Learn Languages Easily. Methods of self-regulation for successful learning

Psychocatalysis is a way to help the self-regulation of the body

Psychocatalysis

 is a method of regulating the body, including its autonomic level. Getting access to the regulated processes in the body is possible by paying a very close attention to the sensations in the body and by observing our internal space. There are three main phases in this process: exploring the initial state (a brief analysis), making a decision concerning spontaneous changes that have taken place earlier (what should move on and leave the body), and – finally – observing the changes (active “meditation’). This method is quick and efficient, and it allows refreshing the state of a person at all levels: at the level of the body as well as at the level of “the head.”

Catalysis

is a term used in chemistry. Adding a catalyst can accelerate a slow-developing process. A lump of sugar can remain solid in cold water for quite some time, but if one heats the water, it will quickly become a part of the solution. The same way with the help of hydrochloric acid and enzymes, the food in our stomach turns into “chyme,” or a set of basic elements; however, without the enzymes, the food will remain hard as a brick.

In the case of our minds, the heater or the enzyme is our conscious attention. It is

precisely our attention,

which brings the

energy and ideas

 necessary to trigger the processes.

A boy with a stick and a clock-master with a brush

Here is another image to demonstrate the idea of catalysis: it is spring, and there is a stream of water; some splinters formed a dam and did not let the water go through, and the stream stops as a result. A boy comes and moves the splinters aside; the stream keeps going and carrying the boy’s toy ship. This boy with a stick is our attention, and the ship is the useful information.

And here is an image of setting free from traumas which disturb normal course of psychological processes: a clock-master looks at the broken mechanism through a magnifying glass: he pushes back the spring, takes out a speck of dust, adds a drop of oil, and the clock resumes its rate.

Psychocatalysis

 is similar to the work of a clock-master, only that it deals with our minds which sometimes also accumulate “dams’ or “specks of dust’ and, sometimes, one needs to “pull the spring back’ or “remove those debris and oil the mechanism’ in order to keep the machine going.

The chilliness of culture cools down the heat of the spirit

Self-regulation and self-healing are the part of our regulatory system, but their potential is not limitless. M.E. Burno, whom I consider one of my teachers, called nature “a wise fool’. A fever is supposed to help our body fight the infection, but if the temperature gets too high, it causes problems, too. When it comes to our psychological health, then our excessive worries are similar to high body temperature. Then the chilliness of culture helps the heat of the spirit cool down to a reasonable temperature. Sometimes, one needs to “turn up the heat’ to speed up the processes which “have frozen.”

Nature does not restore everything automatically, and it looks like it left a part of its responsibilities for restoring the peace of mind to a human being hoping that we will be able to do it. So, we have to live up to nature’s expectations!

Emergency protection

I often compare the kind of protection that activates in the case of stress to an airbag in a car. This airbag saves our lives at a moment of the crash, but it never goes back to its place again. You cannot continue your way once it has been activated, and the car needs to be serviced. Our autonomic system works the same way: if it activated in a dangerous situation, it cannot switch off itself once activated. It is as if nature tells you: “I have saved your life, and you’re on your own. I haven’t really thought of that moment with calling the reactions back.” People tend to accumulate these “upsetting episodes,” and that is why they need to make a special conscious effort to restore psychological balance.

The brightest example of a psychological “dead-end’ that forms under the influence of the natural mechanisms is a phobia. Frightening information “impresses’ the body to such an extent that a mere reminder about the situation which caused this fright leads to a recurrent reaction of fear, even if the situation is no longer relevant, and a person understands that too.

The problem is that this frightening information led to the triggering

emergency protective

mechanisms,

 which do not switch off automatically and get fixed in the psychosomatic profile of a person.

One can use their mind, just like a steering wheel of a vehicle, to navigate through life. However, this principle works only under normal conditions. In extreme situations, automatic single-action safety mechanisms come to our rescue, and once they act like our airbags, moving forward comes to a halt for a certain period.

Healing from phobia does not require a lot of time, but it does call for a special approach: one needs to extract the information that entered the body at a moment of frustration, and now it is set deep in the mind of this person. Greyness or blackness is to be found where it entered the body, and where it moved to, and what it “hit,” and then it should leave the body the same way it came into it. As a rule, it is found in the stomach or in the area of solar plexus where the information tends to hit; then it comes out through the top of the head as black smoke. As a result, a person begins to feel the balance in life and can “steer’ it as he or she did before, that is: using intellect and mature coping mechanisms.

It is rather difficult to imagine any process of restoring balance without this procedure of “letting the smoke out’, which might seem odd at first sight. Without the procedure, “cleaning’ the autonomic depths of our nervous system, the feeling of fear, can last years, even if the central nervous system “came to its senses’ and realized that the danger has passed.

This “object that we discover in our body’ and the way to work with them is described in my previous works (Ermoshin, A. 1999, 2008, 2010).

