MINOR CULTURAL DIVERSITY

EXERCISE THREE

Generate new individual content based on the collectively chosen keyword/category: It can be from personal documents, family documents, cultural documents, school documents, marginalised history, fabricated, speculative etc. Write a few lines of your interpretation of the collective keyword, collect in a file/moodboard and upload to the Students work folder on Teams.

What is my definition of healing?

To answer this question, I must first answer what it means to find yourself in a position where healing is required, to be ill.
Illness, according to the dictionary is: "a disease or period of sickness affecting the body or mind.".
What is perceived as disease or sickness has to do with normativity, e.g. the society/culture you live in has created a social construct in which a certain state of mind/body is non-normative, others will see you as ill. This in turn makes you feel uneasy, or, diseased. The social construct can also be projected onto ones self, e.g. feeling pressured to perform, resulting in high levels of stress and suicidal thoughts.
To be healed then means, to restore your position to a normative one, or learn to live with the uneasy feeling of not fitting into the box created by your surroundings.

Sunny side of spirit - Sunny bergman, VPRO

In dancing, regulating your breath and synchronising it with your movement is very important. Exhaling creates space and relaxation for a motion to reach its full capacity, inhaling builds up energy which can be in turn used to exhale again. Faster breathing transports more oxygen through your body, which allows for better performance.

Sunny Bergman asks in her 3-part documentary what depression means in other cultures, she's looking for 'solutions for problems of the mind'. The latter question is something I mean to answer, or at least work towards in my research and graduation project.
The 45 minute episode I liked the best takes place in Accra, the capitol city of Ghana (west-africa).
Right at the beginning they talk about dealing with setbacks, and how the people there want things such as a bigger house or more money, but don't get too upset when they don't get them. This has to do with their expectations. A saying they have is "take it like that". I've always believed that expectation management is key to a happy life, so it's great to see their mindset.

In Ewe, apparently there is no word for being depressed.

People seem resilient in Accra, according to Sunny. I believe resilience has to do a lot with mindset as well and there are things you can do to position yourself in your surroundings to achieve it.

When talking about feelings and emotions, a man passionately tells about how they are shared; if you feel sad, I too feel sad and feel responsible to take you out of that emotion. The comparison is then made to The Netherlands where feelings are private.
I've experienced the hardship of openly sharing emotions with people other than my mother and sister recently, and I'm still working on it.

A man who has remained without children, was pushed out of the community because is has been stigmatised. He has had suicidal thoughts and in the documentary goes through a healing ritual.
The healing man who is consulted tried finding a spiritual cause and a corresponding remedy.
After the consult, the man takes part in a dance and music ritual to continue the healing process. They believe that the specific movement massages the vertebral column which is connected with the whole body, they also refer to this as the "chord of life".
Believing in the ritual is why it works.

In the image above you can see them talking about breathing in the same air, the same spirit. For me this refers to their hollistic worldview, I might not believe in spirits the same way they do but do believe we belong to a bigger picture.

9:30 about perceived fear
14:00 how do you prepare for suprises? visualising!
18:36 "but at a certain point only I can know how prepared I am, how i feel for it" Alex Honnold
20:10 on visualising: "its important for me to think about these kinds of things ahead of time so that when im doing the actual climb it doesnt occur to me for the first time"
"to think through all those anxieties ahead of time so theyre less likely to occur when it matters" Alex Honnold
23:33 positive experiences to combat fearful feelings "contradicting the intuitive sense of something being threatening" Armita Golkar

In this video it's beautiful to see how embodied knowledge (Alex Honnold) meets academic knowledge (Armita Golkar) and their similarity.

Crying and breathing: personal experience.

I don't cry often, but when I do it usually feels relieving. It helps letting go of tension and processing emotions.
After crying intensely a while back, I could feel my body shiver. My skin would tingle and a warmth would spread from the center of my body, just below the belly button.
Then some days later I guided myself into a deep breathing session to calm down and blow off some steam. In this breathing exercise you inhale and exhale deeply, followed by a minute (or more) of holding your breath. In this moment of stillness, you can feel things happening within more clearly.
It was at this moment I made the connection with crying. My body felt the exact same way it did after just crying my eyes out. It made sense to me: crying is literally inhaling and exhaling deeply with a rather high pace, similar to the breathing exercise I'd just done.