matter how much effort you put into this, you will never speak like a Russian”
A participant of the seminar in Moscow, her name is Svetlana, has been trilingual with Russian, Ukrainian, and Arabic though Russian has never been her primary language. She has been carrying a phrase once said by a teacher whose opinion was very important to Svetlana: “No matter how much effort you put into this, you will never speak like a Russian.”
We confirm the situation.
“Where did that phrase go and what does it look like inside?”
“It’s like a splinter in my heart.”
“What is your plan: will you continue carrying it or have you had enough of it?”
“Of course, I’ve had enough.”
“Then observe what is happening.”
“It has fallen into pieces and come out as bubbles through the top of my head.”
“It looks like it has left you the same way it came in. Quite often people seem surprised that everything negative comes out through the head, the top of it. It’s like a hatch, which opens up, and then everything that got inside by mistake comes out.”
“The wound on my heart is healing.”
“It sometimes happens that closer to the end of the healing process, there’s the sensation that someone touched the wound with a brush, and then everything smoothed.”
Svetlana draws another breath. I ask her:
“Where is the new understanding of the situation? You speak Russian very well, and with every new day, you will speak even better.”
“It’s like a light-coloured cloudlet above me.”
“Isn’t it time this cloudlet came where it belongs, to your suffering heart?”
Svetlana observes how the cloudlet envelops her, gets absorbed by her skin, and then reaches her heart.
Svetlana feels calm. She opens her eyes25.
What do we do to update the state we are in?
Here is a template for such kind of work. In order to work with the discovered unnecessary formations, we use the following questions: “Is there anything that prevents me from speaking the language I need? Where is it? What does it look like?”
If there is anything that seems disturbing, you will find it in a particular place and in the form of a particular object.
Then you decide if you want to keep nurturing it or it is time to stop. If you choose to stop and you do not want to nurture it anymore, then you observe how it dries out to its original state: whatever came from outside will stay, and whatever you added to yourself will be taken back. The rest of the “foreign object’ goes away the same way it came in. You will calm down.
When you calm down, it means that you observe the redistribution of energy on your body. Your arms and legs get warmer and have a pleasant heaviness; your head feels lighter, and the forehead cools down; your chest and stomach feel free, if before that you experienced any heaviness or compression; and they fill in if they used to seem empty. At the end of this process, you make sure that the place where trauma used to be is clean and calm. “The wound’ has healed, everything has smoothed, and there is no “scar’, no “inflammation’ left.
However, you need to be able to distinguish between the two classes of the condition: trace stress due to the lack of competence, which easily melts during observation; and the injury itself, that is: consequences of fright, ridicule, etc. In such cases, one needs to observe how the feeling that has damaged this person in the first place leaves the body.
Another step is looking for the necessary experience in the space around you. The goal of this experience is to help you develop a new attitude to what used to hurt you: it may look like a little cloud above your head of some sort of condensation inside your head, and then it goes in the form of light, fog, or a more concentrated stream to the damaged place.
Remove the splinter and move on
As for the lack of tact or stupidity of other people that often hurt sensitive people, then there is an old Russian saying for that, even if you don’t sow fools, there’ll be enough of them for the next hundred years. A certain percentage of people of this kind always exist among us. Sometimes, there are more of them, sometimes there are fewer, but they always exist. It is silly to expect that one can live a long life without meeting foolishness or evil. It is more practical to understand how different people are and that it is impossible to expect everyone to treat you nicely and with tact, even if you try to treat everyone this way. Moreover, if you got hurt, do not dwell on your pain, remove that splinter as soon as possible, get wiser and move on!
Now, you can address difficult situations in a mature and business-like manner. No one can keep you from increasing your competence!
You may have already succeeded in doing this part of work following the instructions. Just in case, there is a brief algorithm presented in a more structured way.
Exercise 5: Working through internal tensions and traumas received during the learning process
Read the first step of instruction, close your eyes, do the part of the exercise, then open your eyes for a while and read the next step.
– Where are the feelings, left from the first encounter with a foreign language? The first time you heard it, the first attempts to understand and speak – where and what impressions did they leave?
– What do you feel like? Do you feel happy and ready to work (which would be great)? Do you feel some mobilizing tension or even feeling traumatized?
– In case you feel calm, comfortable, and confident, just reinforce this state, let your body feel and spread this awareness, too.
– If you feel some tension or even some damage, wait for the moment when you feel where the element supporting this tension is: is it at some distance from your mind or has it gotten inside? When did this damaging signal start? Did it hit you in the head, the chest, or the stomach? Is every cell of your body suffering? What does this wounding element look like according to your sensations?
– Wherever these damaging elements hit you, wherever it is now, and whatever it looks like (whether it is a rock, a pin, or some unpleasant powder, you need to decide if you prefer to keep carrying it around or if you have had enough of it.
– If something wounded you, observe how this object or energy leaves you in reverse trajectory. Whatever got inside without invitation, let it go without any regrets; it will come out the same way it came in.
– If this is something massive, then you should try to relax and calm down, and take back all your energy from it. This object will dry out; it will get smaller and smaller, and what is left will disappear completely or will fly away.
– Residual inertial tensions melt, and a pleasant warmth and heaviness softly spread all over your body from the centre to the periphery. After this, your mind will get clear. Your arms and legs will get the sensation of being filled; your head, chest, and stomach relax and calm down.
– When you feel that the space of your mind has cleared, and internal filling is even; there is an overall feeling of integrity, purity, and balance, and then you should wait for the realization of the way you should treat similar potentially stressful situations in the future. This understanding may appear right above your head in the form of a little cloud or sun, or it can already appear in your head, on the forehead as the concentration of something radiant.
– Then