“Descent and Ascent with Metaphorical Maps”

Authors: Elena Ratnikova and Angelika Gavrik are known for their books in the field of sand therapy: “Educational games on sand”, “The Myth of the Yggdrasil Tree in sand therapy. Working with age-related crises”, as well as metaphorical cards “Stairs: a metaphor for descent and ascent”; presenters of courses on sand therapy at the Higher School of Psychology.
Characteristics: Hardcover, 2020
Publishing house “MACards”
The book “Descent and Ascent with Metaphorical Maps” examines the metaphor of a person’s life path. To ascend or be reborn, you must descend. The descent represents a meeting with the shadow, with your problems and fears. Here you take inventory of your feelings, manage your emotions and accept your image. Next you have to make a choice: where to go, at what pace, according to what laws and what boundaries to respect. Having gone through the path of exploring our feelings, we will inevitably come to the dialectic of contradictory states, to their harmonization. And with this we will be ready to make the ascent. Working with metaphorical cards is a creative process of working with symbolism or a symbol. And the symbol triggers deep, internal work in a person. There is a theory about peripersonal space, when a person visually perceives an image – a symbol on a metaphorical map – this “enters” the person’s space, starting to trigger transformation processes at the neural level. Accordingly, a person begins to think and act differently.
The advantage of the book is the thematic structure of the material and exercises: working with the Shadow, image, using cards in family and professional relationships, descent and ascent as an exploration of one’s feelings, the pace at which I live , assistance in choosing and setting boundaries in interpersonal relationships.nbsp;The uniqueness of the exercises is that they can be performed with any deck of metaphorical cards.
The manual is intended for psychologists, teachers, social workers, students, and university teachers.