What matters most is that we care. You are hurting, and we care.
I asked myself: “How can we help people? How can we make their lives better?”
I think that most problems on Earth come from a lack of love, from the fact that we do not care for one another as much as we could, from silence, from hiding the light that exists in each of us.
In the culture we grew up in, we were not used to admitting to ourselves that we were weak and needed love: talking about it was shameful. We were not taught how to stand up for our boundaries, how to tell another person about our feelings, and we did not know what to do with the pain that lives deep inside us.
What do we want?
We want to change the world: to raise psychological help and psychological literacy all the way to the ceiling and keep them there.
We want the tools of psychology to be available to everyone, and we want caring for yourself, talking about your feelings, and looking into your own soul and another person’s soul to become normal, everyday things instead of something strange and rare.
How do we want to achieve this?
By spreading psychological information to as many people as possible, convincing people that working on your inner world is cool, taking part in public life, and talking about love, friendship, fear, and other things that, unfortunately, people do not usually talk about.
Psychological help should not and cannot be limited to professional work with a psychologist, either one-on-one or in a group. We need other ways of working with our inner world.
You do not need to sit through an hour-and-a-half lecture to understand that people need friends, or to know what sadness and anger are — deep down, each of us understands all of this; some people simply find it hard to admit it to themselves. We have a big job ahead of us — to make openness normal, to turn people’s desire to talk about what is inside them into something ordinary, into a habit.
There are special cases that require specialized training, but most psychological problems are solved through friendship, warmth, and listening to someone.
Everyone has their own key
Everyone has their own key. In this project, you are given all kinds of keys: keys to finding friendship, keys to dealing with your anger, keys for what to do in those moments when you are very scared but are afraid to admit it to yourself. We do not know which keys will open your particular locks.
We hope that you will find the very set of keys that is right for you. We hope that you will enter every room of your soul, deal with the pain and indifference that exist in our lives, and become happy not only on the outside, but on the inside too.
When you come to know yourself, we hope that you will take the baton from us and continue carrying the light of psychological knowledge to other people, because they, just like you, were most likely never taught any of this.
Accessibility
We tried to avoid complicated terms. Where they still appear, they are explained in simple, human language so that you know exactly what we mean.
Many exercises are made either entirely or partly with visual elements: pictures and images; we also use a large number of metaphors.
All of this is done for a reason: to make psychological knowledge accessible to everyone, to the widest possible range of people.
Each exercise, game, and technique will come with an explanation of what it is and the psychological mechanism behind how it works. We will explain how to do it safely from a psychological point of view, give recommendations whenever possible, and indicate the appropriate age range.
Free
I, Sergey Cheliadinov, founder of the balancium project, have decided that all our work, all printed materials, all courses, exercises, journals, brochures, posters, and so on will always be free for everyone, and the project will be supported by your donations.
If there are no donations, the project will still exist, because I have a burning desire to do this work. I will simply have to spend some of my time earning a living and devote less time and energy to the project, which I do not want.
But this project will live on one way or another.
Besides making everything free to download, I have also made sure that printing these materials is as inexpensive as possible.
I have developed ways of arranging text on paper that use less printer ink, are convenient to use, and still look presentable. This applies both to small A6 and A5 leaflets and to entire journals.
What matters most
Most importantly, at the heart of our project are caring, love, and the desire to help another person.
I am proud that I have strength in me — the strength of love — and a desire to help people. I spent many years getting here, walking a path of light and love. I hope it has not been in vain, and that you will accept my love.
Welcome, dear person, to our project, balancium.
We truly hope that you will live. That you will be happy.
I, Sergey Cheliadinov, founder of this project, truly hope that everything we do is not in vain, that none of it is for nothing, that it will help at least someone, make their life better, and that one day someone will say “Thank you” for our attempt to love.
Thank you for reading this.
Sergey Cheliadinov, founder of the balancium project.