Thinking in images, symbolic actions and strange rituals seem to a civilized person to be meaningless, and their effectiveness is a coincidence. But what if the natives and ancient people just knew how to listen to the world around them, and he gave them hints? Perhaps we should do the same, at least sometimes return to the deep essence, trust intuition and inner strength, suppressed in modern society?
When Altai shamans set out to make rain in August 2019 to extinguish the burning Siberian forests, many residents of Central Russia considered it at least ridiculous and naive. But only not those who understand the deep meaning of this ritual, which at first glance seems absurd. For us who operate with logic, the rain that has fallen is just a lucky coincidence. For shamans, it is a consequence of the work of hidden forces.
“Modern society is very smart in an intellectual sense,” says art and gestalt therapist Anna Efimkina. “But after several years of working as a psychologist, I discovered that the mind does not help at all to solve some life problems. Moreover, sometimes it gets in the way. We, modern people, often think with the left (logical) hemisphere. And we completely block ourselves from non-standard decisions, for which the right hemisphere is responsible. The natives live with it. They do not need logic in our understanding, they have their own mathematics and physics. They think in images, seeing them everywhere."
Once upon a time all people thought so. This is how children see the world - until some authoritative adult tells them that “this is impossible” and the material world has limitations. Look around: how few of us who have grown up have retained this primordial ability to turn off the mind and follow intuition, inner conviction, the call of the soul and nature. But it can be returned!
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
In his book of the same name, ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “primitive thinking” universal and precapitalist thinking. This topic was carried away by the psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, founder of the French Association for Psychogenetic Genealogy Elisabeth Orowitz. She observed the life of indigenous peoples from the islands of the Pacific Ocean, Australia, India and Africa. Their actions can surprise and confuse the inhabitant of the metropolis, because the natives belong to that level of relationship with the world that has been forgotten and drowned out in modern culture.
“What Elisabeth Orovitz calls archaic thinking, I would call right-brain thinking,” explains Anna Efimkina. - The left hemisphere is responsible for cause and effect relationships. Once we did this - and this and that happened. Next time we will not do this, fearing that we will get hit on the back of the neck again, thereby closing the way for new experience - after all, it is not a fact that the situation will repeat itself. In the Akademgorodok of Novosibirsk, where I live and work, people with scientific degrees come to me for art therapy. On the first day of the seminar, their heads start to break - they are not used to thinking otherwise."
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These people can calculate their future, plan tomorrow. But something unexpected always happens in life. For a left-brain person, this is a hindrance, a system failure. But if you listen to the right hemisphere, then, for example, the usual breakage of the heel is a sign that plans need to be changed. It did not just break down, it broke here, now, in the context of this situation.
“Let's analyze the connection with the example of the heel,” continues Anna Efimkina. - The heel, for example, has been loose for a long time, but its owner is lazy and did not want to repair it in time. What else does she need to fix in her life but is she putting off? Or maybe the shoes are cheap and unreliable, and it's high time for their owner to change the price segment of purchases to a more expensive one? How else does she “discount herself”? What does he not allow himself? There can be many such versions. The story turns out to be not about the heel, but about something completely different.
But how do you get right brain information? In Gestalt therapy, there is an exercise called "Sound from the first person." Here's how to apply it: “I am Katya's heel. She usually goes to work in sneakers, but today she put on her shoes and rushed, and I'm not used to that speed, so I got stuck in a crack and broke. At the end, the client is asked to say the key phrase: "This is how I live, and this is the essence of my existence."
And now Katya realizes that, in fact, she is, deep in her soul, glad not to run to a hateful job. And he wants something else - in particular, to walk in heels and finally arrange his personal life. A broken heel stopped her so she could see how she ignored her own needs, causing herself inconvenience and even pain. The heel story reveals our deeper patterns.
“As we grow up, we learn to work with both hemispheres equally. But we can build new neural connections by teaching ourselves to think differently,”says the psychologist. The ability to see the connection between unrelated ("from the point of view" of the left hemisphere) events, the risk of listening to the messages of images (who in their right mind will get used to the role of the heel?) - all this helps to open some completely unknown layers of our existence. For example, we suddenly begin to feel differently our body and ourselves in the world around us.
BODY IN BUSINESS
Modern people, unlike the natives, most often do not perceive themselves as part of something huge and whole. This happens only when global catastrophes and events occur - terrorist attacks, fires, floods. “If something happens that is bigger than us, and we, as an individual, cannot do anything about it, then we feel it at the level of the body - we become numb, fall into powerlessness, even get sick,” notes Anna Efimkina.
In the routine of life, we, who live in the 21st century, reshape the world for ourselves so that we feel comfortable in it, create mountains of plastic waste, destroy nature, and exterminate animals. The native, on the other hand, feels himself to be a part of the world and considers any harm done to him as harm to himself personally. But he also believes in the retroactive force of this relationship. If I do something to myself, the world will change too.
“Clients often ask how to change the other or the surrounding space, and we come to a different formulation: how to change myself so that I feel comfortable living in this world? This is how primitive people reasoned,”explains Anna Efimkina. If something is wrong in our interaction with the world, the main mind - the body - will give a signal.
“The body is our archaic mind,” says the therapist. - It will tell if we are cold and need to get dressed, and that it is time to eat when we are hungry. If the body gets sick, this is a serious signal: something is wrong in our relationship with the Universe. We think ourselves too narrowly. But physically, we are part of a larger ecosystem. And spiritually, we are part of a huge collective unconscious."
We are all heroes of the movie "Avatar", where every blade and animal are connected by invisible threads. If everyone is a little indigenous, they will find that happiness requires far fewer things than we acquire and create.
Author: Olga Kochetkova-Korelova