Thinking in images, symbolic actions and strange rituals seem meaningless to a civilized person, and their effectiveness is a coincidence. But what if the natives and ancient people simply knew how to listen to the world around them, and he gave them clues? Perhaps we should do the same, at least sometimes return to the deepest essence, trust intuition and inner strength, suppressed in modern society?
When Altai shamans set out to make rain in August 2019 to put out burning Siberian forests, many people in Central Russia found 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, operating with logic, the falling rain is just a lucky coincidence. For shamans, it is a consequence of the work of hidden forces.
“Modern society is very intellectually intelligent,” 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. 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, everyone thought like that. 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 you can return it!
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The ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss, in his book of the same name, called “primitive thinking” universal and pre-capitalist thinking. This topic captivated the psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, founder of the French Association of Psychogenealogy Elisabeth Orovitz. She observed the life of indigenous peoples from the Pacific Islands, Australia, India and Africa. Their actions may 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 stifled in modern culture.
There is always something unexpected happening in life. For a left-brained person, this is a hindrance, a system failure
“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. One day we did something like this and something happened. Next time, we will not do this, being afraid to get hit on the back of the neck again, thereby blocking the way for a new experience – after all, it is not a fact that the situation will repeat itself. In the Academgorodok of Novosibirsk, where I live and work, people with scientific degrees come to me for art therapy. It is they who have a headache on the first day of the seminar – they are not used to thinking differently.
These people can calculate their future, plan tomorrow. But in life, something unexpected always happens. For a left-brained person, this is a hindrance, a system failure. But if you listen to the right hemisphere, then, for example, the usual breakage of a heel is a sign that you need to change plans. He did not just break down, he broke down here, now, in the context of this situation.
“Let’s analyze the connections using the example of a heel,” continues Anna Efimkina. – The heel, for example, has been staggering for a long time, but its owner is lazy, did not want to repair it in time. What else does she need to fix in her life that she’s putting off? Or maybe the shoes are cheap and unreliable, and it is high time for their owner to change the price segment of purchases to a more expensive one? In what else does she “depreciate” herself? What does he not allow himself? There may be many such versions. The story turns out to be not about the heel, but about something completely different.
Growing up, we unlearn to work with both hemispheres equally. But we can build new neural connections
But how do you get right brain information? In Gestalt Therapy there is an exercise called “Voice in the first person”. Here’s how to apply it: “I am Katya’s heel. She usually wears sneakers to work, but today she put on shoes and rushed, and I was not used to such speed, so I got stuck in a crack and broke.” At the end, the client is invited 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, in the depths of her soul she is glad not to run to a disgusting job. But he wants something else – in particular, to walk in heels and finally arrange his personal life. A broken heel stopped her from seeing how she was ignoring her own needs, causing herself discomfort and even pain. The heel story reveals our deeper patterns.
“Growing up, we unlearn 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 a heel?) – all this helps to discover some completely unknown layers of our existence. For example, we suddenly begin to feel differently about our body and ourselves in the world around us.
Body into action
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 a separate person, cannot do anything about it, then we feel it at the level of the body – we become numb, fall into impotence, even get sick,” notes Anna Efimkina.
In the routine of life, we, living in the XNUMXst century, reshape the world for ourselves so that we feel comfortable in it, create mountains of plastic waste, destroy nature, exterminate animals. The native, on the other hand, feels himself a part of the world and considers any harm done to him as harm to himself personally. But he also believes in the retroactive effect of this relationship. If I do something with myself, the world will change.
Physically, we are part of a larger ecosystem. And spiritually, we are part of a huge collective unconscious
“Clients often ask how to change another or the surrounding space, and we come to a different formulation: how to change myself so that I can live comfortably in this world? This is how the 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 psychotherapist. “It will tell us 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 too narrowly. But in physical terms, we are part of a larger ecosystem. And spiritually, we are part of a huge collective unconscious.”
We are all the heroes of the film “Avatar”, where every blade of grass and animal are connected by invisible threads. If everyone is a little native, they will find that much less things are needed for happiness than we acquire and create.