, and the forms of the new algorithms of transcendental links in the consciousness. These new links increase the power and generation of the bio-processor.
While I love the modern day alchemist tone of Andrey’s writing, it wasn’t the lucid explanation I wanted. So I started reading about neuroscience.
It’s a whole brain thing.
In his book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink points out that because we in the Western part of the world read left to right and are predominately right handed, we suffer from what is called “an alphabetic mind”. The left hemisphere of our brain controls the right side of our body, thinks sequentially, understands text, and knows how to analyze details. People who are L-Directed Thinkers, statisticians, engineers, accountants, love it over there.
On the other side, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, thinks simultaneously, specializes in context, and knows how to synthesize the big picture. People who are R-Directed Thinkers, actors, musicians, poets, like the right side more. And as Seth Godin points out in Linchpin, we need more and more creative thinkers since we’re giving the non-creative jobs away to robots.
The lovely thing about Dance of Shiva is that it works on both sides of the brain. The simultaneous movement of both arms means the left and right hemispheres are working together to coordinate the spiral motions. The left hemisphere will interpret the number of a particular position while the right hemisphere puts it into the context of the level being worked on. L-Directed Thinkers will be exercising the right hemispheres of their brains more than they’re used to, and visa versa for R-Directed Thinkers. That’s where the epiphanies come from.
Eventually, the monkey mind gets exhausted.
Because Dance of Shiva challenges the whole brain, it’s an extremely mental workout. If you’re making it challenging, you eventually reach the point where you’re saying the numbers wrong, your failing spastically, and your conscious mind is totally exhausted. In the gap of silence that happens when you lay down for shavasana afterwards, your subconscious has a chance to talk.
The creative sparkles and new insights that come after practicing Dance of Shiva happen because your brain has made new neurological connections. In her research, Elizabeth Gould showed that rich, stimulating environments cause neurogenesis and increased dendrite density. Because Dance of Shiva actively fires neurons on both sides of your brain, it causes new connections to form between your brain cells.
Those new synaptic patterns and connections mean you think about things in new ways, drawing connections and making conclusions you haven’t seen before.