When talking about fatigue or as it is called today, burnout, the question arises: what about our great-grandmothers? Many women had 8-10 children and there were the scores of household chores that were far more arduous than they are today. Then there was the cattle to look after, constant hard work, attending to the children including educating them, eternal lack of sleep, drinking often or missing husband, and never a chance of vacation on the beach. How did they all not burn out?

Well, first of all, exhausted, of course. They mastered the mental art of breaking away (off) and became ‘iron-willed by defensively cutting off their emotions, their feelings. But not all for many remained warm and they rejoiced in life, the seasons, the harvest, their community, and felt their children were blessings from providence.

What kind of physical and soul recovery techniques were known to them? Judging by what the acquaintances who grew up in a real village were told, not in the state farm, God forbid, or the so-called Way of Leninism’, but in the countryside.

In Siberia especially, or in Ukrainian villages, folk music was essential to one’s existence. Again, it was not ‘music’ that is party official, processed, neutered, and fed on TV but the original people’s music.

Once you hear this power, you won’t forget. My institute friend Lenka spent every summer with her family in Transbaikalia, as she started Hasbulat successful.

We sang along as much as we could. Based on her voice, it was easy and it seemed that you were singing beautifully and strongly. She told me that there, in the village, everyone sang, regularly, like ritually taking a bath on Saturdays. Psychogygiene, a way to cleanse the soul so that this stream will take out all the fatigue, all the irritation.

Such singing causes a trance like condition, healing and cleansing. I once participated in the voice practice workshop, and there was such an exercise. Everyone stands in the circle singing very ancient Slavic sound combinations (essentially, mantras), who as much as they can and want, but with a ‘free voice’, those who are singing in the villages know everything perfectly well, it is almost a genetic memory.

They take turns in the centre of the circle, in the very focus of the sound stream. This unforgettable feeling rinses oneself from the inside out. Not just singing but the ritual that is an essential part of the psyche-cleansing.

And there are the drums! Have you ever heard such a group of singers supported by drums? I have heard. After 15 minutes, all uncles and aunts begin to give this out. Instead of stiffness, fatigue and dreary waiting for the end of the event, a wave of such primitive joy that you can’t remember since childhood. Yes, our ancestors worked much more efficient than modern psychologists.

Such things meet the many needs of the soul at once. It is a process-oriented activity. This is, to sing, play and dance not to rehearse and perform later, but for the sake of singing, music, the dance itself.

And there are few such activities in our lives today and people somehow get by without such psyche-cleaning. They begin to feel that they do not belong to themselves that they are only a function, a screw, a means to fulfil someone else’s goals. It is a notorious alienation described by Karl Marx and his non-Christian Talmud thumping brethren.

Everyone feels their belonging to the whole, their role, their irreplaceable. If you know that you are the best in the village (in the community) you know how to second or compose fenced treats, you don’t have to dream of ‘getting on TV’. You’ve already received recognition.

This is another problem of the modern world, enduring non-existence. Nothing is written by media for anyone but immediate family and a couple of close friends. There is no community togetherness.

And if there is no family, and friends are far away, then life does not exist at all. From here there is an abnormal thirst for glory, remember the final of many American films: a dreamed for a call from the newspaper asking for an interview.

Or a front-page photo. That’s it, happy music, titles and life has been a success. Partly our blogs, communities, etc. there is an attempt to recreate your ‘village’ or ‘community’ at least in virtual form.

Thirdly, it is very important that in the general choir or dance, no one cycles on small errors. If you’ve lost, you’ve lost yourself, catch up and sing on.

A friend of a very good junior school teacher told me that she never asked first-graders to learn poems one by one, only by the chorus. She doesn’t care to ‘find’ a child that he forgot somewhere. It is important for her not to rustle by the third grade at the board, not to be scared, not lost, and if you get lost, quickly catch up and continue with the same attitude.

Perfectionism is another scourge of the modern world, setting either perfectly or no way, one mistake cancels everything, paralysing the will of thousands of adults up to a total loss of capacity.

Now there are so many how do I burnout requests, from teachers, custody, volunteers. I want to tell them all the time: aunts, you just sit back and sing. And do this every Friday at the end of the working week. Will they not understand? Someday I want to do this program with someone’s help. Lyudmila Petranovskaya. (Publication from Alena Shcholkova).