“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” Federico Fellini
In the last blog, you were introduced to the tool of rescripting your life in the form of a 3 paragraph core narrative for the purpose of understanding yourself. This creative act, in and of itself, allows you to see yourself through a clear, undistorted lens, and the ways in which your life experiences and traumas impacted you; to respect and honor your core self suffering self, to attain self empathy, and to determine how you will handle things going forward. It is the written crystallization of your own power. In this blog, we will examine the ways in which nostalgia and recalling happier times can buttress against the inevitable stressors of day to day life. In a nutshell, nostalgia can be used as a motivational force and a source of imagination. Furthermore, recent developments in the science of memory and imagination have revealed the powerful health benefits of “reference memories”, i.e., positive and supportive moments in our lives that we can draw upon to create even more affirmative and constructive moments in our future. So, when the going gets tough, the tough get nostalgic!
“I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors, silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century….”
This is some of the narration from the film “Last Year at Marienbad’. Much like director Tarkovsky, Alain Resnais’ film was an attempt to construct the unconscious mind on film. It’s a non linear, meditation on memory, dream vs. reality, past and present, and personal identity. The characters seem mired in a timeless universe of infinite regress. The film evokes the trapped feeling I had myself when in the throes of my own TMS experience and the ominous label of “crps”. Much like the doomed characters in “Marienbad” I felt as if was living in a nightmare from which I could not wake up. But was I? Were things really as they seemed? Was I in a dream within a dream? The film reflects the dualistic theories of 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes and illustrates the interior monologue of an individual. Descartes bears inspection here, because one could argue that it opened the door for Western medicine’s appalling backslide into duality. One of the reasons that Descartes separated the mind and body into 2 powerful entities was due to influence of the Church,, but more importantly his theories were widely accepted because psychological defenses were not yet understood. In Descarte’s famous “Dream Argument” he asserts that waking up from a dream can itself be a part of a dream. We are left to conclude that there is no escape from getting outside of our own minds to determine objective truth. The anxiety of the character in “Marienbad” is one of the Cartesian individual, desperately trying to egress the labyrinthine hotel of the mind. Every exit of the labyrinth reveals yet another part of the labyrinth! If you have ever wandered into to a hotel/casino on the Vegas strip you know the feeling! While the characters in the film never do find a way out ( it is a French film after all! ), there is most certainly a way out of the mental prison in which you may find yourself now! The truth is Descartes was wrong and we can free ourselves from these defenses. The mind and body are one and we have only to realize that our symptoms stem from our own anxiety and misperceptions of reality.
“Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso
Now that we are liberated from the shackles of our own false beliefs, we can mine our own pasts for joyful moments. Neuroscience tells us that drawing from a specific happy memory (even seemingly small or brief ones) can produce psychophysiological changes. One fascinating Harvard University “time travel” study conducted by social worker Ellen Langer, in 1980, demonstrated the powerful effects of memory and belief, in which a group of men in their 70s and 80s were placed in a full immersion 1959 retreat. During that time they reminisced and lived in conditions set up to simulate the period (music, food, fashion, decor etc.). A series of cognitive and physical tests were performed, and results showed dramatic improvement in strength, gait, flexibility, hearing, vision, and IQ, after just one week! Those who impersonated their younger selves, seemed to have younger bodies! Nostalgia in this case, was used as imagination, and when we imagine, we redeploy much of the same mechanisms that we would have employed when we actually engaged in the action. Although time is irreversible in the sense that we can’t actually “bring it back”, as the men in this study proved, it’s not what has passed, but what we “embody”… our past is a spiritual and subjective category! As Tarkovsky wrote in one of my favorite quotes, “In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips away like sand between the fingers, acquiring weight only in its recollection.” Whether it’s through recollection or imagination, the ersatz experience creates the desired outcome, and even paves the road for a brighter future.
“Everything has been thought of before. The problem is to think of it again.” Goethe
We all have access to both positive and negative memories that shape our self image, so it’s incumbent on us to activate the positive mental pathways and let the negative ones grow weaker through attrition. Ones involving social interactions are the most healing because they reshape how we see ourselves….memories such as baking cookies with your grandma, receiving applause for a speech, falling in love, enjoying a vacation with loved ones etc. Keep a mental file cabinet of memory folders that you can call up in any needed moment…memories under headings such as “romance”, “safety”, “tranquility” “victory”, “tenderness”, “strength”, “resilience”, “connection” etc. This naturally kindles feelings of gratitude and motivation. It has also been shown to increase productivity and decrease your experience of loneliness and disconnection. This is especially true when we are distracted by symptoms in the body. We need to remember who we really are and that these physical sensations are just a transient experience, and not our identity. Redirecting our thoughts to better past moments that are part of the fabric of our soul, not only serve as a buttress against anxiety and depression, but they point us towards a brighter future. So remember the good, remember that YOU are good, and start imagining! As Albert Einstein wrote, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
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