free. Her ability to hear and to listen returns.
Sometimes, it feels like earplugs falling out when your ability to hear is being restored30.
Tongue in the hook
Here is an example of working with myself.
I learnt German in school and college (in der Schule und in der Hochschule). What do I have left from those times?
My tongue is on a steel hook.
When I was in the fifth grade, our headmaster told us that our new teacher was highly professional and that her pronunciation was the best among other students of her university. Perhaps, this was just a way to supporting a young teacher and earning our respect.
Quite paradoxically, it did not inspire and, on the contrary, we felt numb. It seemed embarrassing to speak with a bad accent in front of such a teacher, but it also seemed impossible to understand how one should pronounce from those few comments and few classes we had with her. In the end, no one dared to talk in front of her, and no one could learn to do so because there was no other source. There was only a textbook. Nobody has heard about audio and video courses back then. Language teaching was very formal and scarce.
Now, many years later, I have a better understanding of that situation, but it does not resolve the conflict between high requirements and the lack of opportunity to correspond with them, which I experienced at school.
Even though I always get my As for German, I continued learning this language in college and achieved a certain level. German has always been a language for reading rather than speaking for me. That “hook’ that got my tongue had me through the years. Naturally, as soon as I realized it, I chose to “get my tongue off the hook.”31
My mind took it quite literally: a steel hook and then setting my mind free from it.
A lump in the throat
A lump in the throat is one of the typical syndromes. It can become an obstacle for the free flow of speech. In many cases, it is connected with the feeling of being offended.
There is a little trick in working with this condition: you do not work with the lump – you should work with what caused it. A lump itself is a secondary formation, and it merely reflects the reaction of the body to the trauma. That is, you should determine what affected your chest at a moment of deceit, the wreck of hopes, insult, or disappointment. In the “pit’ of the chest, there will most probably be pieces of your first naive ideas about life and people. They often look like shatters of glass or knockings of stone.
In all cases, these symptoms are subject to reverse action: they either resolve or heal right away, or “fall out,” and then the energy of the shatter and pieces returns to the body. The lump also resolves after that. A new attitude to life, this time more realistic, comes to the body as light and/or warmth that makes your head more sensible, your soul tougher, and your willpower stronger.
A more detailed description of de-traumatisation and de-neurotisation algorithms are presented at the end of this book. It also includes working through the traumas of disappointment and offence. This is what it looks like in practice.
Tatiana the artist
Tatiana is a grown-up person; she is an artist. She said that she was a straight “A” student and, at some point, she had to change schools. At her new school, English classes were given much more attention than at her previous school. She did not want to look ignorant, so when she was asked whether she had read this or that author in original, she would respond: “Yes, of course!” Her answer would provoke laughter in the classroom. As a result, that period of life brought her the feeling of tension, which has accompanied her to the moment of our meeting.
We discovered it during the following work.
“There is an idea to learn a language. Does this project appear new or far from you? It can appear as some sort of container in front of you. You should decide whether you want to accept it or to reject. If you choose to accept, then observe how your soul is accepting it.” (The method of “putting on’ good things and using this moment as a checkpoint will be described later. We still have to find out more about the method of “test phrases and images.”)
Here is the description given by Tatiana.
“I have started drinking from the cup eagerly. Suddenly, there’s a headache, and everything got stuck in my throat.”
“Is it a technical problem: for example, the cup is too big, and the throat is too narrow? Or is it your body protesting?”
“Most likely, it’s a protest. I tried to imagine that it is water, like a puddle of water, which I could absorb with my feet, but it turned out to be impossible.”
“Is there anything inside that would perceive learning a language as potentially harmful?”
“There is nothing that I could think of. I like learning new things, and I always put my knowledge to use. I’m checking my inner container, and there’s also enough space.”
“Let’s define what kind of impression you first encounter with the foreign language produced.”
Tatiana begins telling her story. For her final year, she had to change schools, and at her new school, everyone seemed to have a much better level of English. Then she realized: “I don’t know this language while everyone else speaks it fluently.”
“I had no problems with other subjects, but English was different. My classmates treated me with condescension, and they laughed at me.”
“What kind of impression did it leave inside? Is there a feeling of inferiority?”
“There’s tension in my head, chest, stomach, throat, and shoulders. There’s a boulder in the soul and a lump of offence in the throat.”
“Many years have passed since then. You have acquired a lot of new knowledge, and there have been many achievements. If it is just tension, then let it melt; if you feel there is something hurting you (it does not matter whether it is sharp or blunt, big or fine, you have to let it go the way it came). Follow the principle that we let go of everything that came in without any invitation.”
“It feels better now. Something was holding me in the chest, like a lump. It’s gone.”
“Now that you’re free from the influence of the old wound and tension, observe what is happening next.”
Everything, connected with language learning (contents of that cup), was absorbed by the whole body. Here are Tatiana’s words:
“I imagined that my whole body was absorbing some yellow-coloured substance. My body was learning the fact that a language could also be learnt by the whole body32.”
What to do when something is smothering you, and you feel screens in the throat and a noose around the neck
Some people discover that they have a noose around the neck or a screen at the back of the neck all of which cause the feeling of being suffocated. We have to note here that such sensations do not always point to psychological problems. One should also consider that they could be the symptoms of problems with the spinal column or with the thyroid gland. It can even be ischemia (insufficient oxygen supply) of the nucleus of the glossopharyngeal nerve or other reasons.
If your intuition is telling you that the reason is psychological, nothing stops you from having a look at who is controlling the noose in case you feel it around your neck. Usually, there is nobody else who would hold it. Even if there was someone who provoked the spasm, you do the rest on your own. That is why you have to decide whether you want to keep on going like this or put a stop to this.
It