This page discusses in more details some theories and practices that inspired the Symbolic Space approach. It is a work in progress: it will take some time to organise all the knowledge and experience accumulated over the years into a coherent, succinct text. I plan to continue working on it. As of now, this is a description of one small aspect of the work — one practical piece that is somewhat easy to communicate and to use to begin the dialogue about Symbolic Space.
The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self- reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain, and danger. The forms of psychic entropy (uncontrolled mind wandering) that currently cause us so much anguish—unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt—are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness.
~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi1.
The divided self
The anguish that Csikszentmihalyi talks about makes us feel fragmented, as if each of us have multiple parts of the self that are at odds with each other. We might feel pulled into different directions by our needs and wants, by our rational thoughts and our fears, by the desire of success and the feeling of being not enough or by our spiritual and physical goals (as discussed, for example, in McNamara, 20092).
Conscious and unconscious knowledge
There are multiple reasons for perceiving the self as divided. One of the main aspects of being self conscious is the very limited resource of attention. While we are constantly bombarded with virtually infinite amount of information at each moment, our attention, our conscious brain can attend to only several bits of information at a time. However, not all the unattended information is lost. Our unconscious mental processes do pick up on many different aspects of information, but they are not able to communicate in to our conscious mind in words (see, for example, The Whole-Brain Child (2011) book by Siegel and Bryson for a detailed discussion3). The easiest example is nonverbal communication — the unconscious self picks up on the tone of voice, gestures, posture, the distance to another person, but rarely all this wealth of information gets into our attention. Nonverbal communication is a good example, but it is just a very thin layer of what else is there.
There is much more knowledge in our unconscious perception, much deeper knowledge. Yet, growing up in cultures prioritising rational, analytcial thinking, we lost the tools of accessing this knowledge. While we have no conscious awareness of this knowledge, it is there, trying to get our attention, which might result in feeling of being fragmented — having different, disagreeing parts of the self (as discussed in No Bad Parts (2021) by Schwartz4).
The multilayered brain and the bodily senses
Some theories in biopsychology and neurobiology talk about a “vertical divide” – the differences between interpretations of sensory information by brain regions at different anatomical levels. For example, evolutionary “older”, “lower” brain regions do not have the capacity to communicate in language. However, they are able to communicate it — some with metaphors and some through emotions (as discussed in Goodwyn, 20125; see also Lakoff and Johnson, 20086). In addition, “lower” regions of the brain have access to a much less conscious yet uniquely informative knowledge of senses. Importantly, those senses are not only well known five senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing, but also the senses that operate at a much more unconscious levels, senses such as proprioception (conscious awareness of body and limbs), interoception (sensations originating in viscera, e.g., hunger, thirst, heartbeat, digestive urges, and air hunger), and vestibular (sensory system that creates the sense of balance and spatial orientation).
Abstract and holistic aspects of knowledge
There is another type of a divide of self discussed in the literature, a “horizontal divide” — a divide between the brains hemispheres, left and right. In contrast to the popular belief about right hemisphere being responsible for creativity and the left hemisphere being responsible for logic and reasoning, both hemispheres contribute to analytical and artistic processes. The main difference between the hemispheres is not what kind of information they process, but how they do it. It is discussed at a very deep level in the works of Iain McGilchrist7. What he argues, is that the main reason the modern human feel progressively abstract and isolated is that our culture made an emphasis on the left hemisphere which is fond of categories, abstracts, and tiny details, but does not “see” a big picture. This is the job of the right hemisphere. However, humans progressively get stuck in the processes of the left hemisphere which “forgets” to report its calculations and categories to the right hemisphere which can put all this information into an all-encompassing picture which includes all of life.
The integrated self
The opposite of feeling fragmented is wholeness – a sense of having a unified consciousness: when all our parts seem to orient towards the same direction, to speak in unison, to be at peace with each other. The Symbolic Space approach offers the techniques (listed below) to achieve exactly that. These techniques allow to achieve a “vertical integration” of the knowledge from the bodily senses and different brain regions and as a result to have a much fuller understanding of the self, our perceptions, our behaviours, our (dis)connections with others, and the world — a sense of an integrated consciousness. This is discussed in good detail in Winkelman, 20108.
The techniques of the Symbolic Space also allow a client to achieve a “horizontal integration” resulting from bringing together the knowledge from a linguistic perspective of the left hemisphere of the brain with the more holistic perspective of a right hemisphere which processes language in a very different way, compared to the left. For the discussion on this topic see, for example, a 2017 book by Carol Wilson9.
For more information on people whose work inspired the Symbolic Space approach, please see the About page.
Theories and Techniques
A brief list of some of the theories and techniques at the heart of the Symbolic Space approach:
- Emergence and embodied cognition
- Using posture, body orientation, and body movements to access wisdom of the embodied knowledge and spatial awareness
- Animistic journeying-based techniques
- Evoking alpha and theta brain waves to relax the conscious mind and to get access to metaphors that are meaningful for “older”, “lower” parts of the brain
- The ultimate goal is to induce the integrative mode of consciousness
- Evoking alpha and theta brain waves to relax the conscious mind and to get access to metaphors that are meaningful for “older”, “lower” parts of the brain
- Metaphors and symbols
- Drawing on client’s metaphors to develop the understanding of the inner landscape, obstacles to goals, and solutions to problems
- Compassionate Communication10 and Coaching
- Deep, empathetic listening for the universal human needs
- Working with the client’s intention and/or goals
References
- Csikszentmihalhi, M. (2022). Flow: The psychology of happiness. Rider.
- McNamara, P. (2022). The cognitive neuroscience of religious experience: Decentering and the self. Cambridge University Press.
- Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child. London: Constable & Robinson.
- Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the internal family systems model. Sounds True Inc.
- Goodwyn, E. D. (2012). The neurobiology of the gods: How brain physiology shapes the recurrent imagery of myth and dreams. Routledge.
- Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
- McGilchrist, I. (2019). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. Yale University Press.
- Winkelman, M. (2010). Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness and healing. ABC-CLIO.
- Wilson, C. (2017). The work and life of David Grove: Clean language and emergent knowledge. Troubador Publishing Ltd.
- Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. PuddleDancer Press.