Андрей Ермошин – Learn Languages Easily. Methods of self-regulation for successful learning (страница 9)
One should add here that observation practices go a long way back in history, and their efficacy has been noted.
“Let’s observe together…”
During one of the international congresses on psychology, I was sitting next to a Hindu who was an heir of the ancient tradition of internal work. It was obvious from his behaviour that he was a real guru. He was a very sympathetic and warm person. When one Russian woman who looked very sad told him that her heart was aching, his reply was the following: “When I finish the Q&A session, we’ll go and sit together in the hall, and
Psychocatalysis has quite a lot in common with various ancient and modern practices, but it also brings them to the next level. This method has a diagnostic stage that is similar to Western analytical practices. However, if traditional analysis of a certain feeling can take years, in psychocatalysis, it takes about 3 minutes. Then, there is a stage when the patient observes the changes of his or her state, and this aspect of the method brings it closer to Easters meditation-based practices. Yet again, if traditional meditation-based approach may last for years, therapeutic stage of psychocatalysis takes minutes. There is a bridge between these two stages: a kind of a transitional stage that unites the work of the conscious mind and the innermost wisdom. This is the stage of evaluation and decision-making, and it takes as much as one needs to grasp the discovered situation and find a solution to it. In many cases, it just takes seconds, but it is those seconds that matter most because they are followed by switching from the reflection to the healing observation.
“A clever fight’ and other congenial practices
An attentive reader will find a certain correlation between psychocatalysis and “a clever fight,” which is a practice from Orthodox monarchism: to observe everything that is happening in the internal space in order to preserve the purity of your heart and yourself as a good vessel for the Holy Spirit19.
Some readers may also see that psychocatalysis has something in common with the methods used by the country quacks. They admit that the change in the state of a person is connected with the fact that our soul receives or loses particular substances, the way it happens with hiccups, for instance. Hiccups “attacks’ a person and then, when one is healed, it comes out and disperses. By the way, in psychocatalysis, you would not “send’ hiccups to anyone, as there is no such need for it. It just stops getting the support of the body and disappears.
In some way, it also reminds me of a Russian fairy-tale about Trouble. Once upon a time, there were two brothers: one lived happily, and the other did not. The unhappy brother decided to find out the secret of happiness from his brother. “I buried my troubles in the field.” The unhappy brother was also envious, and instead of burying his troubles, he dug up that of his brother. Then he dug up Trouble and said to it: “Go back to my brother.” “Why would I go back to him: he’s a bad person, he buried me but you’re good because you’ve dug me up, I’ll stay with you.”
Shaman practices are based on the attitude very close to that of the quacks: some parts of the soul can be lost and some foreign objects, on the contrary, can take their place inside our soul where they should not be. Shaman will be sending the “snake,” which causes distress from the stomach to the centre of the Earth, and that pure part of the soul, which has been rescued will be sent back to the body. Here, we need to add that psychocatalysis does not offer standard solutions like “everything bad will be sent to magma,” etc. The principle of reverse development of the symptoms suggests involution of harmful states, using the same way they appeared in the first place. Fright experienced during one’s life goes away through the top of the head; if it was experienced in mother’s uterus, it will leave the body through the navel; and if this fright is ancestral, then it will go away through legs and feet. Sometimes, it comes out of “all pores.” The way it appeared, it will disappear – it is the same movement, but backwards.
Psychocatalysis is also a close autosuggestion of I. Schultz. However, we do not simply work with wishful thinking. When the warm feeling of psychocatalytic reaction spreads all over the patient’s body, it has its origins and appears for a reason. What makes psychocatalysis different from autosuggestion is the approach to the fact, where warmth and heaviness are initially located and what keeps them there. This is autosuggestion with a diagnostic phase and with solutions concerning spontaneous “formations’ in the body before the’ training’. During the session of psychocatalysis, patients observe the movement of negative sensations to the periphery because there is nothing left that would hold them in the centre.
Some people call this practice “hypnosis without hypnosis,” or even “hypnosis inside out.” They refer to it as “hypnosis’ because what happens during the session is close to what we witness at the session of hypnotic trance. It is “without hypnosis’ because we don’t confront our consciousness and that is why it is unnecessary to turn it off. On the contrary, our consciousness has to take an active part in everything that is happening during the session. For this exact reason, this method can be called “
The light of knowledge versus the darkness of ignorance
Data processing is followed by different sensations, and the experience of practising psychocatalysis allows us to make the following observations.
When new useful knowledge, welcomed by us, makes its way through our mind, we experience the sensation when some light-coloured mass of information is moving from periphery to the centre. When unnecessary knowledge is being “deleted,” we observe the reverse process: it begins from the centre and moves to the periphery; it comes out through the top of the head as something dark, grey, or black, which is what affected us at the moment of frustration. This is how primordial elements of our consciousness send signals, which enter the body and leave it. A variety of cases when patients needed to get rid of unnecessary information are presented in my book “Phobias, Disappointments, and Losses” (2010, 2011, 2014), and we are going to see more of those examples that relate to the subject of this book.
“Knowledge is light; knowledge is power.” “Ignorance is dark.” These expressions reflect how people really feel. If everything goes smoothly, the light of knowledge, which nurtures life, fills in and lightens up the body, whereas the darkness, cast by ignorance and lack of confidence and characterized by a knot in the stomach, step away and disappear, defeated by its power. If something foreign has wounded the depths of the body, it would go away, too.
Knowledge in its integrity, thoroughness, and maturity finds its deserved place while harmful fragmentary and random information leaves it. When “frights,” “deceits,” and other traumatizing signals leave the body, our autonomic nervous system calms down, and our emotional balance is restored.
Studying is much more efficient and successful when one is in a calm state. In this condition, the flow of information come from every direction, and everything new seems easy to learn.
“Mission control centre’
The location of information within the psychological space of a person defines its status and its influence on this person’s life. There are places with more degree of influence, or “prestige.”
The vault for most significant information is usually in our stomach. It is like a town hall. This place keeps the essential information about what one should strive for and what one has to avoid. This is the place, we will usher the information that will help us take a creative approach to life and will eliminate everything that has a harmful effect on it.
Core competence
Information can be stored at the level of the head, but this is not its final destination. Our head and brain can be easily “disturbed’ by the stress. Experience shows that a much more secure place is our body, for instance, at the level of the solar plexus. Deeper levels of the nervous system are much more stress resistant, and they keep the information even in extreme situations. It is similar to oceanic depths because they are always quiet, even if there is a storm on the surface. Having such core competence, a person maintains the ability to adapt creatively to different circumstances, even when reason seems to fail to do it efficiently, and when the brain is intoxicated by stress. Nevertheless, only information that is useful and appropriate for life should be stored there.