Later, we will have a look at the most significant elements of this work in case of foreign languages. This way, we will only help our nature, and we will not introduce any alteration, which means we will act only when automatic regulatory processes fail to do their job. Psychocatalysis is a temporary suspension of a “manual control’ that restores normal functioning of a self-regulation mechanism. Reasonable decisions (the work of our intellect) help the profound wisdom of our body find its way out of a dead-end, which the body drove itself into while solving the problem and using the subconscious in-born strategies of problem-solving triggered by emergency situations.

98 dollars

The decisions themselves, when found, seem to be very simple. There is a joke about a mechanic who made a couple of circles around a broken car, listened to the sound of the engine and then hit it once with a hammer. The engine started working well again. The mechanic writes a cheque for 100 dollars. “Why?” “One dollar for using the hammer, one dollar for the hit, and 98 dollars for finding the right place to hit.”

The connection with the processes that take place at the autonomic level of our nervous system is carried out through our sensations. I do not exclude that the processes at this level cannot be regulated by other methods.

Access via sensations

Each mental process has its own “autonomic accompaniment’: reaction of the blood vessels, muscles, changes of metabolism and of temperature in the brain or the body, as well as changes in electrical conductivity of the tissues. They can be registered objectively and subjectively.

The body electricity

The body electricity can be considered a detector of internal processes built into our body. I am very grateful to Professor A.A. Tabidze for his collaboration in 2012 when we were establishing the correlation between subjective sensations of the patients and some objective parameters. Prof. Tabidze was measuring the intensity of a current at 12 specific places on the wrist and on the sole of the feet (Nakatani-Klimenko method) before and after the psychotherapeutic sessions that I was conducting. In cases of connection with strong emotions, the test revealed considerable positive dynamics: energy channels manifested levelling of conductivity levels. At the same time, one could also observe a correlation between subjective and objective channels. However, if the problem of the patient had a chronic and not only psychogenetic character, then improvement was not as fast.

Changes in brain activity in different states can be registered by modern methods of neurovisualisation, with the help of positron emission tomography (PET). The results of numerous researches are published online, especially on the websites dedicated to the research in the field of hypnosis.

Areas of hot and cold in our body corresponding to the different states are registered by a thermograph.

It is known that “lie detectors’ actively exploit this phenomenon to confirm, if the information given by the respondent is true or false. However, a person can discover a lot about him/herself without any machines, simply by immersing in one’s sensations. Ability to “self-scan’ seems to be this wonderful mechanism offered by nature in order to give us an opportunity to find out the characteristics of our state of mind and ways to participate in its improvement.

Information provided by our internal sight is as relevant as the data on the radar for an air-traffic control officer responsible for airplane traffic in the sky.

Somatopsychotherapy

Karl Jaspers (1883—1969) noted that “intense concentration on one’s own somatic sensations (like the one described by Schulz in connection with autogenous training) leads to ‘discovering organic worries’ which do not depend on suggestion and are not the fruit of illusory development of normal sensations, but they are available for testing by augmented cognition” (Jaspers, K., 1997, p. 283). He called the field of science that deals with the sensations in the body “somatopsychotherapy’. The earlier name of psychocatalysis was “somatopsychotherapy’.

Sensations that accompany various worries are quite concrete. Just think how feeling happy makes us fly, and this sensation seems to be very strong. The weight of unresolved issues often pressures a person, and it is quite tangible. For each emotion and each psychological process, there is its specific configuration of characteristic sensations.

Concentrations and discharges, rises and falls

When a person closes his or her eyes and starts paying attention to the sensations at the level of the body, then it turns out to be quite easy to determine the places of fullness and emptiness within the internal space.

These places often manifest themselves as concentrations of light, air, water, some matter, lava, golden or silver sand or other pleasant substances. However, one can also discover blackness, darkness, and greyness of different degree of density: it can seem like dust, soot, pieces of glass, chips of stones, and other elements, which one perceives as disturbing, unpleasant, and as a foreign object causing tension around itself.

According to people’s perceptions, the body itself may appear as

a mighty

tree standing on the top

of the hill

, and, on the contrary, it may

look like a scrag

. Sometimes, it’s a 

beautiful vase filled with

jewellery

, and sometimes it is

 an old dusty room

. All these images send their message as they reflect the state of a person. When we begin paying keen attention to these sensations, it opens up access to the regulation of spontaneously provoked conditions.

Meditation-based practices

Due to sensations that have to do with the realm of consciousness, they are easier to register when having one’s eyes closed. That is why the major part of such practice is meditation-based: a person closes his or her eyes and observes the processes that take place inside and consciously takes part in them.

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

we’ll have a look at it together

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  Moscow, 2010.

.”

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 Spirit

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  See also: “Добротолюбие” (Dobtorolyubie), 4 volumes.

.

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.

 In the course of the session, the “cause’ stops receiving any supply, then it is sent to a reasonable distance, and after that, the patient finds an antidote in order to stop the cause “poisoning’ his/her life

. As a result, this person achieves not only a temporary state of relaxation, but also an actual reinvention that will give him/her peace for many years ahead.

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 “

hypnosis inside out,” or “anti-hypnosis

:’ “Wake up and observe w