The ideology behind Project Lysegård

The project is developmental

We are born into the world with a set of genetic predispositions and a deep need for watchful care. The balancing actions between those elements help to form who we are and what we will become. The interesting part is perhaps that at a given point in our development, most of us perceive what and who we are as static truths. Some sort of solid form that is unchangeable. But when we look around us, towards those we love and care about, we notice that they are constantly changing. Our children, our parents, our friends are all changing. There appears to be a bit of discrepancy between how many of us perceive ourselves and how we perceive others.

We all have a myriad of core beliefs about ourselves and our surroundings. Core beliefs are thoughts about ourselves and the world that we believe to be true and unchangeable. We all, for example, have core beliefs about whether we are intelligent and clever, whether we are socially acceptable, funny, lazy, polite, creative and the list goes on and on. Most of those beliefs are relatively accurate and harmless. Just a beautiful part of our diverse characteristics. Sometimes they are even quite contradicting in nature and create a brilliantly funny nuance in our personality. Being simultaneously somewhat lazy and extremely hard-working are for example funny contradictions in many of us. These oddities are often what we love most and remember best in our loved ones.

The thing is that as we grow up, most of us develop some negative core beliefs about ourselves that affect our lives in a negative manner to a different degree. Some will for example develop disabling emotional disorders due to such negative beliefs. Like those who perceive other people as potentially harmful or those who lack both personal purpose and value for their abilities. It is not like we have to be diagnosed with a disabling anxiety disorder or gone through a major depressive episode to be an eligible part of the “negative core beliefs group”. We are all eligible part of the group because it is developmentally inevitable.

How we work

We want to tap into these core beliefs, both negative and positive, and gain a better understanding of them through the interactions of cognitive, emotional and physical exercises. We believe that constant interactions between conscious thoughts, emotions and movements are integral to progress and development. We also believe that progress and development are dependent on repeated and diverse actions, in which many do not lead to desired results. Developmental progress is perhaps largely marked by the reactions to non-desired results. It was at those moments our negative core beliefs began their journey. When we made mistakes or received an intensely emotional negative feedback. Many of us can vividly remember these moments. When, for example, children are learning to walk, most toddlers do not just stand up and walk across the room. They constantly fall in the beginning, right? As they developmentally progress, non-desired results become more seldom. Through the results of their actions and movements, progress appears. It is at these moments we can see so much of their characteristics being revealed and developed. When we fall and when we succeed, the strong emotions and conscious considerations about our actions teach us so much. These are the big moments. There are so many of them, if we just notice them. And there is so much to learn from children. Especially from us self as children.

So our program is cognitive, emotional, based on our actions and movements and lastly developmental because we believe that it is a good way to gain understanding about how we were, who we are now and what we will become. It is our belief that we should not isolate these elements in our personal development. In order to be effective, our work needs to be inclusive and progress oriented. First thing is first though, our focus now is to create the platform. And yeah, that will be a cognitive, movement-based and wildly emotional process because this is something that we have never done, something we will often mess up and arrive upon non-desired results. But hey, as long as our actions, conscious thoughts and emotional responses, progress towards the desired result we will develop the necessary tool-kit.